Nakama 1

Rating:
Summary: Neko ga imasu yo!
Review: I bought this book in order to review first year Japanese after having been tortured by the Jorden series (volumes I and II of Jorden's Solipsistic Language), and I am happy to be able to affirm that, yes, in fact, as we all suspected, romanji are completely dispensable and even distracting. This book gives all examples in real Japanese, not some pseudolinguist/ cultleader's private language.

I think that NAKAMA provides fine explanations and lots of good examples. It also begins early on to show the kanji for vocabulary (written in hiragana), which makes this a good book for both learning and review. There are questions here and there, for example, why do the authors claim that Japanese has two tenses, "present and past", and then go on to explain that the present tense is also used for the future? I myself find the perfect/imperfect (completed/incompleted) distinction most intuitive. Anyway, these are minor issues which are naturally open to debate.

However, there are a few formatting problems (who in the world does the proofreading for this publisher? does he/she still have a job?), and the book is WAY too expensive, as a result of the reigning textbook tyranny from which college students sadly have no means of escape. (oui, huis clos!) What bumped my review up to 4 stars, I must admit, was the high frequency of pictures in chapter 3 containing that truly indispensable creature: kirei na neko (sorry for the redundancy). Hai!

Rating:
Summary: Intensive Japanese Textbook!!!
Review: It goes without saying that Japanese is among the most intricate and diffucult languages to learn and master. Nakama 1 however seems to make the language much more manageable. The textbook is wonderfully clear and descriptive. Kanji are presented well with stroke orders, meanings, and their use is illustrated within conversational passages. There is a wealth of vocabulary and the presentaiton of the grammatical points, numerous as they are, is amazingly clear. This textbook is great for a course and for one learning on their own. I initially had reservations about the book simply because the Japanese langauge course I'm taking covered 2 chapters of this book every week. Point being that there is ALOT of manageable material in each of the 12 chapters. Combine this book with the workbook and the tape and you'll come out of it having very strong inroads into the Japanese language. All in all, a great book.