Japanese : Individual (The Spoken Language Part 1, revised edition)

Rating:
Summary: Difficult book.. there are better ones out there
Review: I studied japanese for 1 year before going to college and ending up with this book. I found it extremely frustrating. I can't figure out why the author wrote the book in romaji as opposed to japanese. There is good information in the book about sentence pattern and structure but I spent a majority of my time translating all the of the romaji sentences into hiragana so that I could actually read them. I feel it's much more beneficial for students to flat out learn hiragana/katakana/kanji at the beginning than trying to go through romaji. Several of the advanced students I know who started out with the "Jordan" method still cling far more to the romaji than is necessary and it is a hinderance to their learning. I recommend the "Nakama" textbook series or "Japanese for Everyone" textbook as much better alternatives to this book.

Rating:
Summary: A mistunderstood book that makes a good intro to Japanese
Review: Japanese: The Spoken Language is an introductory spoken Japanese text which is highly misunderstood by many learners. Jorden's approach to teaching Japanese is a highly specialized (some say obsolete) method which requires diligence and above all understanding her method (teachers who understand the method are even better).

To respond to some of the specific criticisms of the book in other reviews:

The use of romaji should not pose a problem. As Jorden says in the introduction, the romaji only serve to remind you of what you have heard, "and heard many, many times." It is true that romaji do not help you pronounce Japanese, but neither do kana -- the only way to truly know how to pronounce a Japanese word or sentence is to listen to a native speaker say it and then repeat after the native speaker. The romaji only serve as a reference point to discuss the grammar in the book, it is *not* intended to teach you Japanese pronunciation. You are not supposed to learn the Japanese from the romaji transcriptions in the textbook.

The emphasis on memorization of core conversations is another feature of Jorden's method. Jorden's method is that you should first memorize how to say something (know what the English translation of what you are saying is), and then look at the grammar notes to know how to form sentences of that type. This is because when you are forming a sentence in spoken Japanese, you should not be thinking of the grammar rules that form what you are saying, rather the grammatical patterns should be internalized so that you can think about what you are saying rather than how to say it. When native speakers speak Japanese they do not think about grammar rules.

Another feature is highly repetitive drills. This, again, is the emphasis on internalizing the grammar and making it automatic rather than relying on rules to form sentences.

Finally, it works on the idea that a good oral foundation is necessary to learn to read. This is why the book does not contain any characters. If you want to learn to read Japanese, that requires a different approach. Simply seeing the vocabulary items and core conversations written out in Japanese characters does not go a long way towards helping you read -- for that you need a specialized reading text like Japanese: The Written Language, Basic Kanji Book, or Japanese: A Manual of Reading and Writing.

To close this section of the review, the idea that romaji use will permanently cripple your Japanese is unfounded. I began with Japanese: The Spoken Language, and I have progressed just fine to an upper intermediate level of reading (about 1600 kanji at this point). This happened despite the fact that I didn't even learn kana until the second semester of my Japanese study.

There are some problems with this series, though:
1. Too much emphasis on keigo and business Japanese. This is particularly bad in volume 3, but even in volume 1 you find that the polite language is introduced before plain form. Most students will find that their primary use of Japanese is either talking to foreign students at their own university, or talking to a host family and other college students if they study abroad in Japan. Neither of these situations are conducive to super-polite Japanese.

2. It can get a bit boring with the endless repetitive drills. This probably is the best way to learn fluent, automatic Japanese, but it's not very interesting.

3. The grammar explanations can be a bit dense -- they're written at a high linguistic level and Jorden goes out of her way to avoid relating things to closely to English grammar (i.e. calling something a "noun" or a "verb").

Despite this I think that volume 1 is a good introductory text and if you really follow Jorden's method carefully you will be able to speak fairly good basic Japanese.

(One final note -- the idea that Jorden "created" her own romanization method is not true. While this is not the common Hepburn romanization system, it was not created by Jorden. It actually predates the Hepburn system and it is used in Japan at least as often as the Hepburn. Also, the details of the romanization system should not matter since you're only supposed to use the romaji for reference, not for learning.)

