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Summary: The Worst Way to Learn Japanese
Review: The Jordan system of learning Japanese has it's fair share of supporters, but anyone who has truly made Japanese an important part of their life understands why this book is not only unhelpful, but counterproductive. This system works entirely in romaji (roman characters), preventing the learner from seeing the language from a native perspective and retarding understanding of Japanese writing systems. As if that weren't bad enough, in place of the standard method of romanization Jordan has created her own, which is both confusing and unnecessary. It uses "core conversations" to simulate speaking in the language, but provides the learner with no ability whatsoever in creating original sentences. Do not buy this book! A much better choice for the beginning Japanese student is the "Genki" series.
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Summary: The JSL Series
Review: The JSL series (3 volumes) is an intense, detailed, and highly analytical exposition of Japanese. Its greatest strength is in the relentlessly rigorous and thoughtful analysis of grammar and structure. If you are attracted to the intellectual aspects of language study, and enjoy the logical edifice that stands behind ordinary speech, this is a great series for you. Two shortcomings of the book are that Jorden's written English style is hopelessly academic and frequently hard to parse, even for a native English speaker; and the Japanese is all rendered in romaji. The former has no advantages, the latter has some. The big plusses of the JSL series are in the analytical approach, the comprehensiveness, and large number of examples and exercises. This series is not for the faint of heart, nor for the traveler who just wants a few phrases, but for the serious student of language who is prepared to spend several years working at it. Japanese is a difficult language and the solid foundation of grammar, structure, and socially-appropriate usage that you find in here is essential. I'm giving this book 3 stars because it has both plusses and minusses, but frankly, I can't imagine learning Japanese any other way.
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Summary: CD won't run in current Windows OS
Review: The program specifies Windows 95, and won't run on '98, ME or XP, or using the win95 mode in XP.
Rating: 
Summary: Excellent text
Review: This book was the foundation of my Japanese language study.
I do agree that the text is boring, hence the 4 stars, but after learning the basics, and this is the best book I have read on them, it becomes fun.
Learning a language in an easy to understand, efficient manner is even funner (more fun) and this textbook does this very well.
I disagree about the argument against using romaji. I would find it more difficult to try to learn all 3 written languages, katakana, hiragana and kanji, at the same time as learning Japanese grammar.
The book's focus is on basic grammar, and basic grammar in Japanese is not easy (if you don't believe you should come to Japan and listen to the young children whose Japanese grammar often leaves much room for improvement.)
I recommend that you buy the book, learn the romaji, learn the basics of grammar, then put what you've learned in the background and move on to other more difficult things like making conversation, and learning the writing system; much like we've all done with our native languages.
I came to Japan 11 years ago, armed with my 2 textbooks Japanese: The Spoken Language I and II, and I had a very strong foundation, which helped me pick up the language much quicker than I would have otherwise.
Lastly, I do agree that this is not a series to be used in a vacuum (i.e. self-study). A trained tutor in a class environment will make up for any of the dryness of the text, and put real people and real life situations with the lessons, which makes it much easier to comprehend.
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Summary: What you need to know about this book
Review: This is a fantastic book. However, it's important that you understand a little about it before you dive right in. There are a lot of reviews on this book, but you will find that many of them are little more than personal testimonies. So, I'll try to give you all the facts and information you should know before you buy or begin using this textbook.The most important thing you should know is that when you buy this book, you ABSOLUTELY MUST BUY THE AUDIO CASSETTES. The interactive cd is even better, but is only available for the first book of the series. Without audio, this book is entirely worthless. In fact, you should treat this book as a SUPPLEMENT TO THE AUDIO CASSETTES, because that's really what it is! Let me explain... This series is designed to make you conversationally adept (if not fluent) in Japanese. Jorden's goal is to get you to ACTUALLY THINK IN JAPANESE, not just memorize vocabulary and grammar rules and attempt to piece together Japanese sentences. To accomplish this, you study (by listening and mimicking) complete conversations, not isolated example sentences. This means that the student develops a better sense of what "sounds right" or is appropriate in certain situations. Also, new sentence forms are drilled repeatedly in a listen-and-respond format until they become automatic. Again, Jorden's objective is to make speaking Japanese so routine that you can focus on WHAT you're saying rather than HOW you're saying it. Therefore, it's important that you get at least the tapes to accompany the book. There are also videos and other resources which are less useful but great if you can acquire them. The second thing you need to know is that this book does NOT teach you to read Japanese. