Cons:
although this course briefly introduces the kana, it’s entirely in romaji (foreigner-friendly transliteration); language explanations are short & terse; although some grammar and language function sections build on previous ones, presentation of topics is haphazard; exercises are simplistic & short – translation, fill-in-the-blank, or matching; lengthy vocabulary lists to memorize; formatting of book is a bit cramped

Living Language’s Japanese Complete Course: The Basics: Learn in 4 Simple Steps! proposes a way for you to learn the fundamentals of conversational Japanese, including vocabulary and grammar. The course comes with four hours of spoken Japanese on audio CDs, a 40 lesson, 400 page coursebook (the heart of this basic course), and a “learner’s dictionary” that actually works as an extensive vocabulary list for the main coursebook.

The entire package is structured around the main book, with audio & dictionary sitting on the sidelines as enhancements. The presentation of each lesson isn’t out of the ordinary, particularly if you’ve learned with Living Language or other conversational program before. There are dialogues, explanations of grammar and language functions, culture notes, vocabualry lists and short practice activities within each unit.

The somewhat unique approach to Japanese here involves splitting each unit into four lessons, with each of the four building on the last, starting with 1) single words, moving onto 2) phrases, 3) sentences and, finally, 4) conversations. This cycle continues for ten units.

This words-phrases-sentences-conversations method comes across clearly in the Japanese vocabulary lists, sentence groups or dialogues that begin each lesson. (Dialogues replace lists of words & sentences in the “conversations” lessons.) Explanations, “nuts & bolts”, “tips” & practice exercises don’t maintain the distinction so clearly, particularly in later chapters.

The course covers a slew of vocabulary and phrases, with believable conversation in the dialogues, and the audio CDs read most of the Japanese in the book! All this makes for good listening comprehension practice.

The coverage of Japanese grammar is solid compared to most basic course books. For example, it teaches most every verb form short of the passive/causative passive. The general supplemental grammar appendix is thorough enough that it shouldn’t go to waste on dedicated students.

Coverage of the Japanese writing system, on the other hand, is very poor. In its focus on conversation, the course lets real written Japanese fall by the wayside. You’ll need to pick up to even start transliterating all this romaji into basic kana, and you’re better off learning some kanji sooner rather than later.

The course’s average, sometimes crowded formatting distracted me more than a few times, and the lack of an index makes it less of a reference resource once you’ve gone through it once. Still, an adequate table of contents gives an overview of the book’s organization. I enjoyed the extras, especially the thorough audio CD for such a low priced product, and even the learner’s dictionary (which you’ll quickly outgrow). The audio has some drawbacks (especially compared to a robust audio program like Pimsleur Japanese I) – the pacing isn’t always great for learning, and it’s entirely a passive listen-repeat-memorize affair.

For all it offers, I’m mostly ambivalent about the long-term value of Japanese: Learn in 4 Simple Steps! There’s not too much here that’s unique, and the course will seem like a blur of instructions and transliterated word lists once you’ve completed it. You’ll need something else to study the Japanese writing system, and active learners will require more student-directed audio or media to learn from. Still, as an introduction to the conversational language, this package is an affordable, surprisingly deep start for a basics-only course.

Cons:
especially initially, phrases don’t seem as basic or conversationally relevant as other courses; really have to stick with the program to see good results

Assimil: Japanese with Ease is the Japanese version of Assimil’s line of conversation-driven courses. The course comes with a book and audio CDs, and focuses on teaching you to speak Japanese. You will not learn the written language here, although Assimil does offer Writing Japanese With Ease, which you should buy only after you complete these lessons. (As a side note, I recommend other writing guides & workbooks in my page on Japanese writing, pronunciation & grammar.)

I have already reviewed this course for another language, and the remarks I made about this method hold true. Assimil sticks to its language learning formula, tailoring it to Japanese as needed. That formula emphasizes dialogues and bits of conversational language, followed by quick exercises.

