Rating: 
Summary: Awesome book!!!
Review: k heres the thing, i havent recieved the book yet, since i ordered it, but i have rented it from the library. its one of the best books to learn japanese with, actually the best. i cant wait until i get it in the mail....great book!
Rating:
Summary: Awesome book!!!
Review: k heres the thing, i havent recieved the book yet, since i ordered it, but i have rented it from the library. its one of the best books to learn japanese with, actually the best. i cant wait until i get it in the mail....great book!
Rating:
Summary: A great job of teaching the essentials for everyday speech.
Review: This book is a great way for anyone to start out their learning of the Japanese language. It teaches the necessary
information needed to start conversations in Japanese. It provides you with an immediate speaking ability. Yoku Yatta!
Rating: 
Summary: Inovative ideas, good book, but won't teach you to speak
Review: This book is neat, it has many pictures, and ideas for learning things, like stickers you can put all over your house that label things in japanese, and a number of other exercies (crossword puzzes, short quizzes, etc) that force you to use as you learn. For this it is quite a good book.I don't give it 5 stars because it seriously lacks in teaching actual comprehension. You'll learn a lot of words in this book, but don't expect to learn how to speak or understand natural sentances. There is very little mention of sentance structure or particles.
Rating:
Summary: The best beginning
Review: This is probably the best beginning. You don't really want to dive into the deep end (sentence structure, verb conjugation, difference forms, etc.) when you can barely swim. You want to learn some words and some adjectives and some very simple sentences to get you by when you visit. Japanese people don't expect thier language to be perfect out of your mouth, so beginning with this simple and easy book should not be a fear! I bought this book, and I give it a four star because it's not the type of book that you can easily be committed to. The self-assigned study was a bit hard for me to commit myself to, but once I got the hang of reading it everyday, I was able to name everything in my house and recognize situations when I went to the store. If you are just deciding to learn Japanese, this is the best way to start.
Rating:
Summary: excellent start
Review: This is probably the best guide that I've found for starting Japanese. I used it before entering my first year of college where I majored in Japanese and E. Asian Studies, and it helped me tremendously. I combined it with "Essentail Japanese Grammar" by Everett F. Bleiler, which I also highly recommend.
The one place that it is lacking is in Kana and Kanji, which are the written forms of Japanese. I wouldn't order books for this on-line, I would go to the store and find ones that are organized in a way that best suits your personal style of learning.
Once again, for anyone who is just starting Japanese, I think this is one of the best options--and trust me, I've used them all.
Rating:
Summary: This is the best first step ...
Review: Wanting to learn japanese I gathered up about ten books, programs and tape studies. After breezing through each I discovered this book was the best first step. Japanese is a very different language from the European languages, so it takes a lot of effort to really come to grips with the sentance structure (which is nearly backwards from English) and pronounciations (more vowels then English). By knuckling down and trying about 30 minutes a day of hardcore memorization i was able to power through a good deal of the book and gather a decent beginner vocab. Fun enough, the title is 'Japanese in 10 minutes a day' but it doesn't apply to anything in the book...there are no 10 minute regiments. You will just have to work through at your pace. The dialogue and vocab is laid out very well so you start with words that can identify things, and things to identify (colors, objects, destinations, food, buildings, etc). Then it branches out into verbs and adjectives. It has a very simple layout that makes the language as easy as possible for beginners. When done you should have about 1000 words under your command and a basic, usable understanding of Japanese sentace structure. The heavier technique of Japanese Language doesn't come through the book- verb conjugation and explainations of the particle words that are so tricky. But this book ramps you up to begin studies in other books and programs that aren't as well laid out, or simple to follow.
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