Rate this book: Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it. Assimil is different from other texts in that the bulk of it is dialogues which you listen along to with the provided CDs. While it does have explanations, called “まとめ　－　Revision and Notes”, a grammar enthusiast will be wanting more. The idea is to learn through assimilation. While it doesn’t really provide a totally authentic immersion environment, I am impressed at how much is covered in this beginner’s text. Assimil has a pretty lengthy introduction which is quite good at introducing Japanese to someone who has only just come to the Japanese language. From pronunciation, how verbs and adjectives work, the writing systems… Then it says: Ugh! Don’t panic. You don’t have to worry about about all of this right away. Assimil works in two stages, passive and active. I only have the first book, so can only really comment on the passive stage. This is where you don’t really worry about trying to learn kana, kanji, What you do is just go through the lessons, reading along to the tapes. The idea is learning through assimilation. With enough exposure it will all sink in.

Every lesson is a dialogue. On the left page is the Japanese, the right in English. The Japanese has kanji with furigana, a phonetic guide and romaji. The first thing I did was get a black texta and got rid of all that romaji and pronunciation. It is important, I guess, to note that I came to this book as something to reinforce what I had already learnt. So I already knew how to read hiragana/katakana. When you are just starting out romaji is good for a guide. But after a couple of lessons I still think you should black out all that information. It gets confusing, and you shouldn’t rely on it. Hell, this book makes it easy, you don’t even have to learn how to write if you follow this method to a t, but rather only recognise them. Any fool can do that!! The English page is also great. It has an English translation and also a word by word translation so you can work out how sentences are put together. Down the bottom are little notes that help you understand the dialogue better. And every seventh lesson isn’t a dialogue but rather a “revision” lesson which explains all the major things that are happening in the dialogues you just studied.

The audio is good but not great. It provides almost 2 hours worth of audio in Japanese. Each dialogues are fairly short, most are around 2 -3 mins worth. The bad thing is that for the first few dialogues the pace is painfully slow. Perhaps this is good for absolute beginners, but I was not an absolute beginner when I started this. Also, the dialogues never reach a native pace. To a certain extent, this is good for a beginner if you realise it isn’t full speed. It is a good intermediate step. Even myself, sometimes, I find the pace just right when I am trying to read aloud and my tongue gets twisted. I imagine as my reading speeds up, I could modify the audio to also speed it up slightly. At the end of the dialogues are some exercises which are essentially useless. It consists of reading along with short phrases, and fill in the blanks that are entirely in romaji. I looked over these but largely ignored them. One feature I liked is that it has the page numbers written out in Japanese. Would have preferred them to be in kana, as they are in romaji, but it is still a neat feature for those learning their numbers. I am quite impressed how far this book actually goes. For just over 300 pages, it covers a lot. I was impressed that the last dialogue starts off with a poem which was a bit tricky to get my head around at first. I haven’t encountered that in any other beginners text and so it was a nice surprise. I am not sure if I personally would be satisfied to learn from this book, as you may know I like to learn by having things broken apart for me, and then some how I put the pieces back together. In this book you have to work out things for yourself, or perhaps not even work things out, you just go along with the flow and have faith that things will come together in the end. However, as a revision tool I am quite impressed. In the second book you start the active phase, and I am keen to pick it up and see if it lives up to the first.   Note: There is a poll embedded within this post, please visit the site to participate in this post's poll.     Purchase Japanese With Ease: Assimil

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Rate This Textbook: Note: There is a rating embedded within this post, please visit this post to rate it. Genki is a very popular textbook, and it was this popularity that convinced me to make it the first text book I bought, and began my quest to learn Japanese. This was back sometime in 2005 and I was self studying. It was my first attempt at learning a language, apart from some years earlier in school in Italian and Japanese. I went about learning Japanese by myself all wrong. I was excited about it, but didn’t really persue it as fully as I could of. I did not research how to learn languages, and when I got stuck on page 58, titled “Verb Conjugation” and didn’t understand, I didn’t go searching for an explanation elsewhere that would help me understand. And so I stopped learning Japanese. I didn’t exactly “give up”, it’s just that learning Japanese sort of fizzled out into the back ground and I didn’t pick up Genki again until the end of 2006 when I had decided I wanted to study Japanese at university. Genki is a good text book, it is popular for a reason. It weeds out romaji very quickly and never uses only romaji. By lesson 3 you better know your hiragana and katakana! It has long, clear explanations of grammar points. The text book is set out clearly. The font is large, which is great for beginners trying to look at all the strokes in kanji characters. Lots of focus on exercises. Great focus on reading and writing, as well as grammar points. However, there are some points that I didn’t like about Genki, in particular for those self studying. I felt like it did not give me enough examples. There is no answer key, you have to buy it separately! I think this is a huge minus. Sure, a language doesn’t exactly follow “rules” but learning from one’s mistakes is a huge part of learning something, and that opportunity is missed. I feel like you don’t get much bang for your buck with Genki. Even though I said the layout was great and offered lots of space, the compromise is that there isn’t as much substance in there as other text books. Most of the exercises are best for class room/group participation or you need to purchase the audio. It is a well rounded text with the audio, but that plus the answer key - well, it ain’t cheap!

So those are the pros and cons of Genki from my perspective. Over all I think Genki is, while not perfect for me, a great text book.   Buy Genki

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