In the beginning, the course sets you up as a “passive learner”. In that stage, you learn through a listen-and-repeat strategy, with a strong emphasis on listening. As you listen to the sounds of Japanese words and phrases lesson by lesson, you follow along with every word as you read the transliterated Japanese text in the book. After making sufficient progress, you become an “active” student, working through tougher exercises (including translations) and receiving training in some of the fundamentals of Japanese grammar.

Assimil Japanese with Ease maintains a consistent focus on conversation from beginning to end. The book lessons are many, each one is short, and most of the text is simply a transcription of the audio. Although you won’t fully master Japanese, if you stick with this program, you’ll have a strong conversational cornerstone for travel and future study. Students looking to write Japanese or have an in-depth understanding of Japanese grammar & syntax should supplement this course with other material.

Cons:
cons about Pimsleur Japanese still apply; only includes eight easy, basic lessons; if you learn well with audio CDs, opt for the more robust Pimsleur sets

Pimsleur goJapanese repackages the first eight lessons of its full (“Comprehensive”) program, offering curious learners a sample of its audio-only method. This continues Pimsleur’s familiar trend of offering more affordable selections of its 32-lesson Comprehensive Japanese I course in the form of a 16-lesson Conversational Japanese and 10-lesson Basic Japanese. You’ll start with the same lessons in all of these, the only difference is how far you can go.

Of course, this taste of basic Japanese isn’t a bad thing. Students new to the much-lauded Pimsleur method can test the waters, and those looking to learn just a little Japanese can find that here. Plus, you’ll get extra MP3 sound file versions of the lessons, allowing you to study on the go. With its emphasis on learning to speak Japanese, you won’t focus on reading or writing, just audio immersion – read my review of Pimsleur Comprehensive Japanese for more details.

The Japan Times’ Genki is among the most popular Japanese language courses for older students and adults. It’s also a common recommendation for self-study. The Genki materials include a course book, a workbook and audio CDs. The lessons come in two phases: Genki I and Genki II. You may also purchase the answer key books separately.

Like many modern language courses, Genki takes a conversational approach. You’ll read and listen to dialogues, learn vocabulary, work through grammar in the context of functional language use, and complete practice exercises. The lessons also teach you to read and write hiragana & katakana (“the kana”) and those devious Chinese characters (“the kanji”) – in other words, you’ll head towards a full understanding of Japanese writing.

Since I haven’t gotten time to work through a copy of these books, I haven’t rated them yet. If you wish to recommend the course to others, by all means post your comments below, or send a copy to be reviewed.

Cons:
poor treatment of writing (nearly all romaji); author’s explanations get lengthy and dense; little guidance to help learners pace themselves; vocab lists and new phrases scattered throughout become overwhelming; organization of material haphazard at times; some of the random memory tricks are too fanciful and imaginitive for no-nonsense students; learning to speak with the audio requires listening, memorizing and repeating Japanese words, sentences and conversations

Teach Yourself Japanese is a book-and-CD program that aims to instruct self-taught students in beginner and intermediate grammar and conversation skills. Like other Teach Yourself courses, the book leads the way, with lessons divided between written dialogues, “key word”-driven vocabulary lists, explanations of grammar, and practice exercises.

The book contains thirteen lessons or units. Each unit covers a heavy dose of language material before moving on to the next. The audi CD mainly reads dialogue, vocab lists and sample phrases aloud.

Units begin with warm-up activities, which help explain new concepts and offer a limited amount of practice before moving on to a series of “explanations”. The explanations introduce Japanese grammar and language usage in dense paragraphs, tables of word forms and example sentences. You will even find yourself confronted with more vocabulary lists in these sections. Fortunately, many explanations are followed by short activities, which require you to parrot back variations of the structure you just learned.

Then, you’ll move to a main dialogue with a through-story throughout the lessons. Typically, these conversations involve one native Japanese and one foreign (English or American) character. The written dialogue takes up a half to full page of text. A vocabulary list is attached to each dialogue.

