Elementary Japanese Vol 1 (Tuttle Language Library)

I was drawn to the chapter organization of this book, which is shorter and more focused than the Genki textbooks. I also liked the many images and cartoon dialogs - these things help learning.I've gone through the first few chapters and looked over the rest of this book. I think it's a good book. But it suffers from too few readings and other language input in each chapter.A universal problem with language textbooks is the lack of extensive comprehensible input. That's what your brain needs to acquire language. Language is not a subject like history or science, where you study about it to learn the subject. Your brain acquires language in a specific way, and has special parts of the brain that handle language learning. So grammar exercises and vocabulary lists are not the way your brain wants to learn a language. That is doing it the hard, unnatural way. You can learn *about* the language this way, but that is not the same thing as actually acquiring the language. How many people do you know who say, "I took two years of Spanish/French/whatever in high school, but I didn't learn much." There you go.So I wish this book had a lot more easy readings in each chapter. A good modern language teacher would take this book and supplement it with many communicative activities where students use the language to perform meaningful tasks - that's the sort of activity your brain needs to learn a language.Also, this book oddly throws in things that are too difficult at their level. For example, in lesson 3 the core dialog talks about the college Japanese "program office." This is not high-frequency, beginning vocabulary. So in some cases this book makes learning harder than it need to be.I'm disappointed with this book, as a self-learning tool. I will supplement this book with the Genki series and with Japanese for Busy People, the other decent books I've found.

This is one of the best Japanese textbooks I’ve used. It is very good for self-teaching because not only does it have solid lessons and good vocabulary work, it also has notes on culture and linguistics. I highly recommend it for both self-teaching and if you are teaching a class.Bonus points for being very inexpensive.*fun fact, it’s used by professors at UC Berkeley for their Japanese classes ;)*

I've been disappointed with most Japanese textbooks (or teach it yourselfs) because most of them write everything in romaji (English phonetics) instead of using hiragana or katakana, the Japanese alphabets.This book starts out using Japanese characters from lesson one and ceases to use romaji very quickly. It makes the learner have to learn the Japanese alphabets.Kanji is also treated very non-painfully. Each lesson introduces a few new kanji and shows the correct order of writing them. Each lesson thereafter uses these new kanji so that the learner gets a chance to use them as in Japan.Each lesson starts out with a dialogue that has pictures and then a translation afterwards. New grammatical concepts or cultural connotations of grammar are explained with lots of examples. There are plenty of exercises to use for practice.AND...the textbook comes with a CD-ROM that contains all the dialogues read in Japanese. It also reads out the entire vocabulary list for each chapter. The PDF on the CD-ROM is printable. It does contain some listening exercises not found in the textbook, which I thought was neat because most CDs with language learning software just read out the dialogues.For maximum learning (and especially if you're teaching yourself), purchase the teacher's edition answer key that comes with this series. It has all the answers to both the textbooks and the listening exercises on the CD-ROM. In addition, it has the dialogues from the listening exercises written out so that you can check exactly why you missed questions.This is the best textbook I've seen so far for Japanese.

The main reason I've chosen this book over other popular publications (including Genki and Minna no Nihongo) was its price and convenience. Elementary Japanese is less expensive than other written resources, despite having a CD included to it. The grammar points are very clear and Yoko Hasegawa's writing is very comprehensive. There is a LOT of information, including etymology and cultural notes related to the language. This information enhances the way the student perceives Japanese language and the culture it is surrounded by. From chapter 2, there's no romaji and all the dialogues are written in kana and kanji only, which makes my studying process less distractful. However, there are also some flaws. First of all, not all the vocabulary listed is used, therefore I have no idea of the context of some words. Besides that, the kanji teaching method isn't really the best, I prefer studying kanji from KanjiDamage or Heisig. Despite its few flaws, I recommend this book to anyone willing to learn Japanese in a solid and practical way.

It arrived today!! This is a book that's for the first semester for college Japanese! Awesome for beginners ~~ I was trying to find a book with out romaji because it can cripple you while learning Japanese and this book is exactly what I wanted and needed!!!!! Came in awesome condition as well, even tho it's a used book. Super satisfied with my purchase

Great if using to seriously learn Japanese. Much better than a basic phrase book. This book has many phrases + vocabulary. I would recommend knowing hiragana and katakana when getting this book.

On the + side, this book as detailed explanations, a cd with listening tracks, a fairly good structure.On the - side, you must know both hiraganas and katakanas before starting this book but the main problem is that there are no answers for the exercises (so I disagree with the statement on the cover that says it can be used for self study).

It's okay if you're learning Japanese in Japan where you're forced to start learning the language in a class but not for self-taught casual learners.

Quite good!

Estou gostando muito. Bem explicado, com tabelas e resumos. Estou usando como método para aprender sozinho e achei muito bom. Possui alguns exercícios no final de cada aula. Alguns pontos a se considerar é que é em inglês; os exercícios em alguns momentos são para serem feitos em dupla e não possuem resposta; as aulas e explicações usam apenas kana, ou seja, sem romaji. Mas o preço é mais em conta que outros métodos mais famosos,e achei super completo e didático!

To be honest, at first I didn't like the way this book did things. Mainly my issues were three things: 1) There are no answers to the exercise questions, 2) Exercises are mostly made for a classroom setting where you have a partner and 3) Grammar points aren't really explained much. However, I changed my mind a few lessons in and I'll explain why.In regards to the exercises: I took them as a guide to how well I understood the material covered in the lesson. If I wasn't sure if I was right or if I couldn't understand something I took this to mean I wasn't ready to move on. This approach worked really well for me; if I was having trouble I would re-read the grammar points and go through the vocab list at the end of the lesson. The second time tackling the exercises I had no problem and moved on to the next lesson. I've been taking this approach for all lessons and retain the information well (with help from the lessons themselves, as they re-use things you've learnt from previous lessons, not allowing you to forget anything). As for them being geared toward practicing with a partner; this is true, but doing the work of both sides means a little extra practice so I can deal with that.The grammar is introduced with the bare minimum information and reasoning behind it. In a way this is good because it allows you to learn using examples rather than excessive information and explanations. However, some people like a bit of explanation (like me). That isn't to say they don't explain things in this book; they do. Just not in a way I found very practical. If you are to understand their brief explanations of when to use a certain particle you will have to be familiar with English grammar and terms such as "active verbs", "modifying nouns" etc. It's been quite some time since I was in high school so naturally I had to look up what the heck these meant.Another thing I kind of got hooked up on was I wasn't able to apply what I learnt on my own without really spending some time to thoroughly understanding the material. I suppose this is due to the fact that these books are geared toward a class setting so they don't have a workbook, questions or other self-studying tools after each section allowing you to apply what you've learnt. The exercises at the end of each lesson act more as review for me rather than practice.This of course is my own experience; others may find nothing wrong with this book and its methods. Despite my small complaints I enjoy learning from these books and find them to be sufficient for quickly learning Japanese. Volume 1 and 2 are meant to be done as one course. They cover a decent amount of vocabulary, 300 kanji, and most of what you need to know in terms of grammar. I am nearly half-way through the book after only two weeks (I do about 2-3 lessons per week, 1.5 hours a day). Finishing both volumes will put you at an N4 level (approximately). For about 4 months of work this isn't bad at all.