Yookoso! An Invitation To Contemporary Japanese, Volume 1

Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese, is the first part of McGraw Hill's Japanese Language textbook series. I just finished using this textbook at the end of last year when I completed my Japanese 201 class. Overall, I like Yookoso, it does a pretty good job in laying out grammar patterns, vocab, and even cultural notes in a simple and easy to understand format. The only failing that I can see in the Yookoso textbooks, is their failure to teach you enough kanji. By the end of Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese, you have only been introduced too and learned around 170 kanji, which is a fairly low number compared to the 1,945 jouyou, or common use, kanji that you will eventually need to know. It also shelters you from kanji use very often within this textbook by giving the reader words that are supposed to be written in kanji in "hiragana" or "katakana". But, other than the way that Yookoso decides to handle kanji within this textbook, it's a very good start to anyone's Japanese Language journey. If you are really serious about learning all of the Jouyou Kanji that you will eventually need to know, I highly recommend Remembering the Kanji, Vol. 1: A Complete Course on How Not to Forget the Meaning and Writing of Japanese Characters by James W. Heisig. While not for everyone, due to its controversial teaching by "imaginative memory", it is a great springboard into learning to recognize, write, and read all of the 1,945 jouyou kanji I mentioned above. Best of luck and ganbatte!

Having taken quite a number of language courses, I think that this book is fairly well done for beginning learners. It explains the grammar fairly good and has a nice amount of vocabulary. My only complaints are that the "dialogues" in the book force you to keep looking down at the bottom of the page for English translation. Also it gets wordy with its "grammatical" terms like "past plain non negative polite tense." Geez.. Why not just say "past tense polite" it can get a bit confusing.. but its much better than other books...

I agree with most of the 3-4 star reviews - while this book isn't perfect, it's a pretty decent choice for a classroom setting. I think some of the material would have been beyond me without the help of my Japanese instructors.I also agree with those who were impressed with the lack of romaaji - my class was fast paced, and we learned all of the kana in less than a month! @_@Anyway, this book is a good tool for learning Japanese, when mixed with good instructors and some resources of your own - for example, I made flash cards that helped a ton. However, if you're on your own, you might want to pass up this book and find something catered less to a classroom environment.

I started using the Youkoso books in University several years ago, and still find myself going back to them once in a while for a refresher. The first book starts out very simple, teaching very basic Japanese, which is romanized, then progressively gets more difficult, introducing both Hiragana and Katakana, and Kanji. I found the course to be very vocabulary intensive, especially in the beginning, when the student needs to learn the vocabulary so that they have something to base grammar on. Another nice point in the book is that it also talks about culture, which helps to explain some language differences, too. If I had studied harder with these books, maybe my Japanese would have gotten much better than it is now.

Seeing the "bad" comments here made me want to write a good one for that book. I actually used 'Yookoso' in my Japanese Level 1 class in university. I tried to learn Japanese on my own with other books, and all of them left me unsatisfied. I do not think there is any "good" book about Japanese... One has to use most of the time many books, and just use the best parts of them. Yookoso is a very good starting point for beginners. It's main strenght is that it uses the things you learned in the previous chapters in the new ones (most books I tried before were poor at that). The grammar points are not explained thouroughly, true, but beginners don't need more. It would simply be too much for a start. Yookoso has good exercises too, good kanji (although there could be more), and good vocab list sorted by topics. Overall, I certainly recommend that book, even though it is not perfect. ;)