Nihon-GO!

nipponnihon:

There are tons of books out there that one could purchase if they were interested in studying Japanese. I’ve broken them down into two categories. The “self help” books, and the “text books”. 

The self help books are things like “Japanese for Dummies” and “Idiot’s Guide to learning Japanese”. These books provide you with a basic understanding of the Japanese language. They go into areas like grammar, pronunciation, useful phrases and other things like that. They don’t really explain the language to you though, which is why I don’t recommend them to a serious learner. Also, most of them don’t have katakana, hiragana or kanji in them, so you’re missing out on the whole WRITTEN portion of the language. 

If you want a basic “on the go” Japanese education, I’d recommend the following self help books: 

-Japanese for Dummies $20.00

-An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese 38.00

-Idiot’s Guide to Learning Japanese $17.00

The text books are on a different level than the self help books. If you purchase a Japanese text book, look forward to getting the same information college and high school students get. These books are designed to really “teach” you Japanese, not just a few ahdn expressions. You’ll learn hiragana, katakana and most likely a few kanji as well. There will be detailed lessons on different grammar points in each chapter, along with cultural sections and plenty of exercise. Usually there will also be an audio CD to listen to and a workbook along with the text book. Here are some books you might think about purchasing!

-Nakama: This series has three books. Nakama 1a, 1b and 2. Nakama 1a and 1b are the same book, bust broken up into two parts. They are very good when it comes to their cultural information, but the arrangment of the information is prety bad in my opinion. I use them in my class. They get the job done, but I’d prefer another. The Nakama line comes with a workbook and an audio CD.  

-Genki: Genki is a series also used to learn elementary Japanese. Genki has very high ratings, and from what I’ve seen it is a very well organized text book. It’s a little on the pricey side, but every penny would be well spent for the serious student. Genki comes in two levels, Genki I and Genki II. Both are for elementary Japanese, so if you’re at an advanced level, you might want to search else-where.

-Japanese For Busy People: You’ll hear a lotof slander about this series. Many people think that Japanese for Busy People I, II, and III all are horrible and don’t teach you anything. I personally have never used them, but when I thumbed through the first edition, I wasn’t impressed. On a good note though, this is the only elementary series that goes up to a third book. Recently, the third edition as completely revised and there are wonderful reviews on it, so I’d check it out!

*All prices included in this post were quoted from Amazon.com. They vary depending on location

Thanks for this!

My Japanese course (and my friend’s, at a different college than the one I go to) requires Japanese: The Spoken Language Part 1 by Eleanor Harz Jorden with Mari Noda as our main text book. 
Personally, I do not really like this book - but my friend likes it and uses it more than I do. My sensei doesn’t use it very much because, unfortunately, it is all in romaji. But there are worksheets that she gives us that follow along with the book, and we only use the book for the utilization section and occasionally additional information about certain subjects. My friend’s sensei uses the book all the time and gets very good results.

The other book that is required is a kanji text book. It is Basic Kanji Book volume 1 by Chieko Kano, Yuri Shimizu, Hiroko Takenaka and Eriko Ishi. We use this book significantly more often, especially in 201 and 202 levels, and it is rather nice. However, I prefer Japanese Kanji Power by John Millen because of the way that the information is organized and presented.

For grammar, I like Japanese Step by Step by Gene Nishi, and the same friend that I mentioned before is the one who both recommended and gave me this book.

 I should mention that the Japanese Step by Step was used even while Japanese was something that I was studying by myself. Also, I have tried the Living Language Series’ Japanese collection and was left incredibly disappointed. The audio, text, workbook and dictionary were not very helpful for me, and were not worth the $80 that I paid for it.