Customer Reviews

Complete Japanese: The Basics (CD) (Complete Basic Courses)

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I am in the process of studying Japanese to prepare for living in Tokyo next year. Learning Japanese through the Living Language series is helpful but also has some drawbacks. The biggest drawback is that the writers fail to include pronunciation helps in the text itself, however they do indeed provide native Japanese speakers to help in the accompanying three CDs. Also, they spend the first four or five lessons on various grammatical topics, which can actually be a little confusing when trying to learn a new language. Other language series jump into learning words and phrases by repetition, citing the fact that to really learn any new language you must practice repeating it over and over out loud and not worry at first about grammar and syntax. That being said, I will seek to finish the 40 lesson in this course and hope it better prepare me for my year that will be spend in Japan.

When I was preparing to leave for Japan this was the first book I picked up to help with my language preparation. Imagine how surprised I was to find out when I got there and use some of the phrases on my new Japanese friends they said "Yes, we understand what you want to say but that's not what real Japanese people say." Later on in my study, my Japanese friend found the book, got a pen, and started changing the phrases around to suit a more natural style.

In short; this book is a good starting off point for learning Japanese but in no way should be considered modern or comprehensive.

IMPORTANT NOTE! If your are going to get this book, make sure you are getting the CD's too. Japanese in a language where the vowel sounds are totally different from English and a long vowel sound can totally change the meaning of a word. (EG. The words "hospital" and "hair salon" in Japanese have VERY similar pronunciation, you need to hear the words spoken it to produce it correctly.)

I started this course book and cd collection and I really like it. Unlike most tutorials it starts off with the basics of grammer: understanding vowel and consonant pronounciation. Starts off with everyday words for each, very short lesson to show you how to pronounce all the vowels and consonants and then you listen to the CD after every lesson to hear exactly what you are reading. Just like learning our own native language it teaches everyday words first, just like we learned apple, Monday, dollar etc first and then sentences. It also explains syllabary. I've picked up many tutorials trying to learn Japanese and so far this has been the easiest to understand and relate to. It's not repition from a tape/CD it's actual learning how to understand and speak it. THEN you can go on to learning kana, kanji,writing etc. Some complaints I read is that it doesn't use the Japanese characters or real-world sentences and situations. Well this is like learning in elementary school. You learn letters, then the words, then the sentences and essays and so on. You don't just jump into writing long words and sentences when you don't even know how to read yet. My only complaint is that with this and all the tutorials is that it's difficult for me to hear some of the words so I have to keep playing back the entire lesson just to replay one word that I have trouble with (on a CD).

As a beginner of Japanese, I have found that this package is best as a grammatical reference. Most of the basics of Japanese grammar are very well outlined and explained in the booklet, and when I want to see how to form a particular sentence I can usually go to the booklet and find it easily. The material has been very helpful in this regard.

This set includes 3 audio CDs; however I did not find them particularly useful for a few reasons. First, the CDs only consist of Japanese sentences taken from the coursebook, with no English accompanying it, so you are hearing Japanese speech only with the idea that you will be using the book along with it. Also, Japanese pronunciation is generally pretty straightforward, so if you know how to read the Romaji system (the system in which Japanese words are written with English letters, and is not difficult at all to learn) it's easy to pronounce sentences correctly on your own. Now the first CD goes over pronunciation basics, and I found that part helpful, but after I learned that I didn't really need anything else on the CDs.

One drawback to this package is that, except for a small amount presented in the back, there is no Japanese kana writing accompanying the Romaji text in the material, either in the coursebook or the dictionary. Since this is a basic course I doubt the company wanted to include that. However if I want to learn to read and write the Japanese sentences presented I often have to look up the words separately in another dictionary. On the other hand, there is a chart in the back that teaches you how to write hiragana and katakana correctly, and this is a good reference if you are wanting to learn that.

So this is kind of a mixed bag, in actuality. I wouldn't recommend it as an audio resource, as I think there are probably more thorough ones out there. I think it would be a much better deal to purchase the coursebook separately (the Japanese Coursebook: Basic-Intermediate (LL(R) Complete Basic Courses)), which you can do, and a good dictionary, such as the Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary.