Book - Animefangirl!

The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death – read about 60 chapters of the web novel

It’s the rare manga that prompts me to seek out the web novel. And not just that but to read all the chapters available in English and go beyond to the original author’s page and keep reading for several more chapters. The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death (Sokushi Cheat ga Saikyou Sugite, Isekai no Yatsura ga Marude Aite ni Naranai n desu ga 即死チートが最強すぎて、異世界のやつらがまるで相手にならないんですが。) managed to hold my interest much longer than most of the other stuff I’ve read this year, and for that the author Tsuyoshi Fujitaka should be commended. Buuut, I still dropped it after roughly 60 chapters and I’ll tell you why in a bit.

Story: High school senior Yogiri Takatou was on a school field trip when he woke up to a dragon assaulting his sightseeing bus, with the only ones still on the bus being him and his female classmate, the panicking Tomochika Dannoura. Apparently the rest of his classmates had been given special powers by Sion, a woman who introduced herself as a Sage, and escaped from the dragon, leaving those that hadn’t received any special powers behind as dragon bait.

And so Yogiri was thrown into a parallel universe full of danger, with no idea of what just happened. Likewise, Sion had no way of knowing just what kind of being she had summoned to her world.

Turns out Yogiri has the power of Instant Death. And he didn’t learn it in the new world either, it’s heavily implied that he had it all along. Anyone he tells to die will die. Anyone he even thinks about killing will die. Heck, not just “anyone”, anyTHING in existence – if it moves, if it works, if he wants it to die, it will die. If you play video games, imagine a boss with an unblockable one-hit kill move that he uses at the start of the battle before you can get a hit in. That’s Yogiri Takatou.

On the plus side, he’s a lazy slacker who doesn’t want to kill willy-nilly. He usually makes an attempt to reason with people before ending them. It just happens that he’s been summoned to a world where magic makes people crazy, so the opponents he faces can never be reasoned with. Since his power is so devastating, there’s not much room for fighting or lengthy battle scenes once he uses it, so eventually the web novel devolves into “How much time can we waste with other characters and unnecessary scenes before Yogiri inevitably ends everything with one word?”

That’s the problem all stories with way overpowered characters end up with. Either they have to nerf the character to make it interesting or they have to take him/her off-screen and fill the time with other people and stories to delay the inevitable. You can see it in One Punch Man where Saitama only appears very rarely these days. When he does he rarely fights. When he does get into a fight, he stands around and gets hit for a while just to prolong the inevitable.

So it is in The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death, especially the further along the web novel goes. You have to read about boring side characters like Aoi and Hanakawa and Raineel for lengthy periods of time and you have to suffer through a loooong sequence of Yogiri and his team traveling through some boring tower. Once the tower was over I called it quits because these days I’m getting better at spotting dead-end series.

I’ll still read the manga because it’s amusing but there’s too little Yogiri doing actual stuff or making actual progress in the web novel to make it worth suffering through the author’s mediocre, unengaging writing style for it. He has a good idea and an interesting premise, he just has ZERO idea what to do with it. The way the story is, he really should have planned it as a short three to five volume series with the battles and opponents all prepared before starting. Then he wouldn’t need to stuff a web novel with filler right from the second volume.

BTW, you may have noticed a busty brunette featuring prominently in the art for this series. Her name is Tomochika Dannoura. She’s ostensibly the deuteragonist – the second protagonist, as it were, so a lot of chapters are given from her perspective. But that’s just her cover story. Her real role is to look good on the covers to make it more attractive to buyers and readers. That’s why she never does anything of note in the story. That’s why Yogiri only brings her along because her boobs were soft. Yes, really. But don’t expect any romantic scenes because of that. It’s not that kind of series, at least as far as I read.

Don’t expect any detailed world building either. What you should read it for is how funny it is in the beginning when Yogiri kills stuff. And the vague hope of Yogiri killing the crazy Sage (who is later shown to be not so crazy but we don’t care because Yogiri is probably going to kill her anyway. The series suffers from a lot of that). The early chapters are the best before the author starts rationing his powers. I’d say check out the manga and given the web novel a miss unless you’re really into web novels.

TL;DR – The Other World Doesn’t Stand A Chance Against The Power Of Instant Death is great at first but stops being good pretty quickly.

