Teach Yourself Japanese: A Complete Course for Beginners

I've been learning Japanese for sixteen years, and I got my start with this book, although without a cassette or anything. True, it ignores kanji and kana, but I used other books for that simultaneously, and I would research how each dialog should be written in Japanese writing, learning the writing and language at the same time. I think they left out kanji and kana because it is a lot to swallow all at once for a beginner, unless you're really motivated like I was back in the day. I used this, a Japanese dictionary, and the book "Kanji and Kana", and really learned a lot from the combination of the three. I absolutely recommend this book/cd. The only way they could improve it would be if they rewrote it as a Japanese pop culture / anime version, so this one is certainly worth using.

Im taking a multipronged approach and using this in conjunction with: GENKI PIMSLEUR LIVING LANGUAGE ULTIMATE ADVANCED DOVER LISTEN AND LEARN These CDS (which can be listened to without the book) are much more engaging than any of the above. A lot of real life situations are covered and there's a section on how to pronounce the hirigana, double consonants and long vowels --- invaluable. Also there's a small segment on colloquial (sp) speech. I wish the text used kanji though. Overall this is an amazing value and I wish they'd make an intermediate package --- with kanji.

This is a great book for a self-pace learning. Busy with school (20 units) and working part time (35 hrs/wk), I really wanted to learn Nihongo but didn't have time to take a full course. So I searched high and low, purchasing 5 self-pace book and none was not as great as this one. The lesson are fun to read and phrases are practical. The audio CD that accompany this book was also useful as I was able to listen how pronounce word/phrases correctly.

Before I got this book as a birthday present, I praised my Essential Berlitz Japanese book. Then once I got this book I just about threw that thing out the window. Teach Yourself Japanese is very complete guide in understanding Japanese. It explains even the hardest things to explain - like 'n and koto very well. I have worn my book out so much that the pages started comming out so Im here to buy another. This has been the most valuable book to me in all of my study of the Japanese language. The only thing I would say is that I would not reccomend this book for very beginning learners of Japanese because the first couple of lessons are kind of lacking on the basics, but if you are seasoned, get this book. Its excellent.

A very good book. It is divided into 22 Units made of dialogues, structure and grammar notes, culture points and exercises to learn japanese. The romaji system makes it very student friendly if you dont know any kana. Don't think to start this book and go thru the end and be a perfect japanese speaker, you will need constant studing and reviewing of the units. Also the small dictionary inside makes this s a very useful book.