textbook

Japanese medical school textbook surprises with questions on patient-doctor romance

Because atherosclerosis isn’t the only matter of the heart medical professionals should be concerned with.

Read More

Characters in this textbook from Taiwan want to teach you Japanese using two-timing tactics

You’ll feel motivated to both study harder and buy this textbook when you see this unconventional sample sentence!

Read More

As fan art pops up for anime-style English textbook character, original artist asks for restraint

Illustrated English teacher suddenly has legions of fans and even an unofficial theme song, but her visual creator is hoping the good-time ruckus won’t lead to a backlash by parents and educators.

Read More

English textbook characters get anime-style makeover to appeal to linguists and otaku alike

Learning aid looks like it could be a hit animated series.

Read More

QR codes and pop culture, what are you doing in my textbooks?

Textbooks are boring. There is too much text, few pictures and back in our school days you had to accept whatever was in the textbook and struggle through it. It was an uphill battle…both ways! But with all the advancements and conveniences of technology, why not bring a little of the 21st century into the classroom?

Textbooks around Japan have been incrementally upping their game with QR codes, “hip” songs and whatever else to keep students entertained and excited about learning. But sometimes these advances in textbook technology don’t provide any benefit, and actually confuse more than they teach.

Read More

Dark Horizon textbooks go beyond “Hello my name is…” to “Who are you calling a bitch, bitch!”

Those who have taught English at a school in Japan would likely have encountered the New Horizon textbook series. Starting off with the basics of English, it takes students through a series of Rockwellian incidents such as “my grandma who goes to baseball games, but doesn’t know the rules.”

One man who has clearly gone through these idyllic situations one too many times is Brain Reyes. Taking New Horizon’s main characters ten years into their bleak futures, he has written a new version of the English textbook: Dark Horizon.

A piece which seems created to exorcise the memories of New Horizon for both student and teacher alike, it also provides uniquely useful phrases you’re not likely to find in any other textbook including “I love you like a fat kid loves cake” and “That’s not just any stack of boxes, that’s my house.”

Read More

Korean students give their textbook characters fantastic fashion makeovers

I’m sure most of us have had the experience of doodling in our textbooks while the teachers droned on about all the math that we realized later in life we would never use. In fact, my personal specialty was decorating large chunks of text with elaborate frames of vines and flowers. Sometimes I even added fruits.

But some creative students in Korea took their doodling to a whole new level by giving the textbook figures clad in outdated fashion complete makeovers. Some of these doodlers were so talents the final result even looks like manga or manhwa!

Read More

The best way to learn English: a stereotypically inaccurate textbook!

At RocketNews24, we’ve covered how English education in Japan is currently faring, with many people agreeing that much can be done to improve it. Of the many problems, one improvement could certainly be the textbook, which many people believe is bland, uses English improperly and teaches English that feels very outdated. What’s needed is something that surpasses all those inadequacies and features English students would encounter in real life.

Well, how about a textbook that includes dialogues where people use bribes, exploit other people’s weaknesses and make giant broad stereotypes about countries as a whole? Yes, let’s try something like that!

Read More

Gone are the days when schoolbooks were made up of pages and pages of text. Today’s textbooks are just as likely to be filled with glossy, colourful images to engage and entertain students. This Thai textbook publisher, however, has come under fire for apparently sourcing an image from the internet to use on a book’s front cover – which turned out to be a photo of a Japanese adult video star.

Read More

Students go nearly a year without textbooks after teacher forgets to hand them out

It would seem a small case of absentmindedness has been breaking out in educational institutes around Japan recently. One such case in Japan’s Kumamoto Prefecture saw a handful of students go nearly an entire year without ever receiving some of their “required reading material.”

However, in this and another similar case, it’s hard to say who’s at fault, the teachers who failed to give the proper references out, or the students who neglected to say anything about it.

Read More

Boys’ love manga company now raising funds to make a Japanese textbook

Anyone who has ever studied Japanese as a second language can tell you that it’s a difficult language to learn, and the textbooks currently available on the market don’t make it any easier. Japanese textbooks are largely outdated, not to mention sleep inducing. Not even the most dedicated language students find joy in flipping open the dry and uninteresting pages of their workbooks or assaulting their ears with the drone of their practice CDs.

Luckily, that could all change, thanks to the ingenious writing of Yumiko Akeba and the online manga distributer, Otome’s Way. This start-up company specializes in “boys’ love” manga and is hoping to bring the appeal of Asian pretty boys to the learning field by creating a series of Japanese textbooks that use everyone’s favorite manga tropes as effective teaching tools. They call it A Fujoshi’s Guide to Japanese.

Read More

Possibly the greatest textbook doodles of all time

Remember back in high school when you’d opened up your textbook to find George Washington picking his nose and Joseph Stalin with a peg leg and eye patch. It was enough to make you bow down and thank the graffiti gods for giving you a much needed distraction from the incessant ramblings of your instructor.

Textbook doodles seem to transcend national borders and bored students from all over the world appear to have a penchant for defiling educational tools. We’ve already shown you some from Asia, a continent that seems to be home to an abundance of bored students with idle hands. Now let’s take a look at textbook doodles from Twitter user and Japanese high school student, Chanta, who takes it to a whole other level, actually erasing parts of his textbook to create entirely different, albeit twisted, pictures.

Read More

Photos of Japanese People Accidently Used on Korean Textbook Covers

State-sponsored textbooks issued to 870,000 first and second grade elementary school students in Korea this year have mistakenly used photos featuring Japanese people on their covers. The mishap was confirmed after much speculation about the nationality of the subjects in the photos. They were said to have different features to Koreans, namely more defined double-creased eyelids and less-defined cheekbones.

Read More

Oreimo English Textbook Coming! Learn Useful Phrases Like “My Little Sister Likes Porn Games”

Set to be published on 10 April is My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute and Brush Up on Middle School English by Chukei Publishing.

As the name suggests, this book lets students bone up on the required English curriculum set to the backdrop of the My Little Sister Can’t Be This Cute popular series of erotic game (eroge) otaku themed light novels. Yes, someone actually made this.

Read More