Speak Japanese Today: A Self-Study Program for Learning Everyday Japanese (Tuttle Language Library)

Rating:
Summary: I think it'a a great book
Review: A great book for beginners. I haven't gotten very far, because I keep deciding to read it on vacations or car trips where I'll be interrupted by something and surrounded by family, unable to say things out loud.

But this book has some great stuff for learning japanese. I'd reccomend it, I think even someone from Jr High could learn from this book. (As I am, and I did.)

Rating:
Summary: It works
Review: The Way lies in practice, and this book provides both the material and the method of practice to allow maximum speed in learning everyday Japanese speech.

The book gets right to the point, without lengthy grammar lessons, linguistic theory, or other complicated nonsense. As the title says, this book will help you "Speak Japanese Today." You will not be able to teach Japanese, write in Japanese, or be able to communicate in an eloquent fashion, but you will know enough material well enough to handle everyday situations.

Thus, this book's optimal audience is anyone who needs a crash-course in Japanese: a student, tourist, or businessman.

To those who want an in-depth study of Japanese, this book can only serve as a somewhat inadequate introduction - but then, in-depth study is not this book's purpose at all.

Rating:
Summary: Great, but how exactly are those words pronounced?
Review: This book is very well organized, and gradually takes the student up the learning curve. It introduces a fairly diverse vocabulary for a beginner level student, and also explains the grammer behind the usage of words and sentences.

Nonetheless, the book poses some key challenges and limitations. Foremost, without an accompanying CD or tape, the pronounciations of the words are simply not conveyed correctly through English language phonetics. As a result, beginners are highly likely to cultivate incorrect pronounciation habits early on in their learning experience.

Second, in the latter half of the book, practice sentences are rote...different words are used in the same sentence structures. While this system promotes practice, the student gains very little from all of the example sentences.

Finally, several words are listed in the lessons. Most of them, however, are never used. Perhaps dropping some of the rote sentences and creating new sentences with these additional words would enhance value to the student.

Overall, this book is an essential addition to the library of every serious student of Japanese. It makes an excellent supplement to classroom learning or to an audio learning system.

Domo Arigato!