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23 of 29 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Not great, not awful., December 8, 2003
Reading reviews of Japanese textbooks has led me to conclude that no one ever agrees that any one system works best. I think the best option you have is to combine several different books to get the best possible coverage of grammar and vocabulary (assuming you can afford it). Having used other textbooks before, I feel that Genki has its good and bad points.The good: Lots of useful vocabulary, easy to understand for the most part, "bonus" pages of real-life grammar usage at the end of each lesson, lots of exercises to practice the grammar forms, the kanji sections are well-done. The bad: Very inadequate grammar explanations (many students in my class had no idea *why* they were using certain grammar, or what it actually meant), poor coverage of grammar forms (i.e., they teach you half of the things you can do with a grammar form, but completely skip the other usages), the coversations at the beginning of each chapter have little to no practical use. I think that this textbook could only be used effectively in a classroom setting, with a teacher to provide more thorough explanations and grammar examples. In my past experience with other textbooks, I've had to memorize a great deal of conversations and sentence structures (all of which turned out to be extremely useful, despite the tediousness), but with Genki, it leaves you somewhat underprepared to use the knowledge you've gained for anything deeper than low-level conversation.
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