> I just finished reading James Clavell's 'Shogun'...and I thouroughly enjoyed it. It was a little slow and tedious in parts, but all in all a great book. The only problem I had was remembering who some of the minor characters were...especially after not reading it for a few days. I'd pick it up and think, "Now who is Kasigi Omi-san again?"
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> Another thing I had trouble with was the Japanese words. Once Clavell had written their English translation several times, he would stop. For example, a very prominent phrase throughout the book was "shigata go nei". I know he wrote what it meant in English several times, but towards the end of the book, he quit doing that. Since I would occasionally go three or four days without reading, I would always forget what that meant; and I didn't feel like taking the time to go back through the book and hunt for the translation.
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> I did remember what "wakarimasu ka" means though. So now my Japanese vocabulary consists of being able to say "Yes" (hai), "No" (neh), "Thanks" (arigato), and "I understand" (wakarimasu ka).
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> I know there was a lot more Japanese that I could've picked up. Maybe I'll read it again sometime and try to learn the rest of it.

"Shogun" is one of my favourite books of all time. I've read it so often that I'm not sure whether I found some of the details hard to remember on my first reading. I loved the way more and more Japanese got added into the dialogue as Blackthorne learned the language. It made me think this would be a terrific way to learn more of a language -- somebody should write a crashingly good adventure novel which starts out in English and gradually introduces dialogue in the other language until the whole book ends up being in that language. Heheh.

When I was in Japan last year I spent a couple of days around the region featured in "Shogun". It was sort of strange to be *in* places like Anjiro or Mishima, trying to correlate the modern cities to the medieval Anjiro and Mishima I had in my mind from the book. You can't do it, but that doesn't affect how I can still *have* those mental images, thank goodness.