Starting to study Japaneese... textbook suggestions?

I used Genki at the lower division classes at university as well and I'd suggest it. The two books covers a wide variety of grammar points and their practice exercises are nicely put together. I also like how they way they arrange the grammar points in the chapters.

My only criticism was that I wasn't too hot on how they integrated kanji and arranged vocabulary in the book. The kanji seems just thrown into the back of the book and you just deal with it yourself. Also the vocabulary were also really sporadic, you'd learn the word for high in one chapter, then low in another.

Otherwise it's a decent book. If you want to start with something ridiculously simple, try Adventures in Japanese. They use them in high school and is relatively easy to follow, although they do a job of confusing you with dictionary terms and -masu form. Their first couple chapters on hiragana and katakana I remember were really effective so if Genki's introduction to these terms (only spanning 2 chapters), then you can try picking up the first book of AIJ.

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Originally Posted by a_winner_is_not_u

I agree with Kat on this one, as well as starting out using the verbs in the informal jisho form (~u and ~ru form). The first text books I used (Interactive Japanese) started with the ~masu form which made things much easier to follow. The Jisho form didn't come onto stage until the 2nd book. I'm not too sure why the authors "split" the Genki text into two parts. The first bit (chapters 1-12, I think) cover "Mary", a fictional exchange student, and her adventures in Japan using everyday life examples as primary study material and the vocabulary revolves around that. The second part seems more like grammar explanations and kanji stroke order and the like.

All in all, I think Genki is a good series, but now on reflection it's not very newb friendly, especially the explanation of the verb system and changing from masu to u and ru form (Genki does this backwards starting with the u/ru form going to masu). This series should perhaps be picked up at a later time, perhaps 6 months after you've got a more elementary textbook as suggested above.

FTW

Uh no, learning -masu form right out of the gate is the dumbest teaching method I can think of. It'll totally fuck up your base knowledge of verb conjugation, in the future you'll have to re-learn everything just to know how to properly conjugate other forms. -Masu form is just one of those many forms, in fact it's barely used at all in normal day to day speech and it'd be stupid to put priority of learning that over dictionary form. Basically if you first learn -masu form, it's just memorization without knowing why it's conjugated the way it is. It becomes double the work and 3 steps back.

There's nowhere I can't reach.

I'm not sure if you have Genki confused with another book but the book does not actually teach it that way. Dictionary forms and masu forms are introduced in the same chapter (#3) but they teach you the differences, (there's even a chart listing out dictionary form, present test affirmative, present tense negative, stems, bases etc.) and how to conjugate RU verbs and U verbs into -masu. Also in the vocab lists, all the verbs are listed under their dictionary forms and -te form is introduced right in the Chap. 6 so I don't see how you could ignore them, for long anyways.

This thing is sticky, and I don't like it. I don't appreciate it.