Customer Reviews

Japanese Communication, Culture, Context: Volume 1 (Japanese Edition)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(2)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

I have been using this book for a few months now, and I am satisfied with it. Its not like I had a choice of what book to pick, but as far as textbooks go, this one actually delivers. It keeps a steady pace while reintroducing previous lessons in new ones, to keep them fresh in your mind. For example it follows the story of an American exchange student in Japan. It starts out with basic introductions and then gradually goes into more in depth conversation and questions and statements.

This book does not make you dependant on romaji, and starts to introduce kanji in the 3rd chapter. However it does not explain kanji (radicals, etc.) strangely enough. But it is good to get used to seeing them and recognizing them early on, because that will be your toughest battle with this language. A good supplement book is "Lets Learn Kanji" to get into the kanji groove. The audio that comes with this book could have been waaayy better, its very short and not too in depth on pronunciation, but its a nice addition. I'm doing alot better than I thought, since it seems the concensus is that Japanese is this enshrouded impossible to understand language. Its not. Dont believe the myths. I'm not saying its simple, but its not as difficult as you may think. If you just want to learn to understand anime or manga, I dont think thats the best motivation. Unless you have incredible patience, you wont be able to really understand the anime for at least a year or two, and even then, anime uses alot of colloquial slang and rude or impolite forms of speech and youre not going to learn that in class. As far as manga, you'd need real determination for all that wonderful Kanji!!!

Anyway, if you have a good teacher, you should succeed with this book. As far as buying it new, dont. You can get it way cheaper used either on ebay or on amazon market place. I got mine for $46 on here, and was in new condition. Its still a rip, but hey.

Some good supplementary resources I have found so far; Pimsleur audio series, "Japanese: The Manga Way", Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary, "Jazz up your Japanese with Onomatopoeia", "Basic Connections:Making your Japanese Flow". Declans Japanese Language series software. Also, if you have access to Japanese movies, anime, or TV (subtitles off!) watch it as much as possible. You'll be suprised at each time you watch it, you'll start recognizing and understanding more and more!

I bought this book in order to review first year Japanese after having been tortured by the Jorden series (volumes I and II of Jorden's Solipsistic Language), and I am happy to be able to affirm that, yes, in fact, as we all suspected, romanji are completely dispensable and even distracting. This book gives all examples in real Japanese, not some pseudolinguist/ cultleader's private language.

I think that NAKAMA provides fine explanations and lots of good examples. It also begins early on to show the kanji for vocabulary (written in hiragana), which makes this a good book for both learning and review. There are questions here and there, for example, why do the authors claim that Japanese has two tenses, "present and past", and then go on to explain that the present tense is also used for the future? I myself find the perfect/imperfect (completed/incompleted) distinction most intuitive. Anyway, these are minor issues which are naturally open to debate.

However, there are a few formatting problems (who in the world does the proofreading for this publisher? does he/she still have a job?), and the book is WAY too expensive, as a result of the reigning textbook tyranny from which college students sadly have no means of escape. (oui, huis clos!) What bumped my review up to 4 stars, I must admit, was the high frequency of pictures in chapter 3 containing that truly indispensable creature: kirei na neko (sorry for the redundancy). Hai!

It goes without saying that Japanese is among the most intricate and diffucult languages to learn and master. Nakama 1 however seems to make the language much more manageable. The textbook is wonderfully clear and descriptive. Kanji are presented well with stroke orders, meanings, and their use is illustrated within conversational passages. There is a wealth of vocabulary and the presentaiton of the grammatical points, numerous as they are, is amazingly clear. This textbook is great for a course and for one learning on their own. I initially had reservations about the book simply because the Japanese langauge course I'm taking covered 2 chapters of this book every week. Point being that there is ALOT of manageable material in each of the 12 chapters. Combine this book with the workbook and the tape and you'll come out of it having very strong inroads into the Japanese language. All in all, a great book.