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. Jorden avoids the written language to allow the student to focus on developing conversational skill. Instead of Japanese characters, the conversations are written in roomaji (i.e. roman letters that sort of resemble how the Japanese is pronounced). Jorden's choice of romanization is quite strange, which seems to be the biggest complaint about the book. However, if the roomaji cause you problems, then YOU'RE DOING SOMETHING WRONG! As I said before, the book is little more than a supplement to the audio. YOU SHOULD NOT LEARN TO SPEAK JAPANESE BY READING, REGARDLESS OF HOW THE JAPANESE IS WRITTEN! Honestly, I don't think I read a single conversation or vocabulary list in the book; I learned all of them by listening and practicing with the tapes. That's the key to using this series - and to becoming fluent in Japanese. In fact, other than reading the grammar explanations and such, you should really try to open the book as little as possible! (Note - "Japanese: The Written Language" is the sister book to this series and DOES cover reading Japanese, but I suggest you gain a little conversational skill before tackling the written language.) Third, this book is not to be taken lightly. This is not a "Hobby Japanese" book like some I've seen. Each lesson is surprisingly deep and requires ample practice to master. If you aren't serious about spending hours - yes, HOURS - a day studying and practicing with the tapes then don't bother. This book was certainly not designed to be fun, although you will find much pleasure in improving your skill in the language. The grammar explanations are sometimes a little too complex to be practical, but listening to the conversations and practicing with the drills provides something far more important than grammar - actual comprehension and manipulation of the language. Usually the grammar will suddenly make sense with practice. Another valid complaint is the rather limited vocabulary this book provides. However, learning new vocabulary is easy; learning and mastering sentence structures is not. Besides, it's better to use 10 words fluently than 100 words in broken sentences - you won't get far in Japanese that way. Finally, my personal experience:
As a college student taking Japanese, I was dissatisfied with my conversational ability. I could read fairly well, but I was unable to have anything beyond a basic conversation. It became clear that I was "translating" rather than thinking in Japanese. So, during the summer, I started this series. The next year in Japanese class, everything changed. I was actually able to speak with the teachers about subjects outside of class and certainly beyond basic conversation. While the other students struggled trying to form different verb conjugations, I spit out the answers in milliseconds. My classmates asked me, "Do you have Japanese parents or something?" When I said no, they asked, "How do you form the verbs so fast?" I replied, "I don't FORM them, I just KNOW them." Even my teachers were shocked at my sudden ability. After reveling in my success for a while, I shared my secret. Since then, several of my classmates have had similar success with the series, and I would recommend it to anyone serious about learning Japanese.
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Summary: A great textbook
Review: This is an unabashedly great text. It is tough going and a bit painful too. But I built a very solid grammatical foundation with it that I find few foreigners have.
I suspect that the periodic poor review that this series gets is just all about how tough a language Japanese is!
Be sure to use her Kanji book simultaneously.
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Summary: The Best Out There
Review: This is the best Japanese text out there. I have used several other books and none come close. If you want to learn Japanese, buy it. By the way, the CD works just fine on my computer.
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Summary: Wonderfully detailed
Review: This package includes two CDs and a User's Manual. The CDs contain 125 videos of native Japanese speakers playing a variety of roles, and innumerable drills, notes, and practice guides. You can, for instance, listen to a spoken vocabulary word, record your response, and then play them both back to compare them. During the videos, you can switch between a translation of the dialogue, and a transcript of the dialogue in Romaji. You can click on each sentence to have just that portion of the video play over. There's a full two-CDs-worth of stuff here, and it's well worth the price. I love this program, and I can hardly wait for Part II!
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Summary: An outstanding series for those who have the time.
Review: This series is made of the most rigorous language texts I have seen. No other explanation of Japanese grammar I have ever come across comes close; Jorden and Noda take the approach of explaning everything to the student to eliminate the ambiguity of special cases, and then relentlessly drill them in. Granted, the vocabulary isn't exhaustive, and the examples can be a bit dated in terms of real-word conversations. That isn't the point, though: by learning through idioms, you gain a working knowledge of the language that, when combined with real-world interaction, gives you a solid base to build upon. Instead of stuttering through remembering the meanings of words, and hoping that you reconstruct them into sentences that don't sound funny, certain "blocks" of language become built in, much in the same way that a child would learn to speak a language. At the same time, you aren't using these blocks blindly, because of the incredibly rigorous detail the authors go into. The vocab/modern usage can be easily built on later; this book builds an extremely solid foundation which sets you at ease with Japanese. I feel sorry for anyone trying to learn out of any other books; you simply aren't getting the full picture when it comes to the grammar. After the base has been set by these books, the rest follows easily. These books may require heavy-duty studying, but they are *well* worth the effort.
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Summary: Analytical, comprehendable and it gives you results!
Review: This series is simply put some of the best language learing material you'll ever find. If you can stand the fact that it uses Romaji instead of Kana, which is included in the supplements anyway, you'll learn alot, FAST! Buy Volumes 1-3, the tapes (26 or so) and get started.
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