Hi @Entity447B, I’ve used A Japanese Reader a little bit. Here are my subjective pros and cons:
Pros
- physical book.
- portable paperback size and weight.
- one volume contains beginner through advanced.
- one volume contains both Japanese text and English notes.
- relatively inexpensive.
Cons
- written in 1962; as far as I can tell, it hasn’t been revised to modernize the grammar or cultural notes.
- Japanese font size gets progressively smaller as you advance through the readings.
- readings advance quickly in difficulty. Lessons in the elementary section (Part 2) introduce up to 34 new vocab words written with kanji for each short reading. Intermediate (Part 3) readings are longer, but the first one introduces 58 new words.
Notes
- There are a few explanatory grammar notes, but as with all graded readers, the book assumes that you are learning grammar from some other source in parallel with your reading. Sentences in the elementary section (Part 2) of this book use grammar and vocab from the old textbook, Essential Japanese, by Samuel Martin
- Kanji are introduced in context, that is, as part of a vocab word to be memorized as a whole. This is different from the WK approach of learning single kanji with reading(s) first, and later seeing it in a vocab word.
- The table of contents and most of the introduction to the book are available on the Amazon look inside feature.
This is a book I turn to when I feel like I want something additional to supplement or reinforce what I’ve been learning elsewhere. So far, I’ve read through the end of the elementary section, but the small amount of time I’ve been devoting to studying Japanese means I’m progressing at a slow pace, and going through one book extremely slowly feels demotivating, so recently I have mainly been using other materials. Plus, the subject matter so far hasn’t been very interesting to me (seems like a lot about business and military, although I did enjoy the reading about Japanese houses).
I hope this helps you and wasn’t too long 