Probably the main reason we use this textbook in my class is that one of the co-authors is a high-up in the Japanese language department at my university. It's not a bad text, but it's really not that great either. On the upside, the book gets into things like Hiragana right away (and Katakana a little later on), so you can quickly ditch romaji, but the Kanji lessons don't start until somewhat later. The recorded materials for Nakama are somewhat lacking in quality, but they're managable. Mostly I guess it's just a textbook, not particularly interesting. It covers new grammar patterns and such pretty quickly, and the explanations aren't always completely clear. There are a number of very useful tables of counters and verb endings and such in the back, though. Overall, it's an okay textbook, but from the things I hear, something like Genki would probably be a better choice.

I decided to write this review in response to the overwhelmingly positive reviews that were posted on this website. No conscionable person could possibly stay silent on this issue.

The truth is that Nakama is not what these people present it as. Nakama is, in fact, a horrible textbook for a college course.

It's childish.

The grammar explanations are jejune at best, a little splurge of example in the form of some uninteresting dialogue is all that is given for each grammatical example. And when I say "at best," it's because grammar in this book is really rather scant. Grammar is definitely not at the forefront of Nakama. It definitely takes a back seat to too much useless
tidbits of "cultural" aspects of Japanese and example sentences and dialogues that border on rote methods of language learning. The coverage of vocabulary that would fuel strong grammatical examples is also weak.

This textbook's main failure lies in the fact that it follows a popular methodology for language learning in the 90s that put the spotlight on the classroom environment to fill in the many gaps that textbooks left in learning. Most of the exercises in the book are classroom activities to be done with a partner or in front of the class. Grammar examples were apparently left to be presented by the teacher and any missing vocabulary again to be divulged by teacher or dictionary.

The cultural exposure also falls flat and it turns out that in a classroom setting this overly complicated feature of the book (Salutations in written letters? Reading medical charts?!) is usually skipped in favor of more teacher examples. This book would leave a self-studier almost as completely blind as some similar European language books do. So what's the point of that? Why doesn't the teacher just teach without a textbook or hand out his own worksheets? It'd probably be equally or more effective.

And as I said, the book is puerile. It focuses on basic conversation, as if the plan of the author was to never allow the student a fighting chance at fluency.

This book also has virtually no real textbook/workbook examples within the text itself. You have to buy the overpriced workbook to get any practice out of it - practice which is really necessary to one's ability in the language. It also doesn't come with a single audio CD. Those can be purchased separately for an inflated price. But the most important audio portion of all is the "Student Tape/CD" which is not included in such a package. This whole thing is just a huge rip-off.

Unfortunately, you don't have much of a choice when learning Japanese. Of the four mainstream Japanese texts, Nakama is right in the middle and not prominently so - it's only marginally better than the laughable Yookoso and in return the more serious Genki series is only marginally better than Nakama. All of the popular Japanese textbooks recently published have been of such mediocre flavor.

Good points? To be honest, the coverage of Kanji is sufficient. This book is very neatly laid out, and the paper seems to be of good quality. Also, the glossaries and appendixes are easy to navigate. And it's not completely useless - the intermediate course might get you through what should be basic first year Japanese with a good book. However, if you're planning to really learn the language and get out of kindergarten Japanese without wasting the price of a private tutor to explain how much you were ripped off by this book, you should consider another method.

I used this textbook during an intensive course. I think it was chosen for political reasons (the author's reputation or connection). But I found it to be lacking in many ways. First of all it is FULL of typos. In fact, one whole chart was mislabeled. An unsuspecting student might think they were learning the past plain form of the adjective when in fact, they were looking at the polite form. I was very frustrated by the typos. Secondly, I could never find clear grammar explanations. A grammar point would be introduced but there would only be one or two examples of it. Then another grammar point would be thrown in, all mixed together in the examples. I ended up buying a dictionary of grammar, which the teacher recommended when she realized how frustrated some of us were with this book.

This book is in very good condition. I was very happy and the price was much better than that at the school for a book in not as good condition. The school does give 50% back at the end of the year. But we still saved about $30.

I got this book the third day that I placed it. The book arrived in better condition than that I was expecting from a used book. It even comes with the original cassette tape, although I don't use it. Great Seller. Would definitely comeback again.