56 of 56 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good and user-friendly first volume, December 21, 1998
By A Customer
This review is from: Japanese for Busy People (Japanese Teacher's Edition in Japanese) (Paperback)
I am teaching myself Japanese using a variety of textbooks and here is a comparative review from my (learner's) point of view.
-Living Language 'All the way' -- This is very good and complete. Also there is plenty of audio material (8 CDs, the only audio-based course I found affordable) and this is vital during the first stages of learning the language. However, the learning curve of the book is steep. So much is crammed into the book's 450 pages that it is very easy to get discouraged. I found the amount of vocabulary cropping up every ten pages (and new lesson) particularly disheartening at times. Another problem is that Japanese characters are not covered particularly well; dialogues and example sentences are all in Romanji. However, I found this course to be truly excellent used together with others, so I could move to another book (and later return) whenever things got too disheartening. (4 stars)
-Learn Japanese-New College Text (Hawaii University) -- This is (overall) the best text I found: the learning curve is just right, although there is a scary amount of new vocabulary in each lesson, a lot of it is obvious (new forms of verbs already learned etc), and there are tons (perhaps too many?) of exercises. My only gripe is that no solutions to the exercises are provided such that the odd sentence may remain obscure. However, this is a brilliant series, both very good value (cheap!) and very complete, with cultural notes that try to relate understanding of the language to understanding of the culture. (5 stars)
- Japanese for College Students (Christian University) - This text plunges into Japanese the hard way, introducing Kanji from Lesson 1. I don't see too many people learning Japanese purely using this text without some external pressure being applied (e.g. University course). Also, since (as I am now able to judge), the level reached at the end of the first volume is not that impressively superior to the level reached through studying my favourite Hawaii text (bar the Kanji), I am not sure if this is worth it. Maybe this is alright if you take up language learning as a challenge. But then learning Japanese is a challenge anyway. This is the only one of my books which I do not use at all. (2 stars)
- Which leaves the present series, Japanese for busy people. Point one: Get the Kana version - although it is hard to start with, you will find yourself at ease with Kana by the middle of the first volume. One serious hurdle scaled. Getting the Romanji version just means you will constantly be 'cheating' by reading Western characters. Point Two: this is the most user-friendly of all the books, careful to never scare you off with an excessive amount of new vocabulary, and spreading even simple grammar points over several lessons. The downside of this is that the level reached at the end of the first volume is still very basic indeed, but this series is great for giving you confidence again when you've been put off by a harsher textbook. Point Three, however, becomes an issue in the second volume, as it gets clearer and clearer that the series is indeed geared toward 'busy', or business people, learning Japanese for career purposes. Since the vocabulary, as has been said, gets introduced fairly slowly (although the pace does pick up in Volume 2), learning words like 'conference room' or 'extension number' when you have't yet learnt some arguably more fundamental words may seem off-putting depending on your approach. Nevertheless, I see this as an excellent series as long as it is used in conjunction with others. (4 stars)
Recommendations:
- Scared of grammar or business person? Get Japanese for Busy People
- Reasonably confident and not that interested in business-specific language? Get New College Text
- Planning to get into Japanese really seriously? Get Living Language (completeness, CDs) and New College Text, move from the first to the second whenever the first progresses too quickly, and get Japanese for Busy People as well if you need the occasional boost to your self-confidence.
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8 of 9 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Can you get a perfect Japanese textbook? Probably not..., May 20, 2002
This book has been reviewed constantly, so I'll be brief. I'm a self-study-er. I enjoy this book because it does a good job of defining sentence structure, verb conjugation, and sentence particles. It doesn't get much into the history of Japan, but tries to describe the general culture through its conversations. The learning focuses on reading dialogues and other basic sentence structures and repetition of them.
The weak point of the book is the kanji study. There are two general schools of thought on learning kanji: learn the kanji that go with the vocabulary, or learn the kanji individually with all of their readings. JfBP does the former, but only by listing the kanji at the end of the chapter and saying "learn these." I also own the Guide to Remembering Japanese Characters (Tuttle, you know, the thick grey book). This book gives a historical background and the main readings for each kanji. As I read JfBP, I refer to the kanji that are taught in each chapter by their listings in the big grey book to get a better understanding. Time consuming, but thorough.
Methinks it's hard to get one book that covers the whole Japanese language experience. I think JfBP covers the parts that it wants to very well. Just expect to learn kanji elsewhere.
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5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
An mixed improvement over the 2nd edition, February 25, 2008
Perhaps it's history with this set of books, but I kinda preferred the prior edition of this book. They've definitely gone through a major revision here though which is good to see for such a useful series. I purchased this for a quick review reference (my 2nd edition copy is very well worn :-)). It includes the CD which is a plus. The lesson flow is nice as are the vocabulary listings (now at the bottom of each section) but the grammar points seem convoluted compared to the prior edition. Overall, I recommend this and the other books in this series -- stay with the Kana versions though.
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