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121 of 132 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
G-A-R-B-A-G-E, February 9, 2004
I feel like I'm going crazy or something because looking at these reviews and finding that the majority of them are 5 stars or 4 stars makes me wonder if I'm coming from the same planet as the other reviewers. I have probably 30 books on learning Japanese, and this is the only one I have ever simply thrown away. I didn't even give it away, or sell it because I didn't want people to learn Japanese the wrong way. Among talking to other people who had used this book, it turns out this book had a reputation, and had come to be known as "The Tome of Suck". First let me list some better books, and then I'll explain why this book is so bad:1) Situational Functional Japanese I, II, III (the absolute best! But make sure you get the drill book AND the notes book) 2) Japanese: The Spoken Language 1, 2, 3. While this series is second best, it is absolutely the BEST in terms of grammar explanations. The weird roomaji system is frustrating, but it's worth it if you can digest the explanations. 3) Genki I, II. Rapidly surpassing Japanese for Busy People in terms of popularity. Simple to understand grammar exercises, great exercises, very useful vocabulary, immerses you in kana right off the board forcing you to abandon the harmful roomaji. Okay, now why is JfBP so bad? Well, first of all, they get progressively better. So Book 2 is mediocre, and Book 3 is not too bad (#1 above is still better). But Book 1. Whew boy. First of all, it pretends Japanese is simple. Instead of actually _explaining_ things, it simply tells you to start memorizing everything under the sun. As one example, there's something called the "-te" form of verbs, and instead of simply telling you the rule for making the -te form, it gives you a list of like 30 verbs and tells you "memorize not only the verbs, but also their -te forms". LOL! What a joke. Then it does the same thing with the negative forms. It's like "memorize the negative form of a verb as well as the dictionary form whenever learning a new verb". Duh, it takes MORE time to do that than to understand the rule (which is simple!) Plus, if you're memorizing vocabulary then you're forced to do it with the word list in front of you, whereas if you're trying to understand a rule, you can think of examples in your head (say, while driving) and try to understand it and comprehend things that way. It's simply a waste of time in every respect to just memorize EVERYTHING. Well, that's the approach the whole book takes to EVERYTHING. There are examples of this kind of silliness in every chapter. Nobody in my elementary Japanese class (which was 3 years ago) learned anything from this book, and we all fought very hard to get them to change the textbook, which they finally did. The reason I took so long to write this review is because I wanted to put this book out of my memory, but as it becomes more and more popular I felt I owed it to students of Japanese everywhere to lead you to a more rewarding experience.
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