Pure Dynamite by Tom Billington (book review)

I haven’t read a book in several weeks, so to get back in the habit I’m cleaning up random books lying around the house. Pure Dynamite – The Price you Pay for Wrestling Stardom will mainly be of interest to people who are/were fans of professional wrestling in the 70s, 80s and early 90s. If you’re not in that select category, you might want to give this a miss since it’s a not very well-written autobiography of a not very nice person.

Abridged summary

Pure Dynamite is a blow by blow account of the career of Tom Billington, who wrestled solo as The Dynamite Kid, and with Davey Boy Smith as half of the British Bulldogs tag team. Although he should have been a millionaire when he retired in 1993, after 16 years of professional wrestling, he had little but memories are scar tissue to show for it.

Now confined to a wheelchair as a result of serious damage to his back and legs, his years of steroid use have also damaged Billington’s heart and personal life. Pure Dynamite is as much a cautionary tale as it is a glimpse into the world of a wrestling legend.

If you watched the WWE (then WWF) in the early 90s then you definitely remember the British Bulldog Davey Boy Smith, most likely for his legendary Summerslam 92 match against Bret Hart. If you watched even earlier, you will remember he was part of the British Bulldogs tag team with his less buff, less fan-friendly cousin the Dynamite Kid.

I started watching pro wrestling around 1990, but there were plenty of tapes of earlier Wrestlemanias around. I liked the Bulldogs well enough – not as much as the Hart Foundation, but well-enough. Just not enough to read this autobiography by the less popular (but way more talented, seriously, just Youtube his early matches) half.

What made me get Pure Dynamite? The promise of an honest tell-all book in an industry filled with soft-pedalling books full of “eat your vitamins and say your prayers” kind of talk, that’s what. Nary a mention of drugs or steroids even though we all know they were a big part of wrestling particularly in the 90s. Apart from Bret Hart’s book which laid it all on the line, even allegedly honest books like Jericho’s and Mick Foley’s, while being excellent reads for the wrestling fan, didn’t really expose the seedy underbelly of the WWE in the way the gossip fan in me wanted to see. They were also suspiciously light on the self-criticism. Pure Dynamite, I was told, was written by someone with nothing left to lose and thus was the place to go if you really wanted true dirt from that era.

Brutal Honesty?

Well, was it? Alas, no, though it is indeed much more honest than most of the other books I’d mentioned. In particular Tom Billington makes no secret of what a horrible, horrible person he was – without meaning to, actually. He’s a sociopath through and through who can’t see what might be wrong with setting someone on fire in a McDonalds. Or cuffing someone for ignoring him. Or beating someone up because they might possibly be angry with him.

If you’re interested in reading about wrestling “ribs” i.e. backstage pranks, this is definitely the book for you. Just realize that what Billington considers “ribs” are physical and mental abuse and sometimes outright crimes, stuff that should have landed him in jail 200 times over if anyone had bothered reporting it. Reading it you really wonder if this guy has normal thought processes and feelings, he’s just so amoral and blase about it. This happened and that happened and then I did this (completely immoral) thing.

Billington is also honest about the different drugs and steroids that sent him on his downward spiral. He straight up names those who first gave him speed, where he got his steroids from. What he took, when he took it, why he took it, why he quit both steroids and drugs, the sequence of physical punishments he put himself through that landed him in a wheelchair, it’s all explained frankly and clearly in this book.

Dynamite Kid also wrestled for or with most of the key wrestling figures in Canada, Japan and the USA in the 80s, so his book is a veritable Who is Who of wrestling names. Antonio Inoki, Giant Baba, Andre the Giant, Giant Haystacks, Tiger Mask I and II, Terry Funk and on and on. It seems he tangled with just about everybody who was anybody back then, and he’s not shy to let us know what he thought about all of them.

Spoiler: he thinks the world of all his friends and everyone else sucks. Oh it’s not quite that bad, but there’s a pretty obvious bias towards those he likes while those he dislikes are quickly dismissed with backhand compliments at best. Still, he’s not afraid to name names or criticize even popular wrestlers, so it might be worth it reading Pure Dynamite just to see what Billington has to say about your favorite old school wrestler. The biggest surprise for me was that Vince McMahon was actually portrayed very positively. Guess Dynamite doesn’t want to burn all his bridges, eh?

