Starting to study Japaneese... textbook suggestions?

I'm currently using the GENKI series of textbooks as you can see:



I find the approach they use isn't quite as direct as the Interactive Japanese, published at my local university but it's quite informative and gives you more background into how and why a particular grammatical structure is used. It's aimed at somewhat higher level of English readers though, surprisingly. One note I have is I find that they introduce kanji a bit too quickly, but most of the kanji is accompanied by furigana. If you keep at it everyday and do the exercises concluding each chapter, then I think some decent progress can be made if you do self studying. BTW, would anyone know what the approximate JLPT Kyuu level the first and second textbooks are aimed at?

EDIT: Sorry for stretching the tables as I'm using a work computer and it doesn't have an image resizing program. Gomen nee. ;_;

Jam it back in, in the dark.

Quote:

extreme basics.

Yes, regarding the kana - the two alphabets - hiragana and kata, I'd advise you to follow this method to learn it ASAP. Don't spend two months like how I did just to rewrite the stupid A I U E O table 500 times.

Here's how you do it (or I did it, and got it down pact within 3-4 days instead of taking forever):
For Hiragana
1) Right down the "A" hiragana 10 times in a row, and get a good book or online that shows you the proper stroke order. VERY IMPORTANT! Also make sure you pronounce these correctly. This should be pronounced as "AHHH" like when you go to the doctor.

2) Move on to "E" kana and do the same. Sorry as I'm using my work computer and cannot use Japanese font.

3) Continue this until you get to the "O". Now close the books and test yourself. Testing yourself is the best way to memorize, as while it took me about 3-4 days with hiragana, kata was picked up much faster - within a day, since many of them do look similar to hiragana.

4) Once you've got yourself from a i u e o to ka ki ku ke ko and all the way down, start writing it in tables and if you can do that, then that's great.

5) Use flash cards. You can make this yourself with cutting up paper. Write the kana on one side and the romaji (English expression) on the other. Put them in a hat and draw them up and recite what you have. If you picked up a "U", then write the kana for it.

6) That's pretty much the basics. But to get the alphabet down as well, start writing simple words, like konnichiwa etc. You should already by now note how to use Ko - n- ni - chi - wa, those 5 kana's to come up with the word.

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Originally Posted by David4516

http://tsunamichan.phpwebhosting.com...ese/index.html

This is a flash-card stlye game that teaches you Hiragana. It's also kind of like strip-poker, because the more you get right, the less clothing the "teacher" wears .

That's actually a pretty good test since it gives you good statistics of which kana you're good at and which one's you recognize quickly. Good find.

How ya doing, buddy?

Originally Posted by kat

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.

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.

Originally Posted by Bigblah

Let me be the first to tell you that it is spelt Japanese, not Japaneese.

FTW

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Originally Posted by kat

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.

I started with the Interactive Japanese texts and it just seemed that they used ~masu as the base. At that time I wouldn't really know if it would be the most optimal or the least effective way to go around verbs. But since I've seen both ways now (masu to u/ru/irregulars) and vice versa, I guess I'm somewhat indifferent, but it seems the u/ru forms are where some of the other stems come from (~te/~tai desu). Perhaps when I move further into Genki I'll see the reasoning of starting with the u/ru form.

I was speaking idiomatically.

Speaking of all this, I just got my pratice copy of the Kyuu 3/4 JLPT test today in the mail. I'll be putting that aside until a few months when I'm ready to test myself out.

How ya doing, buddy?