Editorial Reviews:
Product Description
With Teach Yourself Japanese Complete Course, you can learn this language from the comfort of your own home, at your own pace. It introduces you to practical themes, such as making travel arrangements, meeting someone new, shopping, and other every day activities.
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Customer Reviews: Read 8 more reviews...
 perfectly crazy way to organize a book August 9, 2008
Carlos Porter
All I can say is that this is a perfectly crazy way to organize a book. I've been studying languages for 45 years (I am professional translator) but I've never seen anything like this. I don't mind that they seem to have amputated the first year or two of their "complete language course" and that it seems to start in the middle of everything, with no rhyme or reason; what I mind is that, after the first three lessons or so, there is NO TRANSLATION OF ANY OF THE DIALOGUES. You get a dialogue in Japanese, then there is NO TRANSLATION of any of the words in the dialogue! Not even if you look the word up in the back of the book! What you get is something like U5, SL4, which, translated into English, means Unit 5 (Chapter 5), Society and Language, Section 4. So it takes you perhaps 5 or 10 minutes to find the meaning of even one word. I've been listening to the CD for 6 months and I've got all sorts of stuff going around in my head without the slightest idea of what it means. What kind of language course is this? I prefer to listen to Japanese films with sub-titles, at least that way I know what they're saying. I'm serious.
Whoever put this book together is crazy. It might be all right if you already know the language basically, like you studied 3 years of Japanese 10 years ago and want to brush up a little bit, but don't tell me it's a "complete course", that's just a lie. I've never seen anything organized this way, it just goes around in circles. For example, if I learn one pronoun, "I", why not teach me the other pronouns too, while we're at it, for example, "you"? Instead it goes around in circles. I'd say if you don't know any Japanese, don't buy this "complete course". whatever you do. Buy anything else, but not this.
CARLOS
 keep looking April 22, 2008
W. Stallard
Like any book, if you work hard enough you'll get something out of it. This book just doesn't make it very easy on you. It moves fast with little explanation. Virtually no japanese characters are taught, and the ones that are seem to be nearly random. It would probably make you want to give up learning Japanese.
 A wonderful course even if it doesn't teach kana or kanji December 11, 2007
Turning Japanese (New York NY)
I've been learning Japanese for sixteen years, and I got my start with this book, although without a cassette or anything. True, it ignores kanji and kana, but I used other books for that simultaneously, and I would research how each dialog should be written in Japanese writing, learning the writing and language at the same time. I think they left out kanji and kana because it is a lot to swallow all at once for a beginner, unless you're really motivated like I was back in the day. I used this, a Japanese dictionary, and the book "Kanji and Kana", and really learned a lot from the combination of the three. I absolutely recommend this book/cd. The only way they could improve it would be if they rewrote it as a Japanese pop culture / anime version, so this one is certainly worth using.
fun and lively way to learn Nihongo April 5, 2007
Sparks (United States)
2 out of 2 found this review helpful
Im taking a multipronged approach and using this in conjunction with:
GENKI
PIMSLEUR
LIVING LANGUAGE ULTIMATE ADVANCED
DOVER LISTEN AND LEARN
These CDS (which can be listened to without the book) are much more engaging than any of the above. A lot of real life situations are covered and there's a section on how to pronounce the hirigana, double consonants and long vowels --- invaluable. Also there's a small segment on colloquial (sp) speech. I wish the text used kanji though. Overall this is an amazing value and I wish they'd make an intermediate package --- with kanji.
Great for selfpace December 21, 2006
Anh (Berkeley, CA United States)
This is a great book for a self-pace learning. Busy with school (20 units) and working part time (35 hrs/wk), I really wanted to learn Nihongo but didn't have time to take a full course. So I searched high and low, purchasing 5 self-pace book and none was not as great as this one. The lesson are fun to read and phrases are practical. The audio CD that accompany this book was also useful as I was able to listen how pronounce word/phrases correctly.
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