I’ll jump right in. That’s a garlic bagel with a ¥60 discount.
They discount things constantly in Japan because they want their customers to feel appreciated.
AJATT had a wonderful habit of doing this for its previous customers, with a % discount for previous purchases, including this one. If you pre-ordered the Japanese Story Book, you’d get a generous 30% discount. Unfortunately, I was busy and missed the pre-order window. My fault. But since I’ve been such a nice customer, I figured I would email mister Khatzumoto and ask if there was a discount for previous customers who missed the pre-order window. I still have not received a reply. [edit: he did reply a few days later, read near the very end]
While Khatz’s business acumen is admirable, Khatz sincerely needs to work on his customer service skills.
In any case, I paid the full price, $21.95, for My First Japanese Storybook. That’s pricey, but given the quality of Khatz’s past products, such as the QRG and the fantastic Sentence Pack, I figured the price would be well worth it.
Ever since I bought the product, I’ve had really mixed feelings. I’m still not sure who it’s intended for.
First, I’ll state that the story is short, really short. 27 pages of story may sound like a lot, but when it is one sentence per page with childish illustrations (which look like they were made in MS Paint) taking up the majority of it, it’s over in less than 5 minutes.
Next, I’ll say that the English translations are jokes (while the mom jokes are funny, they’re just confusing to the reader). For anyone looking to compare the translations side by side without using the included SRS pack, it’s just annoying. There is a Japanese only version of the book included as well, but oddly in a completely different format: a Microsoft Word document instead of the PDF format for the SRS and bi-lingual book. That’s odd, was it on purpose? Was it a mistake? I’ll never know, but it’s seems shoddy.
It’s not appropriate to kids (not that I care) but some might. The subject matter is very niche. Come to think of it, it’s not appropriate to 90% of all conversations in Japanese. The only people who commonly speak like this are Japanese highschool students and some university students, mostly male. After that, most grow out of it. Oh, and pick-up artists, doing 軟派 (なんぱ). The entire conversation just comes out awkward (I can’t imagine someone as geeky as Khatz actually speaking like this). I’m not saying you don’t need to know any of the language in the story, it’s niche/slang vocabulary and it is used, so at some point you will come across it.
If Khatz’s target audience is a bunch of American highschool/university students who swear like truckers and wish to immediately know how to speak like that in Japanese before anything else, then he has hit his target. Otherwise…
It wasn’t actually promised, but it was hinted that the audio recordings of the book would be recorded by native Japanese speakers. While Khatz and the female narrators voices are 99.9% close to being native that no one, not even a Japanese person, would be able to tell the difference; it should be noted that they’re not native speakers.
That didn’t bother me at all. What did bother me was the terrible quality of the recordings. Acceptable for the outtakes, but for the narration of the short story and the SRS pack, it sounds like it was recorded in about 15 minutes during Khats’s lunch break. A little polish can go a long way.
The one saving grace of the entire product is the SRS sentence pack. Which harkens back to the original SRS pack he released for a more reasonable $15. In fact, it harkens back to it so much, that there are a many repeated sentence items which you won’t need or want if you bought the first one. On top of that, while it looks like Khatz had a lot of fun making stuff up (the repeating joke about bananas comes to mind) there is a lot of fluff and it looks like he really didn’t take it seriously.
In fact, the entire product just seems shabbily put together. This would be acceptable at $5. But when you’re asking for over $20 for a product like this, a bit higher quality is expected. I can spend that money on real Japanese products.
Or maybe that was Khatz’s whole point? ‘For 20 bucks, you should really just go out and spend your money on actual Japanese products, like 5 or 6 manga, a couple Japanese story books, rent a few movies, etc.’ 優しいね。
All that being said, I may be in the minority. I don’t think my Japanese is at the level where I should stop learning from Khatz’s stuff, but I definitely could I have lived without this one. If you have the cash to spend and you want to support the AJATT cause, buy it and try it out.
Khatz has a 100% money-back guarantee like every other online business in the world, so if you really want a refund, all you have to do is shoot him an email and hope he responds. Considering he hasn’t responded to my original mail, that may take some time though.
I support AJATT simply because the wealth of information on his site and what I have previously learned from him, so he can keep my money this time. However, if his future products don’t increase in quality, I may have to pass on them in favor of the next One Piece、コナン、ゴルゴ１３、Rookies, ドラエモン、etc.
Sorry Khatz, I really wanted to like this one. Please don’t hate me. 
[update: khatz emailed me back a few days later with a full refund saying 'sorry to hear that the product didn't fully satisfy you, I'll keep making cool stuff until we hit something that you *love*' which is pretty nice, but it really wasn't my intention to ask for a refund. Either way, the gesture was appropriate. I now have his olive branch (whatever that means). In turn, I donated the amount right back into his Paypal account as a charitable donation. 'Cause that's how I roll. Even if my complexion is far too pasty to use that phrase ]
Probably Related:
{ 2 comments… read them below or add one }
Mm, yeah, I was a little disappointed with the quality. Mostly, it was the length of the story that bothered me. I got the discount and everything, so it wasn’t so bad for me. But, I would have liked for it to be longer. The speech styles don’t bother me because they’re kind of comical and fun. The illustrations are reminiscent of the Dick and Jane series, which I didn’t mind. My hope was that the 27 pages would be kind of like 27 pages of manga, where you have several panels on one page. I’d have to say, the audio of the story was read kind of quickly (not that it was hard to understand or anything, but just that I couldn’t take time to enjoy the pictures while listening because I had to flip through them so quickly!).
The audio was rather natural sounding, which is great if it were the transcript of a drama or something.
But for a storybook, I think we are more used to thinking story-book style of writing, with words and descriptions and a magical story with fairies and gingerbread houses… and an old man speaking into an expensive microphone with a deep-voice (from smoking 4 packs a day) recalling the story from his memory all nostalgic-like.
Or maybe that’s just me