Edit to add: the English pages do contain profanity, so if that doesn’t fly for you then don’t open the spoiler tag.
What’s up everyone! I’m here to share a book shown to me by a coworker that I found so hilariously entertaining I went ahead and bought one for myself. It’s a book of casual phrases (he specifically referred to it as ギャル or パリピ speak) intended to teach Japanese speakers casual English. It’s called 今日のタメ口英語 and the cover looks like this:
Now here’s the thing, the English isn’t actually always super casual, nor is it entirely accurate every time, either. BUT, that being said, since it’s made by Japanese speakers for Japanese speakers, we can be fairly certain that the Japanese is at least fairly accurate, and therefore at least somewhat useful for picking up phrases here and there (I’ll be the first to admit this is probably most useful for picking up speech in anime/manga rather than everyday life… unless you’re part of the ギャル・パリピ crowd, I’m not here to judge). Here’s a couple of pages I found particularly entertaining (ignore my fingers, it’s a new book and I couldn’t get it to behave). They’ve got the Japanese on the first page, and then the English “equivalent” on the back:
I started doing this the other week with the 英文和訳演習 book line, which I ordered the 中級 and 上級 levels of. I really wanted a way to practice construction in Japanese and be able to get immediate feedback. Have done a couple of passages from the 中級 book already, and have found it really beneficial. It helps catch your own bad writing habits as a learner, and reinforces more natural phrasing. https://www.amazon.co.jp/gp/product/4796110054/ref=ppx_yo_dt_b_asin_title_o01_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1
The books are designed as tools to guide English comprehension and translation into Japanese as a native Japanese speaker, but there’s nothing stopping you from flipping that around. Every few pages offer a passage from a real-world bit of English text, some Japanese translations for niche vocabulary (should you need them), and then a full Japanese translation of the passage. What I’ve been doing is making my own pass at a translation, then retyping the book’s translation below them and noting instructive differences.
This would be for a pretty high level of learner, but I think anyone who’s looking for helpful practice with construction past an N1-ish level of comprehension might want to give it ago. There aren’t a ton of ways to practice writing with immediate feedback, unless you have someone on hand to bother all the time, but reversing some native translation resources offers a pretty good way at it.
Weblio is a similar type resource as an online dictionary for Japanese speakers learning English. It’s a dictionary, but for entries there are tons of example sentences and it has great pronunciation assistance too. It’s been super helpful for me when encountering Japanese phrases that don’t normally appear in a regular dictionary.
I got Attack On English the first time I went to Japan, and it’s great. It, too, is loaded with English mistakes, but reading the Japanese has helped me learn a lot of neat vocabulary and grammar points!
