Customer Reviews

Mastering Japanese, Level 1 (Ten CDs + Book)

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

 

 

The cover sais hear it, speak it, write it, read it.

the write it, read it part is in another companion text

book. ISBN # 0-300-01913-0 Reading Japanese (Yale Language

Series)that is to be studied after mastering the 10th

lesson in "Beginning Japanese" the text book included

in this set.

This set is for those who wish to become fluent not for those

trying to just get by. After having bought many Japanese language

learning aids through the years I have always gone back to this

set for its extensive practice drills and no nonsense approach.

The examples in the other reviews are correct in stating that

some of the material is old fashioned, it is also true that in

japan the old fashioned way of speaking is also the more formal

polite way. I will never buy an ashtray or cigarettes in japan

but its not hard to substitute a noun, those exercises are only

there to teach the pattern. Don't be discouraged.

This is college level learning if you are serious.

I brought this a while back to help me learn Japanese. I expected that the expensive price meant a quality language course. I was completely dissapointed. The package says that the course will enable you to speak, READ, and WRITE the language (emphasis mine). However the book uses only roomaji (the Roman alphabet) and is concerned only with speaking. The Hiragana and Katakana(Japanese phonetic alphabets) aren't that hard to learn. Why doesn't the book teach them? Moreover, being copywrited in the early 60's, the book is completely out of date. My Japanese friends informed me that using the word "jibiki" for dictionary (which the book teaches) sounds horribly old fashion and archaic. The dialogues are really stupid (For example we get to learn how to say "Boy, these are pretty ashtrays!") and the drills are mindless substitution drills as opposed to actual comprehension. Grammar is explained rather poorly. Finally the vocabulary introduced is insufficient and rather poor. For example we get to learn about buying cigarettes and ashtrays, but there is no vocabulary for the college student, or vocabulary dealing with business.

One wonders how it would be possible to master reading and writing Japanese, when the accompanying booklet, "Beginning Japanese Part I" is typeset only in archaic romaji, circa 1963. I thought that it might be possible for the audio CDs to redeem the package, but I found myself listening, instead, to what sounded like a drugged-out school ma'am introducing drills in a listless, uninspiring tone. Whatsmore, these may be CDs, but they're poorly reproduced from ancient low-fi cassettes. You can actually hear the reverse side of the original tapes mumbling away in the background.

Despite being packaged in a deceivingly slick plastic case, "Mastering Japanese" looks and sounds like a relic from the Pacific War. This, incidentally, might shed some light onto the packaging's claim: "The same course used by the U.S. government to train diplomatic personnel."

I'm sure I'll find some use for the CDs, but this is by no means the modern kana-ised product I'd envisaged. The "Power Japanese" CD-ROM would be a much wiser investment in language learning for around the same price.

I had seen a sealed copy of this in a bookstore, and decided to purchase it (much cheaper from amazon.com than available locally). One of the main selling points to me was the fact that this uses CDs rather than cassettes -- I don't have a cassete player, and CDs make it much easier to queue up to the right dialogue track, and much easier to repeat those dialogues. Everybody should make their language courses on CDs, but almost nobody does. Anyway, on the cover of the binder it had said to learn to speak, "read, and write" Japanese. However, when I opened the package I find that it was ALL in romaji (i.e., the English alphabet). So much for learning to read and write. I would recommend that if you are interested in learning Japanese, check out "Japanese for Everyone" by Nagara Susumu. This is a much better book. It teaches the kana (the Japanese phonetic alphabet(s)) right from the beginning, and then rapidly starts presenting all the Japanese dialogue in kana. I have talked to friends that are both native as well as non-native Japanese speakers, and they all agree that this is the best approach to take to learning Japanese.

I think the biggest gripe that I can glean from the other reviewers is that this product isn't an all-in-one quick-fix solution for the problem of attaining some level of japanese fluency. As far as the outdated terms are concerned, that's something that can easily be remedied if one is not relying on this product as the sole means of learning japanese.

I was actually in the very fortunate position of having this book/cd set while living in Japan and it proved to be of tremendous help in getting a handle on basic conversational skills as well as the actual spoken mechanics of the language.

