JapanNewbie

Japanese Textbook Recommendations

Posted on 19. Feb, 2007 @ 5:16 pm by harvey in Books, Language Views: 1,322

I am often asked about textbook recommendations for learning Japanese. I finally got around to asking my most trusted Japanese teachers and friends about books they recommended for beginners… And narrowed it down to these.

The incredibly popular Genki: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese.

japanese_textbook_recommendations

Genki has been receiving rave reviews. Clear explainations, a great audio suppliment, and resonable price make this a favorite. If I were to recommend only one book for the person who wants to seriously learn Japanese from scratch, this book would be it. Many universities also use Genki as a textbook. My University however, used another book called JSL, which I will introduce next.

One note regarding Genki. The answers are not in the textbook, so you’ll need to pick up the Genki answer book as well if you don’t have a native speaker available to check your work.

Japanese: The Spoken Language

japanese_textbook_recommendations

The JSL Series were used at my university when I was a student. The books have example sentences from serious societal situations, not just random conversations about people going for a walk in the park, or ordering things from a restaraunt. In this sense, this textbook is great start for those who want to eventually be able to use Japanese in their profession.

JSL is often critisized due to it’s heavy use of the Roomaji and notations to help readers with pronounciation. This shouldn’t be an issue however if you use the book properly by listening to the audio samples provided, and not rely on the Roomaji to get through the lessons.

The original version of JSL comes with audio cassettes, however there is now a CD version available.

Japanese: The Spoken Language CD-ROM for PC

In my second year Japanese class at Indiana Univeristy we used Japanese, The Spoken Language: Part 2. The roomaji was in fact annoying, however, if you’re a serious student you can write the stuff in Hiragana and Kanji in your notebook anyway. And also, as one reviewer on the Amazon site has noted, the roomanization is not the point of this book.

The strong point of JSL in the grammar explainations and example sentence quality. If you go through this book with the audio guides, and really drill the lessons, your Japanese will improve. There is a reason that many universities rely on this textbook to build the foundation for their early language students.

I would recommend the JSL series to students of Japanese who are ready to go a bit deeper, and are not necessarily looking for a quick Japanese crash course.

That’s it.

Now that I have said all that, if you can only get one book, get Genki.

Let me know in the comments what other opinions you have of the Japanese language textbooks out there!

- Harvey