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Rating: 
Summary: Romaji was fine by me.
Review: I used this series to learn Japanese before going to Japan, and my grammar was perfectly fluent in about 5 months. After having basic speaking out of the way, I started studying writing and after living in Japan for a year I passed the top level of the Japanese Proficiency Exam. I found that once I was a fluent speaker, the writing came much easier.On the other hand, I have known scores and scores of people who have studied Japanese from a written grammar based approach who have never learned to speak. Even after many years of diligent study. The Romaji in this series I think is a good thing, because the approach used here is not book focused. In fact, the method recommends only using the book in order to help yourself understand what the tapes say and then immediately put it down. The exercises, in fact, should be done with the book completely closed. I can't recommend enough using this approach to quickly learn fluency in the language. This book however, has an updated version, it seems. Published in the late '80s.
Rating:
Summary: Best Japanese text book
Review: If you are serious about learning Japanese and want to choose a textbook that will help you do so, at just the right pace, this is your book. In each chapter you learn a great deal, but you are not made to continuously flip back to other chapters to look up words. I am nearly to the end of this text book, and I have never become frustrated by the teaching method. I realize now, browsing through other Japanese grammar books, that if I had chosen one of those books, I might have decided the language was too hard and would have given up. Thanks to this book, I am confident that I will become fluent in Japanese in the next year, when I begin on Book 2 of this series.
Rating: 
Summary: Thorough book, but dated and lacking kana and kanji
Review: Well, I can say that this book is extremely thorough. It will teach you how to speak Japanese fairly well, if you can wade through it. However, I personally dislike this book. This book is quite dated, as are all Jorden books. We're talking 40 years here. What's worst is the lack of kana. You won't be able to read Japanese at all. You can study kana and kanji on your own and in a class, but you'll never be very good at it unless you work yourself to death. Textbooks with kana and kanji in them, such as Nakama or the extremely good Genki are great in that you begin to be able to read Japanese nearly as fast as you can understand it, and kanji recognition is much easier.
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