Yes, I’m finally getting back around to documenting my shipment of Japanese Peanuts books. This isn’t the first time I’ve ordered lot of such books from Japan. Last time, I realized later that I’d ordered a large portion of cookbooks. This time, most of my order ended up being language education books. I guess I’m just tickled by the thought of people learning English from Peanuts, with its frequent use of uncommon terms. Making it more amusing as a whole, these books are all focused – in title, anyway – on learning English from Snoopy, a character who, while he knows English (the novels make that clear), doesn’t actually speak the language. As such, titles like Snoopy is My Teacher! Let’s Speak English have that extra bit of built-in irony. This book (and in fact, all the books on this shipment) are arranged in the left-to-right reading order standard for English books rather than the right-to-left order of Japanese texts.

This book, which is divided into five chapters (“Monday”, “Tuesday”, “Wednesday”, “Thursday”, and “Friday”, despite the fact that the book consists largely of Sunday strips) features mainly Peanuts strips reprinted in a panel at a time, with the English text left in the panel and a Japanese translation outside the panel. At the end of each strip is a section where various individual phrases are discussed (at least, I presume that’s what’s going on, I don’t read Japanese), so that the student can better understand such terms as “get an advance”, “figure out”, “what’s wrong with you”, and “deficit eating”. And that’s all just the first strip! This all makes for a great index to read; right in a row, you have entries for “How do you mean?” “How embarrassing.” “I can’t help it!” “I can’t stand it!” and “I don’t know what I’m going to do with you.”

List price for this 2014 printing of a 2004 book is 1200 yen.

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