Dynamite Hypocrisy

That’s not the only place where Billington is shady and hypocritical, however. It’s particularly glaring if you’ve read the autobiographies of Bret Hart and Diana Hart and know the truth behind the dissolution of Dynamite’s marriage. Billington tries to play it off as “we just grew apart” but his years of abuse and outright torture of his wife are well-documented.

He tries to paint himself as a hero for not contesting the divorce and giving Michelle everything he had, but after the hell he put her through, it’s the least he could have done. And he talks about how proud he is of his children while admitting he almost never saw them and that he got a divorce even before his third child was born. There’s something missing here. It’s hard to call this an honest book when Billington won’t come out and admit the wrong he did to this woman – and to her friends if one particularly lurid anecdote by Diana Hart is to be believed.

Billington is also inconsistent in his preaching about his wrestling philosophy as well. Several times he states that he always tried to give everyone he wrestled with a good match. After all, if you make someone look small and pathetic and beat them, you’ve beaten a nobody. All good and nice advice, but in between the philosophizing he also recounts at least two incidents where he and his partner intentionally no sold opposing tag teams (the Nasty Boys and Los Guerreros) for no good reason. There’s really no reason, he just didn’t like the look of them so he was a jerk. That’s a pattern you’ll see a lot throughout this book.

You will also have a lot of unanswered questions at the end of his book, particularly regarding his finances. He’s very diligent to record much of what he made from his tours and matches, e.g. $6,200 for a one week tour with NJPW, $10,000 for a commercial, and so on and so forth. But then suddenly he’s broke and returns to England with less than $30 in his pocket. Wait, what? What happened to all that money? Drugs? Women? (of whom there are suspiciously few in his account) Bad investments? He mentions buying a house for $200,000 cash and having some land, but where did all the rest of the money go? Again it’s hard to call his book “honest” when it has such glaring gaps in the narrative.

Cautionary tale for wrestlers

As the summary says “Pure Dynamite is as much a cautionary tale as it is a glimpse into the world of a wrestling legend.” I don’t think Billington meant it as such, though. He himself says he wouldn’t change a thing if he had to do it all over again. He speaks approvingly of “hard” fighters, i.e. fighters who hit you for real and dismisses wrestlers who didn’t want to work dangerous styles or with dangerous wrestlers. With all due respect, the results show for themselves.

It’s almost funny how oblivious he is to the fact that he’s a walking advertisement for not doing the things he did. At a point where his own body is almost completely broken down, he criticizes Davey Boy Smith for not wanting to get hurt. It’s like, duh? Look in the mirror first?

And this book came out before the Chris Benoit tragedy, so his praise of Benoit for aping the Dynamite Kid’s style comes across all the more as “Don’t try this at home, kids.” I think fans who don’t like the WWE’s present safer working styles and wellness policies will rapidly change their minds when they see the toll unsafe practices took on Tom Billington. It’s definitely a “cautionary tale” whether Billington means it to be or not.

On the quality of the book itself

Last few notes on the book – this review is longer than I’d expected – for better or worse it definitely feels like something Billington wrote himself, even though I know there was a ghost writer. That means a lot of typos, inconsistent spellings and quite a bit of repetition.

It suffers from quite a bit of disorganization and rambling before getting back to the point. Your mileage may vary on this, since it does have a genuine feel of listening to the Dynamite Kid recount his life. A little more editing, cutting out the hundreds of prank stories and “I wrestled this guy” stories and more explanation of his life outside the ring would have really raised the level of this book.

This especially applies to his family in England. His dad shows up prominently but the rest of his family is like a shadow. His mother and his sisters almost never appear. It’s not so much that I want the nitty gritty of his private life, but it’s a very incomplete autobiography when most of the stuff you would expect from such a book are either covered up or completely ignored.

Another ‘mileage may vary’ issue is that many of the matches are written in “kayfabe,” as if the outcome of each match was ever actually in doubt. There are matches where this isn’t the case and Dynamite shows the decision-making process, but the bulk of the matches are written up like they were real fights. For me this wasn’t a problem at all and was actually very interesting to read, but I’ve seen complaints about it online so I just throw this out there. YMMV.

Final thoughts

Pure Dynamite is worth a read on one hand, but on the other hand it’s kind of hard to recommend this book. It’s invaluable for its frank look at the excesses of the 80s Rock n Wrestling era. It’s also useful if you’re the nosy type and want to know how much wrestlers typically made in those days – a lot if you were at the top and a good negotiator.