Rating:
Summary: The definitive Japanese text book
Review: Jorden comes from a unique background as she was tought at Yale by one of America's most distinguished linguists who himself discovered some aspects of the Japanese language that even the Japanese didn't know and are only now acknowledging.

I am not much of a linguist myself but I can tell you that I and everyone in my class learned from this book what no other series can give you: a thorough understanging of the Japanese language.

I have been studying for many years now and have not found a better source yet. Just read each lesson, use the video or cassete tapes to drill on understanding and rapid reponse. The very inexpensive teachers suppliment contains all the drills and conversations in native japanese (for the guy that didn't know this)

Also, the written language is a seperate book but you don't have to use it. Of course from day one in class we began learning the kana as well and then the kanji but to learn the kanji from lesson 1? That would be too difficult because the book is in order of most usefull words, not most easy to write words. The offical system is more like kana and eaiser to see how the conjugations work where as the Hepburn system has too many unnecessary rules you have to learn to make it work. In Jorden's book, you quickly get used to the offical system and I wouldn't have it any other way. It also has helpful pitch markings to remind you how to nautrally shape the sentences until it becomes rote.

I cannot say enough good things about this series, it doesn't take you all the way to being fluent of course but by the time you get though the 3rd book, I gaurantee you will be able to understand what people are saying to you and be able to respond right away in real world situations.

Bottom line, these books work and is part of a whole system of videos, audio tapes, drills, writing, reading, and listening practice that will make you an expert on Japanese that puts all other books to shame.

Rating:
Summary: A True Masterpiece
Review: JSL is without a doubt the best Japanese language textbook on the market; it's most likely the best language textbook ever written. I encourage students to use the book in conjunction with the audio tapes, CD, and partner textbook, Japanese: the Written Language.

Rating:
Summary: An anime fan's perspective
Review: Not to repeat the previous reviewers, I'll just give my own perspective. I started to learn Japanese when I seriously got into anime my freshman year, then enrolled in the summer FALCON program which is 9 weeks of intensive Japanese that covers the first 10 chapters of this book. A few things that I've discovered in my course of learning Japanese, perhaps this is true of learning all languages, or maybe just particular to Japanese, or maybe even just particular to this book/method. The first week or so seemed like it would never end. The drills can feel robotic after a while and it was almost like torture the first week. After that, my brain gave up resisting this new language, and started absorbing it. As time went on, the chapters went by faster, even though we were studying them at them at the same pace. I was able to much more easily absorb new material and memorize entire coversations rapidly. (This isn't just learning by rote, it'd be impossible to memorize by sound only, as the series develops the grammar becomes automatic and you start focusing on memorizing the contents of conversations, remebering the context so you can reconstruct the exactly conversation).

To be accurate, this particular book won't get you very far in the sense of practical Japanese, since it lays the foundations for what's to come in volumes II and III. After finishing JSL 1 I could comprehend a few words and various phrases in anime, basically, slightly better than where I started. Although I still didn't understand a lot of phrases and expressions, I started being able to pick apart the sentence structure of what people were saying, basically, I could tell which word is a noun, verb, or adjective and how they're connected, even if I didn't know the vocabulary.

Now I'm almost done with volume II. If you manage to make it this far, you'll notice that your rate of Japanese comprehension when watching anime will start taking off around chapter 13 which is the first chapter of volume II. Having laid the foundations in volume I, Jorden introduces many commonly used grammar patterns in volume II, which appears very frequently in conversation (and of course anime). Of course, drilling is still necessary to internalize all this, but it becomes a lot easier, because you start getting the hang of the language and it starts feeling natural.

Learning a language is quite personal, everyone has an unique experience. For me, the gauge of this book's usefulness is in how much anime dialogue I can comprehend after studying the lessons. JSL 1 doesn't go very far in this sense because it spends all its time laying the foundations, but once those are solid you'll find that starting in volume II comprehension rate will skyrocket. Not only will you understand the explicit meaning, but also the social meaning of the sentences/expressions, the untranslatables, because JSL goes to great lengths to explain social context. I'm not sure how well this series work in self study settings, but in a class where the teachers understands Jorden's method (and Jorden was a professor here at Cornell, so her method is quite well passed down in the Japanese department), this method can work wonders in building fluency.