Following the conversation, you move on to the practice activities. These exercises aren’t innovative, but they offer variety and are rarely too dry. You’ll fill in blanks and answer true-falso questions, but also give directions based on a drawn street map or listen for specific information as you overhear a native speaker (listening comprehension).

The course has been updated to cover the Japanese writing system, as mentioned in the author’s introduction. While you progress, you’ll find the end of some units devoted to teaching kana and, later, kanji. Unfortunately, these are dealt with very roughly and not used regularly. In fact, outside certain short reading selections, the entire course uses only romaji transliteration. As I’ve mentioned before, that’s easy on foreign eyes, but it’s not the way real Japanese is written. If you plan to read and write Japanese, find another course with a clear focus and implementation of Japanese writing.

Outside the lessons, which make up the bulk of the text, you’ll run into a few expected “extras”. The beginning includes a cursory pronunciation guide (although notice that trickier features like intonation aren’t indicated). Answers to the exercises, a short English-Japanese and Japanese-English glossary, a list of verbs by conjugation type and a short grammar index end the book.

Teach Yourself Japanese packs a lot of grammar material, vocabulary and conversation topics into twelve lessons. Getting through the course will involve quite a bit of reading. You will need to set your own pace through the dense and sometimes jumbled structure of the book. For that reason, I hesitate to recommend this book/CD program.

The audio helps your Japanese pronunciation if you listen and repeat along (preferably multiple times), but this book doesn’t offer much to students looking to write as well as speak Japanese. It’s hard to find this much coverage of Japanese at this price, but the course’s shortcomings mean that you should bump other comprehensive Japanese language products ahead of it on your wish list, even if that means spending a bit more cash.

The book & cassette tape lesson course known as Japanese All the Way is now published as Living Language’s Ultimate Japanese. I don’t notice a difference between the two besides the updated cover and CDs, and I have reviewed the newer version (follow link above).

Cons:
limited help if you get stuck; questionable organization; even though you read lots of Japanese, you never read real Japanese writing in the real Japanese script; pacing is off (5 minutes a day won’t work for most); expects you to remember more vocabulary than you will between lessons

Topics Entertainment’s Instant Immersion Japanese Deluxe course combines reading, listening and exercises to help you learn the absolute basics of Japanese.

Sixteen chapters present lessons covering a range of topics. Some lessons seem unified in approach (like the chapter on family), while others come across like a jumbled mishmash of material. Still, the book manages to cover a good range of Japanese language functions and vocabulary.

Vocabulary words and grammar are typically taught in context, with lists and explanations highlighting constructions also used in stories and dialogues. The dialogs and stories build on Japanese you learn along the way, so you typically understand most of the text. When things click, you only need the few helpful translations given in italics beneath new Japanese words in the readings.

Unfortunately, things don’t always click so fast, especially when we’re new to a foreign language as challenging as Japanese. Extra explanations are brief here, so if there’s something you don’t get, it can be difficult to push on.

Japanese practice exercises typically offer your average fill-in-the-blank, true-false, multiple choice or question and answer routine. Colorful drawings spice up every page of the course, including vocab lists and exercises, making the mundane seem a little less so.

The end of the book has answers to exercises, a glossary of vocabulary words by chapter, some cultural info about Japan, a National Geographic map of Japan, and flash cards with a picture on one side and Japanese vocab word on the other.

All the Japanese in the course is written in romaji. Since you spend a lot of the course reading, it’s a shame that you’ll need to retrain yourself to learn to read and write real Japanese if you ever want to handle real Japanese writing.

The workbook comes with an extra CD with videos of people speaking certain phrases from the course, which is a plus. A real audio experience requires purchasing the actual audio CDs (see my link above).

This course is on par with series like Barron’s Japanese the Fast and Fun Way. It tries to get you past the basics of Japanese with readings, vocabulary, decent grammar explanations and exercises without too much difficulty or time. I don’t find the approach particularly immersive, but it’s good for the money if you like what it has to offer. However, if you’re really looking for a complete Japanese audio immersion course, these lessons don’t quite fit.

