Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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42 of 47 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Unfriendly to both students and teachers, March 6, 2000
By A Customer
Learn Japanese is not as bad as some other texts I've had to use, both as a teacher and as a student of the language. Having taught Japanese for 27 years (and studied it for over 30), and having written quite a bit of language-learning material myself, I have not been favorably impressed with this book during the three-plus years I have taught from it in college-level courses. The vocabulary is odd and sometimes culturally passe ("record store," for example). Vocab progression is uneven and does not seem to be well thought out. Dialogues are too long for memorization, too odd to be particularly useful, and not always well-geared to the grammar principles presented. The grammar presentations are shallow, disorganized, and not well supported with exercises. The authors seem to be too intent on presenting "authentic" material and not concerned enough with how students actually learn language and build on basic foundations. Cumbersome "authentic" forms like "n desu" get in the way of learning for the beginning student. And why in the world would anyone wait until Lesson 7 to present desu? I also don't care for the terms used to explain the grammar, but there is, unfortunately, not much uniformity of nomenclature among the Japanese teaching community as a whole. The long initial section on pronunciation seems to be designed for the linguistics student, rather than the language student. The entire text is not user-friendly for either teacher or student. All this sounds pretty negative, but I am not saying the text cannot be used successfully. Obviously it can, if some of the other reviews are considered. (The reviewer who said he had to retake Japanese 1 after having taken it with a different textbook probably had an instructor whose teaching skills and enthusiasm overcame the problems of this book.) Plus--show me a truly five-star Japanese textbook, and I will show you one that hasn't been written yet. The better lesson materials are geared toward younger students or are only available to specialized groups (foreign service, Mormon missionaries, etc.) No textbook is perfect, none is going to please everybody, but some are more universally helpful than others. I don't think this one of them.
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23 of 26 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Good book, but compliment it with a good instructor., May 21, 2001
By A Customer
Or would that be Nihongo wa totemo muzukashii desu.I tried to learn Japanese with Japanese For Busy People to no avail. I then enrolled in my local community college and used Learn Japanese. While I had the benefit of an instructor, I still consider this a vastly superior book. Learn Japanese does not overwhelm you with vocabulary, but rather teaches the fundamentals of grammer very well. I feel this allows a student to construct their own sentences sooner. After all, the core of a language is not vocabulary, but grammer. Get the grammer down, then use a dictionary to gradually learn vocabulary. Once I picked up the grammer in any particular chapter, I was able to use it in a variety of settings by substituting different vocabulary words. For me, this works far better then conversational texts, or those that dump huge amounts of vocabulary down your throat. I think it's shortfalls are not presenting enough kana earlier in the book, and not presenting at all dictionary forms of verbs. It's nearly impossible to use a Japanese-English dictionary after finishing Volume 1. I was informed that Vol 2 jumps into dictionary forms, and it uses kana almost exclusively for presenting the language. The language unfolds with each succesive chapter and before I knew it, I could speak more of the language then I thought I could. Despite the two problems outlined above, I heartily recommend this book. But be forwarned, Japanese is not a language that can be learned in 4 weeknight sessions prior to a trip to Tokyo.
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9 of 11 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Solid textbooks, but you'll need a good teacher., May 15, 2000
Volumes I and II feel like linguists wrote them. With the right teacher, they are quite good. With the wrong teacher, I could see them being disastrous. The strength of this series lies in the presentation of the grammar in a very abstract and clear format. The amount of Kanji per chapter (once you get to Volume II) is sufficient and easily digestible. The drills and exercises are fine. I wish the authors had included all the Japanese words from Volume I in Volume II. I haven't had experience with Volumes III and IV yet, but I would be satisfied to continue with this series if they are chosen as the textbooks for the second-year Japanese classes that I intend to take. For those interested in studying Japanese, I'd also suggest Kodansha's Furigana Japanese Dictionary (ISBN: 4770024800) and NTC's New Japanese-English Character Dictionary (ISBN: 0844284343).
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