Anyone buy any Japanese/English books?

[Banianna]

Books with the Japanese text on one page and English text on the other. I've seen a copy of The Magi by O. Henry which had this, it's very interesting and could be helpful for those who are out of the introductory period of learning Japanese. I've seen manga also that had Japanese text and an English translation on the same page. Anyone bought any books like this and has it helped with kanji and vocab retention? Thanks in advance! They seem kind of hard to find, even searching on Amazon I'm having difficulty finding some reliable sources.

[Miya]

I have purchased  Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors . It's not a novel... it's just a bunch of short writings put together. But it has both English & Japanese translation which is very helpful for intermediate Japanese learners who are just starting to read Japanese text.

I haven't read the whole book yet but from what I've read, it's a good book. I will be purchasing the stories version of this book too.

[Daimashin]

I have bought a few Dragon Ball comics that did something similar. The dialogs of both languages are cramped in the same speech bubble making it look messy. Other than this, I haven't had any because I find myself only reading the English part and completely missed the original text.

[Banianna]

I have purchased  Read Real Japanese Essays: Contemporary Writings by Popular Authors . It's not a novel... it's just a bunch of short writings put together. But it has both English & Japanese translation which is very helpful for intermediate Japanese learners who are just starting to read Japanese text.

I haven't read the whole book yet but from what I've read, it's a good book. I will be purchasing the stories version of this book too.

This is exactly what I'm looking for, thank you!! Definitely putting this on the wish list and ordering soon. 240 pages is kind of short though, does it still contain a lot of content for that length? Maybe the short stories version will be longer. Do these two seem geared toward Japanese learners or are they kind of general compilations that happen to have English and Japanese text?

Thank you for the help!

[Miya]

If you click on the cover on Amazon, you can actually preview a part of the book to see if you're interested in it before buying.

There are 8 writings in this book and each writing is only a couple pages long. The right handed side has the Japanese text and the left handed has the line-by-line English translation. A glossary and a CD (if you want to actually hear someone reading it to you) is provided.

I think this book is geared towards Japanese learners. Or at least that's how I'm using it. It takes me a while to read and understand a page because I actually break down each sentence and try to understand the vocab and grammar. It's like a Japanese reader to me.

[Banianna]

Thanks for the tip about seeing a preview of the book! It wasn't working on Firefox but I opened the link in Internet Explorer and was able to get it working. Now this book has risen considerably on my to-buy list, sounds very helpful for comparing actual text and translations and including the Japanese text right next to the English text on the translation page seems like it would make things all the easier. Still getting used to the differences in sentence arrangement for English and Japanese, so hopefully this will offer some real practice!