Title: moetan II Vol. 1
Book Size/Pages: B-6, 298+48pp.
Volume: 1/2
First Printing: 12/22/04

This series is truly an abomination and yet, it's one of the more popular, or should I say infamous, English vocabulary books. This is the followup to the first book in the series published in 2003 and from the cover art though, it's pretty easy to understand why people would be inclined to buy the book. Just to state the obvious, the artwork in the book is very beautiful with a light pencil and watercolor drawings. In fact, this month's bonus CD-ROM in Animage has a the promo movie for this book, and it looks so much like a renai game if not already an anime. However, it's supposed to be a study guide, not eye-candy (or is it?).

The book advertises that it's a vocab book geared towards college-bound students preparing for their entrance examinations. The words seem a little simple, but English is my native language so I shouldn't judge. If a native Japanese looked at what I study with, they'd probably think the same. The book is formatted in a way that it presents a short story partitioned into 14 chapters and after each chapter, there's a list of words with the pronunciation, explanation, and example sentences. They use kana to approximate the pronunciation of English, which I guess is equivalent to using romanji, so I have no issues with that. The dictionary translations are fine. It's the example sentences that are just terrible.

From the preface, the authors mention that they want to come up with unique style of learning English, and what I can gather, that means using the words in syntactically correct (most of the time), but semantically messed up phrases. Let's see some examples, shall we:

to steal
"In an instant he steals everything except the kitchen sink: everything that glows and everything that is precious. Thus, he even steals stars and lives."

to allow
"Even if you are brave, it is not allowed to go behind the service counter."

to yell
"Roots of the plant cry out, when we tear them out of the soil."

Even the passages in the novel are poorly worded with common errors such as agreement and changing tenses mid-sentence. I can't imagine how anyone can seriously learn English from this.

Like I mentioned before, the book comes with a story and vocabulary list. Fortunately for me, it has the story in Japanese on an attached booklet about 50 pages long. Being the masochist, I decided to read the Japanese text which took me an hour rather that 10 minutes if I read it in English. It's actually not that much reading as each chapter of Iriya is twice that length, but since I read it, it qualifies to be placed in the Novels section.

Volume 2 is supposed to come out sometime next month that continues the story.

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