Rating: 
Summary: Awful textbook.
Review: This text book alone forced me to drop my college class. To say this book is confusing is an understatement. All other books I've read teach romanji, and then go onto hiragana, katakana, then eventually kanji. This book, however... was not what I expected or had braced myself for. Even my instructor told me it wasn't the best book! (He was a native Japanese speaker!) This was all the college bookstore had which is a shame. This is Japanese written with poor phonetics and a bad attempt at that. "zya" instead of "ja?" This is not the correct way to learn Japanese, I'm sorry. It only complicates the easiest of exercises to learn the language.
I dropped the class after a few weeks of confusion and picked up "Japanese for Everyone" which I've had better luck with so far, learning with my friends or on my own.
In closing I have to say, please do not use this outdated, inaccurate book. It makes learning Japanese a confusing, tedious chore. No fun at all.
Rating:
Summary: Warning! Try to avoid this book.
Review: When I ordered my book I was in a really good mood waiting to get it. I figured that it would be good to learn from since it is an actual textbook used in many colleges. When it finally arrived I found I was wrong. The book has to be the worst book I have ever seen.
Here are a few problems with this book: 1. The author makes learning the language harder than it really is. She uses a really old system of Romanji (Japanese written with the english alphabet). It is really hard to remember the rules of how to pronounce everything just right. 2. It goes into too much detail at the start, so it will confuse most who try to read it. She taught the different accents of the language in the first few pages which is unwise. The Japanese accent is changing all the time, and the accent she teaches is used only used among the really old citizens nowadays. 3. This reason is just amusing. First off you have to buy the book for thirty dollars because you think it may be good, and you might learn a lot from it, but when you finally get it you find that the book is useless unless you have the tapes that go along with it, which cost sixty dollars. I know most people, including myself, do not want to pay almost a hundred dollars just learn Japanese. It will cost even more if you want to finishing learning the language because you have to buy the second and the third book also. There are better books out in the world for you to get. Try to avoid this one or else you will end up disappointed like me. Save yourself now and buy some other book that takes a better approach to teaching the language.
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