The problem is the subject, Tom Billington. He is just so, so unpleasant. A lying, unrepentant jerk that it’s really hard to feel sorry for despite all he’s going through now. Not that he wants or deserves your pity, of course. But you will come away with a bad taste in your mouth. Overall I’d say read it if you’re a fan of that era but definitely skip it if you’re not. It makes me grateful the WWE has changed so much these days, even though it does mean the angles and matches are so boring that I can’t watch it any more. At least lives are being saved, and that’s what matters.

Thoughts on Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okasan wa Suki desu ka?

I’ve only read the free sample pages of Tsuujou Kougeki ga Zentai Kougeki de Nikai Kougeki no Okasan wa Suki desu ka? provided by Fantasia Books and don’t intend to read any more, but that was enough to form a general opinion. The intention of the free sample is to help the reader decide if they want to read any further, after all, and 70 or so pages of a book is a pretty substantial freebie. This post will contain a few spoilers, so read chapter one and two if you haven’t already.

On to the meat. We all know other world/isekai light novels are all the rage these days. Every other LN features a hero ending up in another world somehow where he somehow becomes overpowered and a chick magnet and all the other otaku fantasy wish fulfillment tropes that the genre is so well-known for. Other world stories are so common these days that’s it’s hard for new books to make a dent – unless they either subvert or deconstruct the genre (getting increasingly common these days) or add some kind of spin or gimmick.

Enter Tsuujou Kougeki – Do You Like Moms Whose Normal Attacks Hit the Whole Enemy Party Twice? The twist here is that the main hero Masato does not go into the game world alone but is accompanied by his doting mom Mamako and it is Mamako, not Masato, who becomes the overpowered hero. It’s pretty funny how he gets so worked up and excited about being the Chosen One… then his mom just walks up and snags the two most powerful weapons in the game. Not only that, but the in-game guidebook suggests there might be other such overpowered mother-son pairs in the MMMMMORPG game. It would be interesting to meet them and see how things go.

So the unexpected swerve is an intriguing one, enough to get even a light novel avoider like me to read it. The problem is, it’s not quite what I expected. I should have smelled a rat when I saw the cutesy, fanservicey picture of Mamako on the cover. What I was expecting was a normal mom, late 30ish early 40ish soccer mom with the dignity and gravitas to match. Putting a regular, realistic everyday person into these kinds of situations is always much funnier and more interesting to me anyway.

Mamako is just annoying. Ditzy, clingy, manipulative, always ready to use tears to control her son if nothing will work. Doesn’t know jack about what’s going on, won’t share what little she does know, won’t listen to common sense advice but charges ahead without a thought in the world. Is this really a woman in her late 30s? How did she survive long enough to breed? The worst part is her fake crying to weasel her way into or out of situations. That’s just plain dirty. The excessive focus on her young appearance and on Masato’s brief moments of attraction to her are just pig-disgusting icing on a pig-disgusting cake.

Masato is no paragon of virtue either. He’s whiny and too cranky and rude towards his mother. I’m sure we can all remember times when we were a little sharper with our moms than we had meant to be, but to snap and snarl at her all chapter long is just… ick. And all that whining and crying just because his mom has better weapons instead of creating a build and learning skills to make the best of what he has. I blame Mamako for bringing him up wrong, that’s what. Plus he’s 15 years old, what can I say?

I didn’t read enough to get to know the loli merchant and the tsundere sage better, but I doubt they’ll be any better than the already-low level established. The tsundere in particular killed my desire to read any more. You know she’s just going to argue with Masato and beat him up all the time but she’s still going to “win” his affection over any better girls in the series anyway. Just thinking about it gives me a headache.

TL;DR – The premise was interesting, but the ditzy personality of the mom and the whiny, cranky personality of her son ruined the whole thing for me. If they make an anime I might try an episode or two, but the interest I had in Tsuujou Kougeki is gone and probably isn’t ever coming back.

Reread Dune – Quick book impressions

It’s been… I want to say 20 years but possibly more since I last read Dune by Frank Herbert, a classical work of science fiction. I still remembered a lot of the main points of the story but the finer details had long since been lost to history. After watching several anime series with overpowered main characters (Sword Art Online, Log Horizon, etc) I decided to return to a much earlier example just for kicks. Go on, Paul Muad’Dib Atreides, show those amateurs how a real Gary Stu does it.

