Elementary Japanese Volume One: This Beginner Japanese Language Textbook Expertly Teaches Kanji, Hiragana, Katakana, Speaking & Listening (Online Media Included)

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.

When I purchased this book and the other two volumes, my attitude was a little bit reserved because of some of the other contradictory reviews. However, now that I have the books I can say that THIS IS THE BEST JAPANESE TEXTBOOK EVER! It is way better than Genki. Grammar elements are better structured, each lesson has a lot more vocabulary than Genki, kanji integration in each lesson is natural and easy to remember and, most of all it has way more exercises than Genki and all of them are completley solved in the third volume (The Teacher's Manual). The rich vocabulary and explanation completed my understanding of even very basic things that Genki simply does not cover like for example the double vowels and double consonants and the writing tricks of doubling them or, another example, the pitch tone - meaning of some groups of words.Some people might find this tome (together with the other volumes) rather difficult because Romaji transcription appears only in the first two lessons and then the student is supposed to know the syllabaries. I do not understand why some people criticize this fact. Isn't it obvious that you have to learn how to write?I highly recoomend this books together with the other volumes only to those people who seriously want to study japanese. It's the only book you'll need. (PS: each volume comes with a data CD that contains every lesson and vocabulary)

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 ;)*

A pre-purchase from when I moved. I recommend using erasable highlighter and erasable pens if you want to mark and study for years of use. :)

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.