Comments on: Do I need to take a class to learn Japanese?

By: Robert

Robert — Sat, 08 Mar 2008 20:31:55 +0000

Firstly I would like to say thanks for the amazing grammar guide and very informational posts that you have made Tae Kim, they have been invaluable in my Japanese studies.

I’m currently using Elementary Japanese by Yoko Hasegawa of the University of California, Berkley. I’ve found this book to be very good. Up until I bought this book I studied on my own from online guides. I figured I should get a good text book that has what I need to learn otherwise I might as well not get one at all, so it took me a very long time till I found a book that I liked (one that fits the standards that you laid out for the most part) and so far this book has worked great for me. Although quite a bit of the first half is just review for me it helps explain what I didn’t know very well, and I get the new grammar very fast. It mostly teaches by example sentences which I find really cool, but it still has very nice explanations. The explanations are also short and strait to the point, although I feel sometimes the explanations are a little to short because the book was after all made to be used in a class room (but works just as well for self study). So yeah, this book fits all of my requirements, it only uses kana/kanji, teaches at least 10 kanji every lesson (starting at lesson 3), has plain form early on, very good explanations, and even comes with a CD with simple audio for all the vocab lists, dialogs in the book, and even extra listening activities. Another thing that I really like about this book is that in the index it has charts of all the kanji taught in the book, complete with stroke order and readings. Along with the kanji charts they have conjugation charts which are invaluable for reference. There is two volumes to this book, the first one is supposed to be the first half of the semester of a college Japanese class, and of course volume two takes up the second half of the semester. I have also looked at げんき and although I do find it a nice book I like Elementary Japanese more, mainly just a personal preference I guess. I hope this post helps anyone looking for a good book since it’s always nice to have more than just one choice.

So anyways, I was wondering if anyone had suggestions for an intermediate book. Although I’m no where near ready for intermediate I’m still curious and looking for a decent enough book. I figure given how long it took me to find a decent beginners book I might as well start looking for an intermediate one now so I’ll have it when I finally need it hehe.

Best of luck to all of you in your Japanese studies! :)

By: claytonian

claytonian — Thu, 14 Feb 2008 03:02:49 +0000

I think dictionary and masuSTEM forms should be taught at the same time if possible. The stem is so useful.
Integrate that with teaching a kanji and you’ve got a good little lesson nugget.

By: Tae Kim

Tae Kim — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 04:04:47 +0000

Francis, that sounds like a great book. I’ll have to go check it out.

By: Francis

Francis — Tue, 05 Feb 2008 03:39:13 +0000

I’m a 2nd year at University of California at Irvine and I have to say I am very glad my teachers and my textbook taught us hiragana and katakana within two weeks and started with 10 kanji every week (its currently 15-18). We answered quizzes and tests in polite form and did compositions and projects in plain form. Haha and on the んです, our book had a very clear explanation:

寒いですか？
寒いんですか？

“In the first sentence, the speaker has no idea whether or not the person addressed feels cold. Therefore, it is simply a straightforward question: ‘Are you cold?’ In the second, the speaker assumes that the person addressed feels cold because, say, he is shivering or wearing a thick sweater. The second sentence, then, asks for an explanation: Is it that you’re cold?
Similarly, if you see a friend getting ready to do something, it would be odd to say

何をしますか？　What are you going to do?

because you have actually seen his or her preparations and know that he or she is about to do something. This information is shared between the two of you, so it’s more appropriate to say

何をするんですか？
What are you going to do? (Lit., What is it that you are going to do?)”

Sorry for the long post, but if anyone’s interested, my first-year textbook is called “Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese” by Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku

By: Michael

Michael — Sun, 03 Feb 2008 00:18:44 +0000

I’m only in the second semester of my Japanese course at my college (University of Wisconsin-Madison), but from looking at your guidelines it looks like it was done pretty well. The dictionary forms are the first forms we learned, followed very shortly by -masu forms, we only used Romaji early on before we had learned all the Hiragana and Katakana, and we also got into the Kanji about a month into the course.

We did use げんき which seems to be a pretty good textbook (it does, after all, follow all of the things I mentioned above). It’s not perfect; I sometimes feel it can go into a bit more detail about things, but fortunately our professors add that detail. Still, it’s pretty good. At least I can feel pretty confident that the course I’m taking is a good one!

