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Rating: 
Summary: Boring without good grammar explanation
Review: Although a lot of people seemed to have liked this book, for some reason I found it exceedingly boring and hard to work with. After all the pronunciation explanation, the first real lesson teaches you months and days of the week. That isn't really important...greetings etc. would be more important in my opinion. Besides the fact that remembering names of months and days is fairly difficult as they are abstract type things(12 months and 7 days makes 19 foreign phrases to remember right off the bat), and how often do you really reference them in real conversation? They then teach the compass directions north, south, etc. which i found completely pointless. How often do you say those in convesration? That aside, the majority of the book is large amounts of phrases thrown at you with english translation on the side. They will sometimes explain a little bit of grammar, but most of the time you're just left to yourself to memorize this phrase meaning that phrase, without really understanding how it works with grammar. Oftentimes you will be unsure of which word in a phrase corresponds to the english word, or if it is a direct or indirect translation, none of which is explained in the book. For example, in the book they list the phrase "Sansei desu ne" as meaning "You agree don't you?" But they don't explain WHAT sansei means, since this is obviously not a direct translation. For all we know it could be an adjective meaning "agreeable", or a noun meaning "approval", etc., we have no idea how it works in the sentence. You just have to memorize that phrase and hope you remember how to say it when you need it. It is much easier to learn individual words and how to PUT THEM TOGETHER YOURSELF, so in conversation you will speak slow but constantly, instead of stopping completely and trying to remember a set phrase. Basically, i hated this book. The only good thing about it was the cassetes, so you can hear spoken japanese if you don't have any other source.
Rating: 
Summary: You must study
Review: I purchased this book and have gone through every page. I didn't think about reviewing it, until I realized my own ability in another language. First, there is a lot of material in this package. The Cd's are worth the money, no question. The workbook though, all by itself is the best aid i've seen in hepling you to learn. I try to keep this with me at all times for standing in line etc., but usually my hands are way to full in some places. Most language texts are convuluted and distorted and actually interfere with the process. I enjoyed this very much. What more can you say about a text book?
Rating:
Summary: Perfect Beginners Guide!
Review: Talk about immersion! The instant i received this from the UPS guy, i tore the package open and began my adventure. This coursebook is just amazing. Within an hour i learned so much! The CD's work so well that I had my friend buy the same product also, so now we speak to eachother in japanese. The teaching method is awesome. The cd's totally immerse you in the language, picking it up naturally, as the package says. It works! GET THIS COURSEBOOK SET!
Rating: 
Summary: Quality Conversational Japanese Course with Recordings
Review: The living language course provides a book with clear explanations, a dictionary and a CD (or cassette) featuring native Japanese speakers who demonstrate correct phrasing and pronounciation. The book and CD are well integrated. Clear explanations of basic sentence structure and usage are provided. The course only teaches spoken Japanese. The course relies heavily on phrase construction (as opposed to sentence construction) which is acceptable because spoken Japanese makes heavy use of phrases. The course is high quality, but should be combined with other teaching materials which provide conversational dialog such as the AMR Japanese Module 1 series. The two work together well.
Rating: 
Summary: Warning!!!
Review: The whole book is using Roman Characters, without a single Japenese characters. If you want to learn how to read and write, consult another book. But it is a great book to learn how to speak Japanese
Rating:
Summary: Excellent way to learn, but...
Review: This is by far one of the best ways to learn Japanese that I can think of. Even though it doesn't really teach you much WRITTEN Japanese, it is by far excellent in teaching vocabulary and especially the confusing grammar of Japanese. My only complaint is that unless you can think of ways to make it fun, you could easily get bored with it. The book is very straightforward and doesn't offer the fun that I think other methods of learning the language (subtitled videos, songs, etc.) can offer. But other than that, it is far superior to anything I've run across on the web.
Rating:
Summary: It's Useful for the Very Basics, but...
Review: This is the book set I started with a year ago when I started learning Japanese. I have since looked at many basic grammar books, and I hesitate to say that this is the very best. It starts out slow and teaches the very basics of Japanese grammar very well, but once you get into topics like conjunctions, conditional phrases, etc., which I consider to still be basic grammar topics, the book starts to lack. It starts introducing conjuctions and particles as footnotes, instead of giving them proper treatment in a lesson. It introduces some speech patterns without explaining them at all. I was getting frustrated with the lessons, until I got to the real meat of the book, Lesson 40, which calls itself a grammar review, but introduces and explains many things that were not explained at all earlier in the book. I did learn from this book, so I will give it 3 stars, and I still use the last lesson for reference, so it's not all bad. Just expect to graduate for this book still having the need for a more in-depth coverage of the language. I recommend the Power Japanese books for a number of more advanced topics. As for writing, as others have mentioned, it does have an introduction to hirigana and katakana, and writing charts, but never actually uses it in book examples. This book actually never claimed to be designed for learning written language; I practiced by writing vocabulary and examples from the book on my own. The dictionary included is somewhat small, but not terribly so; I still find it very useful. The CDs are okay, but I also listened to Japanese radio stations through the Internet to practice picking out words I knew and didn't use them too much.
Rating:
Summary: Very comprehensive, easy to use, great buy!
Review: This was a good buy. It has a good coursebook and dictionary. The only drawback is that it is pretty boring. The course is in no way exciting or even that interesting. It just gives a straightforward course of the Japanese language.
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