Customer Reviews

Japanese, The Spoken Language: Part 3 (Yale Language Series) (Pt.3)

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

 

 

Such a simple little word "doumo". Yet when I came to Japan 13 and a bit years ago it started to bug me. Why? Well becasue I knew that it meant "thank you"- everyone knows that right?

But the strange thing was that as my ears became more attuned to what people around me were saying, I realized that they were using "doumo" in sometimes very strange ways. When they greeted one another or parted for example. So I thought- well maybe they just use "thank-you" somewhat more broadly than we do in English. But then you hear things like "doumo henn" and "doumo omoshiroi". What on Earth is that all about? So I went to the bookshops and checked every Japanese text I could find and all agreed that "doumo" means thank-you. Seems everyone knew that except for the Japanese.

Some time later I chanced upon a copy of JSL and, never having seen it before, looked to see what it had to say about "doumo". Lo and behold- there it was. A simple account that explained all the seemingly disconected uses of "doumo" that I had heard.

The series provides plenty of other similarly insightful accounts of Japanese usage that assist with the process of learning to manipulate the language at a fine-grained level.

It gets four stars instead of 5 as there is a lack of practice with extended sequences and the recording quality of the tapes is poor.

As a student taking Japanese in a well-known University that uses the JSL series in its Spoken Language track, this book has become my CRUCH in speaking Japanese. It uses conversations as models to learn from, drills to teach you ways to utilize your new vocabulary and grammar tools, a listening section and translation section (unfortunately without an answer key). The most helpful aspect of the book though are the in-depth grammar explanations; they really help you internalize the meanings and usages of honorifics, conjugations, special words and compounds, speech styles (careful/casual, direct/distal, gentle/blunt...) and so forth. The idea is to help you learn to create these sentences yourself, to the point where it seems natural (although this ideal cannot be achieved without an extended stay in Japan), or at least to the point where you will know the right thing to say in certain social contexts.

While the grammar explanations are stellar and offer students a chance to construct new sentences through logic (a very linguistical approach to language-learning), I have found some problems with the series:

1) It's all in romaaji. Let's face it. When you go to Japan, almost everything will be in evil but beautiful scribbles called 'kanji' -- even with JWL - the written language accompaniment - you won't even have the reading capability of a 1st grader.

2) You NEED a GOOD teacher to help you through the series. I did the entire third book myself (by far the most difficult) and I didn't learn it nearly as well as I learned the previous lessons.

3) The slow but exponential learning curve. Things won't "click" until you're more than half-way through the series. There are 30 lessons and around lesson 19 I was able to start constructing complex thoughts in a managable time-frame. However, after that I could start to have basic conversations pertaining to everyday life.

4) This series was originally written for DIPLOMATS during Japan's bubble-economy era, and it really shows. You learn American Consulate in Lesson 7 and air in Lesson 30. Subsequently, you're language will be EXTREMELY formal and stiff compared to today's standards, but it's better to be polite than rude, right? Moreover, slight problem, a few words here and there are outdated (ie Monbusho should be Monbukagakusho, or Monkasho for short).

5) Although the grammar explanations are great, you will probably need a tool to fully understand it... I suggest google-ing Tae Kim's Japanese page. Amazing.

In response to the 'huji' review: Jorden has a very good reason for changing a couple spellings for consistency's sake. It will limit the number of exceptions to the already-overloaded conjugation rules. Just deal with it. English has 37 vowel sounds and only 5 vowels!

Conclusion:
If you're learning this in a class-setting, I say go for it, but still make sure that you're getting a good bit of writing in on your own; luckily, there's a writing portion added to our class. If you're attempting to learn the language alone (um good luck!) you should use a WIDE VARIETY of sources. No single textbook will be your cure-all. Furthermore, make sure you have good listening materials: JSL can provide that. In finishing the third book of this series alone, I have found it useful to do all the drills and use other textbooks to help me. This includes Miura's 'An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese' and 'Breaking into Japanese Literature' by Giles Murray. In addition, it wouldn't hurt to have a good kanji dictionary (I suggest 'Kanji Learner's Dictionary' by Jack Halpern).

Finally, I hope I have been fair in my review of this book, and more so, I hope that this helped!

ganbatte kudasai!

At this level of study not having kana and kanji is an absurd blunder. The only way to get the non-romanized versions of the text is to buy a very ugly teacher's edition of the core conversations and drills, which themselves become a bit too much like brute memorization here.

This book is great for polishing your knowledge and tiny grammar subtleties, but something extra is needed in order to prepare yourself for making your own sentances, not ones you memorize from a book. (This could be provided by say, a teacher)

So in this sense, a book more geared towards self-learning and adaptation would be the second half of the Yookoso series, Yookoso: A Continuation of Contemporary Japanese. This book is JSL2,3 and JWL2+more combined into one.

I have been using the Japanese Spoken Language books for about two years now at my college using 1st, 2nd, and 3rd parts of the series. I'll start with some positives and go on to why I gave this book a low score.