By: kasunori takahashi

kasunori takahashi — Wed, 02 Jan 2008 00:24:00 +0000

By: Nick

Nick — Mon, 31 Dec 2007 01:54:39 +0000

I was lucky enough to get an actual Japanese native to teach the classes I took in college, though she spoke hardly any English, and was virtually impossible to talk you. And no matter how much I studied she always looked at me like I was a complete moron. Haha, jeez.
We used the なかま textbook which I would suggest avoiding at all costs.
Finding good research tools is really one of the biggest challenges in studying Japanese. Definetely, the most important tool is a die hard passion for the language. With so many kanji and the poor classes I took, I all but had given up on the language. I found my faith renewed by listening to the Pimsleur tapes. Its important to remember early on, that the spoken language is almost a entirely different animal then the written, and not as daunting as the kanji memorization may seem.
I found I learned more from the Pimsleur tapes then in all my class work. They are far from perfect, and extremely boring, but they will really help for those starting out.
I was extremely annoyed to find out that I was pronouncing so many words wrong or unnaturally, especially the ones with dropped vowels like the third “i” in haijimemashite. So often textbooks ignore these points of native speech.
Beyond that, I would suggest studying the kanji without the use of ideograms, since most Japanese don’t even learn them this way as far as I am aware. Focusing on writing them and not just looking at flash cards. Otherwise, you end up able to recogonize them but not write them. I found the program Yokozuna! http://rainboo.com/ to be a great help in practicing stroke order. Another great resource is http://www.japanesepod101.com/ which has native speakers in daily podcasts. They are entertaining and informative. I will have to take a look at the genki textbook, since most of you seem to like it. Good Luck everyone! Keep at it! Together we will master Japanese!

By: Seth

Seth — Sat, 15 Dec 2007 02:29:18 +0000

I believe you have just set out the framework which should now be compulsory for all future Japanese textbooks. :)

I know personally that the right approach to Japanese makes a hell of a difference. A friend asked me to teach them, and as soon as they’d got a grasp of hiragana it was on to verb conjugations FROM the basic form.

It was kind of amazing…over the course of 3 lessons, all around or less than 2.5 hours each, they were able to express the most incredible range of meanings and competently independently use a dictionary to fill in the vocab gaps. In Japanese, grammar is power!

It felt quite good, given I have exactly 0 teaching experience.

By: Ed

Ed — Thu, 13 Dec 2007 05:13:42 +0000

I have been living in Okinawa now for over 3 years and have been actively studying Japanese for a little over two years. I started learning at a college here using the “Japanese for Busy People” series textbook. The classes are 8 weeks long covering the first book in the first two classes and the second book for the second set of classes. Thosewere the Beginers classes. I have not yet taken the Intermediate Courses. Anyways, we were required to learn hiragana in the first class and katakana in the second class. We did not really begin to learn kanji until the third class.
I agree though that JFBP is not an effective book. When trying to practice my learned language in a real setting (i.e. buying stuff at a local convenience store) I could hardly understand what was being said to me because the dictionary form was being substituted for the -masu form.
Having japanese friends helps a lot. I normally try and force them to speak only in japanese to me but normally the conversation sways to english in their own curiosity to learn english.
I have the book Japanese Step by Step by Gene Nishi but have not taken the time to really read into it. (I think I will do that tonight).
Reading from a book has forced me to learn by reading, not by listening. So I can read information and understand it but when I hear japanese I am quick to say “ゆっくり話してください”.
So I have force fed the local radio stations to myself. I am picking up on words and phrases a lot more and their usage. Listening to the news is a big help, though it is mainly in a more polite form, it is easy to comprehend and distinguish between words. I know most of us who are learning Japanese do not have this luxary but there are resources on the internet.
がんばって

By: Joey Dangerous

Joey Dangerous — Wed, 05 Dec 2007 19:36:31 +0000

I’ve taken some classes in high school and in college. None were very good. I can’t remember the name of the book we used in high school, and we used Japanese for Busy People in college. Both were terrible. I learned only polite form and mostly only learned on my own. I pretty much gave up after that. It’s now three years later and I started studying again from the beginning about three months ago (save for hiragana and katakana).

I’ve been using three main books to learn from. The first was Easy Japanese, by Jack Seward. It was moderately helpful and pretty amusing, but it teaches everthing in a really haphazard way, plus it’s mostly in roomaji. After that, I worked through Japanese Step by Step by Gene Nishi. This is the best book I’ve found on beginning japanese. It’s perfect for self-study. It introduces everything in a logical order, and gives enough examples to grasp every concept it introduces. I highly recommend it for self-study. Also, all the examples are in Kanji, hiragana, and katakana, but the roomaji is always printed below if you get stuck. The book I’m working through now is called Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication. I also recommend this one. It has all the basic sentence patterns you would need, and it covers plain form and polite forms side by side, so you can learn either. I already understand most of what is in the book (thanks to Japanese Step by Step), but it is clarifying a lot of things I was confused about from the other two books. I think it would be a good book to start with as well. I also taught myself all of the JLPT 3 and 4 kanji lists, readings and writing. Kanji comes pretty easily to me, so I don’t really need much help with it, it’s just time-consuming.

I’m going to study abroad in Japan in about a month for a 3 month program. Thanks Tae Kim for letting me know what to look for!