Essential Japanese: An Introduction to the Standard Colloquial Language (Tuttle Language Library)

Rating:
Summary: One of the Best Self-Teachers Available
Review: I concur with the other users of this site in my opinion of this book. You really can learn colloquial Japanese from this book. It is a bit dated - it was, I believe, originally written for American GI's and missionaries who found themselves in Japan after World War II and needed a good self teaching book which could be used on the ground, preferably with a native speaker to go through the material with you or at least to provide pointers on pronunciation. However, this doesn't mean that what you're learning is too basic. Virtually every feature of the spoken language is at least touched on, and best of all, there are a lot of illustrative sentences for every item covered. The whole book is split into only ten lessons, and each lesson seems to last forever, but when you actually start working with the book it is much easier than it initially appears.

There is another book by Martin out that includes copies of the dialogues from this book in written Japanese, if you really feel a need for that. While of course it is a nice idea to be able to work with the writing system immediately when learning a new language, with Japanese I don't really really believe that this is a good idea. All told, Japanese is probably the most difficult language in the world to learn to read and write correctly, more so than Chinese, so I would suggest to the would-be learner that she work with this book for a while and then start on the written language with other learning materials.

Rating:
Summary: An excellent method to learn the nitty-gritty/structure.
Review: Of all the courses I have purchased, I keep returning to this one. It is thorough in its pedagogy, and provides enough practice material to really drive the grammar into your head.

I would like to see tapes for this book. It would really enhance its overall coursework.

Rating:
Summary: One of the best books for learning conversational Japanese!
Review: This book is probably the single best book I have found for teaching yourself real conversational Japanese along with enough grammar neccessary to understand it and use it! It gets a nine because it could be better only with kana and kanji. If you want to learn Japanese, you will save much time with this book