The book is overall good for grammar. It gives a thorough explanation of particles and usage of words. It provides `everyday' conversations and clarifies the usage of such things as particles, nominals, ect. However, I will indicate now, that unless you are quite good at understanding some advanced English language structure terms (such as predicate, adjectival, verbal ect.), this book will be a bit difficult to understand, at least quickly. Otherwise, the explanations of Japanese sentence structure are very thorough in letting you know all the rules to constructing your own Japanese sentence. It also provides a variety drills, exercises, and even "check up" questions to make sure you understand the grammar.

Now onto the bad stuff and this will be lengthy. First, the book was actually written in the 60's. The author, in fact, died a year ago at the age of 88. This book was republished in 1990, as you can see, but the words and even a majority of the sentences are EXTREMELY outdated (I think 1990 is still too old). Many of my Japanese friends indicate that when I talk in Japanese I sound like their grandmother. So, if you want to sound like you're a 70-year-old grandmother; then this book is for you. Next, this book contains absolutely NO writing like hiragana, katakana, and kanji. It's all in romanji, which in case you didn't know, isn't used in Japan. Thus, the "Spoken Language" part of the title. You'll have to get the "Japanese Written Language" by Jorden and Noda as a supplement (which doesn't follow the lessons in the Spoken Language so it gets confusing). Most language books that I've had experience with provides the CD with the book or at least a website that gives you access to audio. For gem of a textbook, you have to purchase the CD separately (if you can locate it) for a lovely $68.00. The CD itself is awful. It provides some videos of the speaking conversations, however the audio and the video are of such poor quality (my two year old nephew makes better videos), you can't really understand anything. The only other thing it provides is some listening conversations with questions and a grammar quiz. The CD is worth about $5.00 in quality, but if you want to spend the $68.00 on this, please do.

As someone mentioned earlier, you cannot rely solely on this book. Your Japanese will be incredibly poor and outdated to the point where Japanese natives won't even be able to understand you. People in my class who relied solely on this book, even after two years of study, could not speak to our Japanese students at all while the other students who only used to book for homework were able to hold themselves in a conversation. Many of our Japanese students hate this book themselves and refuse to use it when they help us. We've even noticed, compared to students of other languages at my school and even students of Japanese at other schools, that the individuals that use this book are not where they should be in the time they're studied.

Learning a language is fun, and should be fun. But this book destroys any amount of excitement and fun you could ever have in learning a language and it's especially noticeable when you try and speak to Japanese natives. It's to the point where I am almost embarrassed to talk to them (they are nice about it, I just know what I'm saying sounds awkward to them).

Quick round-up: Decent for understanding grammar, a horrible nightmare from the bowels of hell for anything thing else.

Pros: Good grammatical structure, and just enough vocabulary necessary for a beginner to learn japanese. The book starts with a conversation in Romaji, then the translations, including vocabularies that must be memorized. The onversation is thouroughly explained later. Sentence structures and grammar lessons, and drills comes afterwards.
Cons: Too much unecessary information about the conversations sometimes, and... the vacbularies and book itself could be more organized. Overall, I give it a 3, or a four.

How to resolve the twin conflicts this third book of the series presents? While on one hand it is chock-full of appropriate and useful information for intermediate students of the Japanese language (as are the other two volumes in the series), its explanation of the intricacies of the language read like passages from a third-year collegiate chemistry text. Buyer beware-- there are better books out there.

When learning a language, it is important that class time be devoted to learning, not rehashing forced conversations that are supposed to emphasize grammar points. This makes students memorize things people normally do not say or phrases that are not commonly used. The most useful learning experiences in my opinion, were the times when the teachers threw in extra information/phrases and made use change up the conversations using added vocabulary. This book would do better as a text for a Japanese grammar class taught it English, rather than a Japanese Conversation class. The over analysis of the Japanese language is best suited for that type of environment.

I have studied Japanese for over 7 years at 4 different institutions , from a large high school, to a small private school, to large colleges abroad (including in Japan). During that time I've used all sorts of textbooks, the best of which was Genki in my opinion.

The worst? This book series ( I am using the 2nd and 3rd books). It is no exaggeration that I have seen manuals for toasters with better text layout and smoother ENGLISH, not to mention the extremely stiff and formal Japanese that this book presents (the likes of which I hardly ever heard during my time living in Japan). The weird romanization has already been touched on, but combine that with a reliance on the 'core conversations' as opposed to drilling grammar to make it your own and you have a product that is almost as bad as its cover art.

I am eternally grateful that I have gotten most of my major and Japanese education out of my way before using this book- if I had started with it I probably would have committed '''. Some professors seem to love this book, but I've never met a student who did.

DO NOT BUY THIS BOOK. If your professor requires it- change schools or take up Spanish; anything to avoid this insult to the Japanese language and any living being that can claim to have a soul.

J.S.L.III, like the preceding two volumes, is designed for learners seeking a thorough foundation in the culturally-appropriate use of Japanese by foreigners (i.e., non-native Japanese) in Japan. In its examples and exercises, it uses authentic "real life" Japanese rather than the artificially contrived sentences so often found in foreign language texts. This text series is definitely not for the casual language dabbler.