Japanese for Beginners

Rating:
Summary: Unpretentious but effectivie
Review: As good as a text for beginners as you will find. There is no royal road to learning a foreign lanugauge. This route is as good as any. Hard work and persistance renmain the route. I lived in Japan for 18 months, and it helped me. For those outside of Japan. It is one hell of a struggle without or withoutbvthis book.

Rating:
Summary: The best I have found
Review: I have purchased no fewer then 7 basic and elementary Japanese books, including 2 while I was starting my studies in Japan some years ago. The book that I always went back to is Gakken's "Japanese for Beginners" by Yasuo Yoshida. It is simply the best...the fact that it was in its 45th impression (the copy I bought a couple of years ago) shows how well it holds up against newer books that try different ways to teach you.

The good points of the book are it teaches alot, I mean really ALOT, in each chapter. You learn it too. The vocabulary it teaches is instantly useful. No other book broke down the lessons into such easy-to-grasp units. You memorize the vocabulary, you see the the key structures they are drilling for you to learn in that lesson, you practice it, you practice conversation using the words and structures up to that chapter, you review a look and learn section and you move on. It actually is easier then you think, since the lessons are small enough to be manageable. The bad news (if you consider it bad) is that you have to learn the system the book uses for abbreviations and annotations. A large part of the learning is picked up through using all the abbreviations, so when you see an entry like: dare who? -->KS & FS you will be best to learn that this means it is important that you learn this before moving on and you are going to see alot more of it because it is a key piece to understanding Japanese.

The second "downside" of the book is that it is in Romanji. Most books try to get you to learn hiragana, katakana and kanji from lesson 1. I never liked this system (found in 6 of the other books I bought) because even after memorizing the alphabets, you learn slower when you have to translate both the letters and the words so your mind understands it. It is easier for me to remember "hagaki" means "postcard" when studying. After I get real comfortable with it (and moved more to an higher level of basic Japanese) I can visualize the hiragana characters for postcard. Not really a bad side to me...I learn more vocabulary and how to speak faster, but at the cost of not being able to read it as well.

And the last negative is that the book does show its age. It was originally printed in 1976 and so it uses words that date it...you learn the old way to say car (which now means automobile) and the word for a telex machine...but you don't learn how to say personal computer.

I gave it 5 stars because it is the best for someone who, like me, gets overwhelmed by too many words, rules and exceptions in each lesson. It is bite sized pieces. When you finish the book, you are not going to speak Japanese well, but you will be able to get your basic points across and be able to engage in some small talk. It is an excellent primer for Basic III or Intermediate I Japanese and a good self-learner book.