Yookoso! Continuing with Contemporary Japanese (Student Edition + Listening Comprehension Audio CD)

Rating:
Summary: A language acquisition experiement gone RIGHT...
Review: For those who expect to learn Japanese in less than a year, be fluent, and a master of the language... this book is not for you. It goes at Japanese (though this is the manual for Part Two) with a student-approach. It has everyday life scenarios, has written and reading Japanese activities, introduces Kanji practice exercises in the workbook, has available listening comprehension, and cultural notes.

This Japanese learning series is based on a student-learning level. It is not for someone looking to study Business Japanese, or someone with an extreme cultural focus. This book focuses (and the other in the series) on teaching basic, practical Japanese. In the second book, it goes into more detail and harder forms of verbs, tenses, and so forth. Both plain and polite language is discussed, and it gives vocabulary words at easy-to-grasp levels.

There is a glossary in the back, and a thorough index.

I studied Book One on a High School school level (a level which, curriculum wise, is only allowed to move slow) for four years. Later, I continued with Japanese, and went through the second book.

This is not the type of book that will teach contemporary Japanese in an instant. It is not the type of book that NEEDS to make the learner love Japanese more or less. A stutent of Japanese (or any language) should go into the field with a desire to learn. Japanese is very different from much of the English language. It is a hard language, but, the book is correct on one matter. Japanese is elegant, beautiful, and a language that everyone should be proud to study. It takes perserverence and a great attention to practice and detail. It also takes a good instructor. The book cannot do all the work FOR you.

Therefore, with careful study, practice, diligence, a good textbook, and a teacher who is up to date in Japanese, a student can learn and become fluent. You can't blame a textbook for what your class was lacking.

But, Youkoso (both Volume 1 and 2, and the accompanying workbooks) will be beneficial to a student of Japanese and are good tools for learning and mastering a different language.

Rating:
Summary: A language acquisition experiment gone terribly wrong...
Review: I own Yookoso I and II, both versions of each. This book is the worst thing you can use to teach Japanese to native English speakers. The author has the bizarre notion that Japanese is a simple and elegant language compared to English, and all that is needed is to present it to English speakers in this light, and they'll spontaneously start speaking and reading as fluently as a Japanese who took 12 years in school to learn his kanji.

I started out believing that it was of primary importance to learn the script simultaneously with the other aspects of the language. Unfortunately, it took two years of slow, stumbling sounding out of syllables to be able to read at any reasonable speed. (Wa...ta...shi...wa...su...shi...o...ta...be...ma...su...) Even though I spent far more time than is reasonable (or was expected) studying the material, I never felt as though I mastered any of it. By the time I had taken 4 semesters, everybody else had become discouraged and quit Japanese entirely. Worst of all, I had no listening comprehension and could not produce anything remotely resembling speech. The exercises in the books are full of unexplained irregularities, so when you do them, you get them wrong and can't figure out why. (They fixed that in the second edition by taking the answers out of the back of the book, so we couldn't check our work.) The workbook, on the other hand, seems to be written by someone who is unconcerned that they material they are using hasn't been presented to the student.

A book must be judged on its result, and this book didn't result in any of over 100 students learning to speak Japanese, or continuing its study. As a linguistics grad student, I am now convinced that to learn a spoken language, you must be exposed to speech, and how much you learn is directly related to that exposure. The more you attempt to intellectualize the task, the more you distract from the natural acquisition of language.

If you think the way to learning a language is paved with endless multidimensional tables of grammatical rules, long lists of vocabulary without context, and myriad bookwork exercises, this is the book for you.

If you want to learn Japanese, get RosettaStone.

Rating:
Summary: A logical approach to Japanese
Review: I used the first Yookoso in a Japanese class I took before I came to Japan. Because I liked the format and grammar explanations, I bought this book. It's been a big help in my struggle to learn Japanese. Many texts throw a lot of unrelated vocabulary at you expecting you to memorize every word. Yokooso groups the vocabulary by theme (e.g. work related words, health words, etc). Thus you're learning in a sensible manner.