Blurb: Set on the desert planet Arrakis, Dune is the story of the boy Paul Atreides, who would become the mysterious man known as Muad’Dib. He would avenge the traitorous plot against his noble family—and would bring to fruition humankind’s most ancient and unattainable dream.

A stunning blend of adventure and mysticism, environmentalism and politics, Dune won the first Nebula Award, shared the Hugo Award, and formed the basis of what it undoubtedly the grandest epic in science fiction.

It IS indeed a stunning blend of adventure, mysticism, environmentalism and politics. For once the blurb did not lie. I stayed up to like 3am reading it and continued the next day until I finished. There are plenty of hair-raising will-they-make-it adventure sections, way too much BS psychological mysticism, enough environmentalism to make you develop an interest in desertification and its reverse and, of course, politics up the wazoo. The politics was the most interesting part IMO, there should have been way more of it.

So is Paul really a Gary Stu? You betcha! He’s sooo smart and sooo strong, and sooo psychic, he can do at age 15 what thousands of predecessors have failed to do, he learns everything so quickly, and on and on and on. There are suggestions here and there of the probability that he might fail at something, but of course it never comes to pass and he always sails through just fine and comes through even stronger.

That’s okay with me in the earlier parts of the book. It’s justifiable to have a super-strong, super-perfect character if the alternative is certain death. Of course he’s strong, if he weren’t strong he’d be dead. It’s the later parts of the story where he’s no longer in any danger but continues to get even stronger and even more perfect to the point where almost nobody in the whole universe can hold a candle to him physically, psychically or mentally that made me think, oh brother! Frank Herbert really laid it on thick.

To his credit, the negative side effects of his perfection do trouble Paul quite a bit. He gets fear, worship, reverence, fanatical devotion and even love in spades, but all he really wants are friends. He’s also worried by persistent visions of a universal jihad caused by his followers – an eventuality he seems to stop fighting after a while because, *shrug*. Dunno why, he just does.

It also bothers him how little he feels even when tragic things happen. Or so he says, anyway. Frank Herbert was probably trying to soften the super-perfect, super-competent image on Paul, but it backfires a bit, IMO. It just makes it much harder to get under his skin or relate to his feelings as he gets more and more prefect. Which is kind of the whole point of his dilemma so it works and yet doesn’t work at the same time. Very… complicated.

I also enjoyed the fact that Dune doesn’t start out focusing exclusively on Paul Atreides. Sure it’s his story, but there’s plenty of time spent developing characters like his doomed father, his mother, retainers like Thufir Hawat and Gurney, and even side characters like the geologist Liet. When you watch anime or play games about a prince taking back his kingdom, the kingdom is usually lost pretty quickly. Sometimes it’s lost even before the story starts. Dune, on the other hand, takes the time to sketch out the previous status quo and show how and why things went wrong. It’s very enjoyable stuff and I’m a little sorry other series haven’t imitated that approach since.

So, as I’ve bseen saying all along I had fun rereading Dune. It’s not a perfect book, though. When I was younger I found the swashbuckling adventures in the desert to be the main point of interest. This time I enjoyed the social and political intrigue and found the geological and ecological details to be far more interesting than the “Paul does something awesome yet again” parts. If I had to find fault with anything it’s that there wasn’t half enough attention given to those sections as there should have been.

For example Herbert portrayed Baron Harkonnen as a sneaky, wily, highly competent foe early on, but then the character vanishes for a while and the next time we see him he’s just a fat buffoon. There are attempts to build Feyd Rautha up as Paul’s ultimate rival but not only is he out of focus for most of the book but when we do see him he’s just a spoiled brat. Same goes for the emperor, who is never given a chance to show us what, if anything, qualifies him to rule the known universe. The supposedly powerful Guild is yet another example. It’s not that they aren’t all powerful in their own way, just that Paul is portrayed as so much stronger and smarter and more determined that they might as well not bother. I would have enjoyed a bigger focus on all of them, but it wouldn’t affect the ending in any way so I guess it’s all the same in the end.

