Eleanor Harz Jorden and Hamako Ito Chaplin recommend reading the first 10 chapters of Beginning JapanesePart 1 & Part 2 as it is coordinated with Reading Japanese. There is also an Audio Cassette you can buy which comes with the book.
This was site view 12,781 of our new website at joyo96.org
A vowel symbol written smaller and lower (further right in vertical texts) than surrounding symbols also indicates that the preceding symbol has its consonant value only. For example, the combination フェ represents a single syllable consisting of the sound symbolized by the h- of hu + the e vowel. This will be indicated in romanization as h(u)e. The more commonly occurring combinations in this category are:
ティ t(e)i ディ d(e)i トゥ t(o)u ドゥ d(o)u チェ t(i)e
シェ s(i)e ジェ z(i)e
ファ h(u)a フィ h(u)i フェ h(u)e フォ h(u)o
"...one-fourth of all the characters used in modern Japanese occur in three-fourths of all the most frequently occurring words. This means that by concentrating on learning approximately 500 select characters, the student is assured of being able to read 75% of all the high-frequency words he will encounter in modern literature." - The Kanji Way to Japanese Language Power.
