Teach Yourself Japanese: A Complete Course in Understanding and Speaking (Teach Yourself¹Complete Courses)

Rating:
Summary: Great self learning tool
Review: Before I got this book as a birthday present, I praised my Essential Berlitz Japanese book. Then once I got this book I just about threw that thing out the window. Teach Yourself Japanese is very complete guide in understanding Japanese. It explains even the hardest things to explain - like 'n and koto very well. I have worn my book out so much that the pages started comming out so Im here to buy another. This has been the most valuable book to me in all of my study of the Japanese language. The only thing I would say is that I would not reccomend this book for very beginning learners of Japanese because the first couple of lessons are kind of lacking on the basics, but if you are seasoned, get this book. Its excellent.

Rating:
Summary: Teach Yourself Series Scores... But Not Quite With Japanese
Review: I should start off by saying that I have had previous experience with the Teach Yourself series as have used Teach Yourself: Beginner's German, German, and French. The book scores with German and as long as you have the tapes, with french too. But the japanese book is lacking... The lessons are well-thought out and extremely easy to follow, but there is absolutely no approach to written japanese. This is the one flaw of Teach Yourself: Japanese.

Rating:
Summary: Teach Yourself Series Scores... But Not Quite With Japanese
Review: I should start off by saying that I have had previous experience with the Teach Yourself series as have used Teach Yourself: Beginner's German, German, and French. The book scores with German and as long as you have the tapes, with french too. But the japanese book is lacking... The lessons are well-thought out and extremely easy to follow, but there is absolutely no approach to written japanese. This is the one flaw of Teach Yourself: Japanese.

Rating:
Summary: Lack of Japanese script is simply unacceptable
Review: This book is good, but probably only for reference on items that other books do not do a good job at explaining.

The first and worst mistake that this book makes is that it ignores (maybe "runs away from" is a better description) the Japanese writing system completely. The author of this book may say, "That's not true, we included it a little bit!!!" However, all they do is put the words in hiragana and kanji with captions in roman letters in a way that is 90% illustration, 10% stupid and 100% useless.

To the beginner it can be useful to not use hiragana, especially in dealing with verb and adjective paradigms, but this should not become a habit at all.

The bottom line: save your money and buy a different book, like Japanese For Busy People (Kana Edition), Japanese for Everyone, or Genki (however, this text can be difficult to understand without a teacher). Money is usually pretty tight for people studying Japanese through self-study, so do yourself a favor and invest your money wisely!

Rating:
Summary: Eh...
Review: This book is great only under one condition: you want to learn only spoken Japanese. I began with this book and quickly noticed the lack of kana. I thought nothing of it, until my copy of Japanese for Everyone arrived. It was then that I realised I was in a very bad situation. I had to relearn *everything* because I now had to learn how to write it. I lost close to a month of time because of this. If you a serious about learning Japanese, then skip over this book---it is the first Teach Yourself book I did not enjoy. Get a copy of Japanese For Everyone instead.This gets 2 stars solely for the fact that it can be a good reference until a better reference is found.