Long story short, Dune is a great read/re-read for fans of overpowered main characters. There’s a lot of new terminology thrown around but you can usually figure it out from the context without referring to the glossary. And the story is just plain interesting and easy enough to follow without being simplistic. Good books are just good, you know, Gary Stu or no Gary Stu. I’ve never read any of the sequels because I hear it’s all downhill from Dune Messiah, but I’ll give it a chance anyway. Looking forward to it!

No Sweat Cantonese book review

I hadn’t read the AllJapaneseAlltheTime blog for a while, but I popped in about a month ago and one of the recent posts kind of pricked my conscience a little bit. Why Are you Acting like a Deadbeat Dad Language Learner? the title goes, and it talks about abandoning a language as soon as you’re halfway good in it. Th…that’s like me and Cantonese, I thought uncomfortably.

The truth is, I’d managed to get to a semi-decent point in Cantonese. I don’t have any language partners so I can’t speak a lick, but I’ve gotten to the place where I can get the gist and sometimes more than just the gist of what people are talking about on news broadcasts, in dramas and on RTHK 2 programs (off-topic, but does anyone else have difficulty live-streaming RTHK? I have to use the RTHK on the Go app on my phone to get the broadcasts.) Right about then I kind of ran out of Canto movies I wanted to watch and music I wanted to listen to, and it became a chore hunting for HK dramas that aren’t dubbed into Mandarin, so I just kinda threw the whole thing over and walked away. I still listen to RTHK a few times a week, watch Guangdong TV from time to time and listen to Cantopop quite frequently, but with nowhere near the energy I used to.

But since the AJATT post stirred me up, I decided to at least go through my bulging folder of Canto-learning material I’d always meant to read but never got round it. There’s quite a bit of, and I’ll try to tackle at least one or two sets a month but first up, No Sweat Cantonese: A Fun Guide to Speaking Correctly by Amy Leung. That was a long intro, wasn’t it? ^_^;; A-anyway, the blurb:

The long awaited textbook from one of the most popular and successful teachers of Cantonese. Amy Leung teaches Cantonese to managers of multinational corporations in Hong Kong in a fun new way. No Sweat Cantonese distils her approach, fulfilling the demand for an up-to-date textbook focusing on the practical needs of expatriates in Hong Kong and elsewhere in the Cantonese-speaking world. Like never before, Cantonese – “that impossible language!” is now easy and enjoyable to learn. Includes CD with pronunciation aid and full-length conversations.

The presence of audio was the selling point for me, because Cantonese is one language where it really helps to hear stuff spoken. There are sooo many homonyms in this language, it’s crazy. But anyway, since I spent so much time on the intro I’m going to put the actual review in point form to save time and hopefully stop myself rambling like I am so wont to do.

The good

Starts with a rather good pronunciation guide and using a romanization guide that makes sounding things out easy to do.
Vocabulary lists with hanzi at the start of every chapter.
Dialogues provided are short and easy to follow/repeat.
There’s a helpful appendix at the back with even more vocabulary, all voiced.
Lots of cultural notes and suggestions about places to go and things to do there, making this a good guide for people who intend to visit Hong Kong in the near future.

The bad

A bit too elementary for an intermediate learner like me. No Sweat Cantonese is better suited for those just starting out, preferably with the aid of a teacher.
There are a lot of careless typos, including one right on the contents page (see proof above).
Inconsistent typesetting annoys me. The typesetter will randomly change fonts on the same page and put accents on English words and numbers where they don’t belong at all.
The vocabulary comes with hanzi but the dialogues and chit-chat lines don’t, so there’s an extra step involved if you want to enter them into an SRS or put them on a card. It’s not too bad for an intermediate user because none of it uses complicated dialogue, but for someone just starting it out it can be intimidating. Again you’re better off working with a teacher.

tl;dr, I didn’t get too much out of it. The vocabulary lists are the best part, but I have an aversion to entering just words/characters into my SRS unless they’re in a sentence where they’re used in context, and the sentences in this book came without hanzi and I was too lazy to write them out from scratch so… yeah. At $30 on Amazon it’s a bit pricey for what you’ve get, but if you’ve got all the other Canto textbooks and need something to round out your collection and fill in a few vocab gaps it’s not a bad buy. Still, No Sweat Cantonese is probably most useful for current and future expats who have access to a language teacher and just need a structured textbook to help them through.