Furthermore, I found out later that the book was in use in UPenn's japanese program when several of my friends were taking Japanese there. Each and every one of them came out of the program with an extremely high level of fluency, which leads me to suspect that since the material was an integral part of the coursework, it's not that nearly as useless as it's made out to be.

In conclusion, this course is not for the faint of heart (let's face it, neither is japanese), but proves to be quite valuable to someone with patience and the proper study ethic, especially when used as one of several components in a curriculum.

I bought this book through another retailer...I wish I could get a refund but it is opened media. The title clearly says "Mastering Japanese, Hear it, Speak it, Write it, Read it" One might assume that this system will teach you to do just that... But the book inside states "This textbook is concerned only with spoken Japanese"...This is no doubt from the cold war era... I only wish I could get a refund.

I've read many bad reviews for this product from people with no patients. I've lived in Japan for 3 years. I wish I had this study guide during my stay in Japan, it would have help me immensely. I especially liked the CDs, it made so much easier to queue to next lesson.

For a difficult language to learn, this beginning course based on the Yale University curriculum is designed only for those who seriously want to practice the grammar and vocab of the language for proficiency. The program does not lend itself to laziness, but for those interested in well designed audio drills with a fast-paced college textbook, this would be a good choice.

It took me six months, studying about six hours per week, to finish this course, and I am very pleased with it. It combines a very thorough treatment of the important points of Japanese grammar, an extensive vocabulary, and dialogue and drill practice on 10 CDs. Aside from Pimsleur, I don't know of any other Japanese course that offers so much audio (and Pimsleur, of course, gives you no written materials). After completing this course, you will have a good grasp of basic Japanese grammar and a nice vocabulary to go with it. This course will by no means make you fluent in Japanese (I don't think anything short of constant practice with native speakers can do that) but it lays a very solid foundation for further study and for developing greater proficiency.One flaw of this course is that it does contain some antiquated vocabulary, such as "jibiki' for dictionary and "junsa" for policeman (instead of jisho and keikan, respectively) so, as one other reviewer mentioned, you should not rely solely on this course-"Teach Yourself Japanese" and a good modern dictionary are excellent correctives to the older style of speech that is taught here. Many reviewers have criticized this book for not teaching the Japanese writing system. I don't feel that this is a fair criticism. Writing Japanese and speaking it are two very different tasks, and if this book had included Japanese writing it would certainly have been at the expense of a considerable amount of grammatical and vocabulary instruction. There is no shortage of books available for learning written Japanese. I find it enjoyable to learn the written language concurrently with the spoken language. The techinque I have developed, which works quite well for me, was to learn the two kana systems (I recommend "Learning Hiragana and Katakana by Takagaki and Henshall for this) before starting on "Beginning Japanese," and writing each lesson's dialogue out in kana. Also, with the help of a Japanese dictionary and P.G. O'Neill's "Essential Kanji," I learned 10 to 15 new Kanji per lesson, by checking to see how new vocabulary items are written in Kanji and practicing them. This is a demanding language course, definitely no-nonsense. If you just want to learn a few traveller's phrases, look elsewhere. But if you are serious about learning real Japanese and are willing to put forth the time and effort it takes, you can't do better than this.

I think both the book and the CDs are excellent, and anyone with a serious interest in mastering the language should get both. Japanese pronunciation isn't terribly hard, but the system of pitch accents is tricky for someone who comes to Japanese from a language (like our own) with stress accents. The book course is probably still the most thorough coverage of Japanese grammar that a beginning student will find out there, and the dialogues that precede each lesson build up vocabulary surprisingly rapidly. There lots and lots and lots of drills, as well as translation exercises (English to Japanese), for which unfortunately there is no key, and supplementary dialogues. The writing system is taught separately in another book (which was the standard practice at the time this book was written). While most learners would probably prefer something more contemporary (try the excellent series 'Japanese for Busy People,') I learned a lot from this course and recommend it to anyone who doesn't mind an approach with a lot of grammar, drilling and repetition.