Cons:
retraces a lot of basic material, but expects you already know some Japanese; lots of vocabulary to memorize; standard dialogues-vocab-explanation-exercises format will put off some; script missing for vocabulary words

In the West, we caricaturize Japanese society as formal, compartmentalized and demanding in the way it follows cultural norms and etiquette. That’s based on a grain of truth, and perhaps nowhere is that truth more evident than in the difference between the everyday Japanese language and standard business Japanese.

Young’s Basic Business Japanese arrives on the scene to fill a perceived gap in Japanese language studies. Even fluent learners struggle with the awkward distinctions made in the formal (and sometimes overly humble) language used in business discussions in Japan.

Instead of undergoing trial by fire, intermediate and advanced Japanese students are invited to learn fluent business Japanese in this lesson course. Basically, you will go through ten lessons of sample dialogues, business vocabulary words, cultural notes and exercise drills to master this unique register of the Japanese language.

Each lesson starts with multiple dialogues. Dialogue pages have gray borders to set them apart from the rest of the lesson. The dialogues are short, but well constructed and realistically relevant to the chapter’s theme. In the lesson on “Entertaining”, you’ll find conversations in which characters invite colleagues to lunch or dinner, propose a toast, make a short speech at a party or thank someone for an invitation that they accept or deny.

Japanese vocabulary is given between dialogs and exercises, so it’s always relevant to reading / listening comprehension tasks and practice exercises. You’ll have a lot to remember, but at least it’s contextualized.

Grammar notes and usage notes point out tricky parts or key points of sentences related to the topic, so Japanese grammar is also studied in context.

Cultural and business practice notes may mention key language phrases, but mostly concentrate on Japanese social norms. As you’d expect, understanding these components of Japanese society is vital to your success in business. Short explanations of practices relevant to each lesson topic are just as essential as linguistic insight.

Exercises are simple and direct, but plentiful. If used well, they will be effective in learning business Japanese.

Overall, this course is a great way to practice your Japanese if you’ll ever use the language in formal business settings. It’s one of the few courses I’ve seen that actively presents you with a wide range of lifelike business conversations in each lesson. I highly recommend buying the audio cassettes for the listening comprehension drills (sorry, no CDs!). This book is also ideal for group or classroom use led by a native Japanese speaker. Dedicated students who fit the course’s profile can learn a lot of relevant Japanese here.

Cons:
set aside a lot of time if you actually want to complete it in 30 days; Japanese dialogues are practical, but formulaic; the lessons are more book-driven than audio-driven; intro to writing is too limited to really teach you the script; neither an immersive method nor a comprehensive grammar (you’ll need other resources for that)

Most chapters present some language topic, like “Telling Time” or “All About Food”, while others deal with linguistic skills, like how to use adjectives or the Japanese particle “de”.

Along the way, you’ll listen to and read along with dialogues. You’ll study explanations of vocabulary words and grammar functions. There are a number of cultural notes distributed throughout the book, too.

Each chapter asks you to complete practice exercises. These activities include translating (Japanese-English and English-Japanese translation), saying something aloud in Japanese and checking your answer against the audio CD, matching, answering questions based on pictures, and others. Instructions are always in English. It’s nothing novel, but it gets the learning done.

For a beginner’s 30-day lesson course, the book ends up covering some more complicated aspects of Japanese grammar and sentence structure.

The Berlitz lessons perform less admirably when it comes to writing the Japanese script. Short sections in each chapter introduce a handful of kana and ask you to practice writing them. But you never see or use hiragana and katakana outside of these small sections. The final chapter introduces kanji, but barely scratches the surface. See my review category “script and writing” for some suggestions that will teach you what you can’t learn here.

If you’re a grammar-minded student who wants some structure in your studies, but still enjoy plenty of exposure to native spoken Japanese and plenty of practice exercises, this is a good beginner’s course for you. Learners looking to immerse themselves in an all-audio program should look elsewhere. Students who want master fluent Japanese, and especially want to start out writing Japanese, won’t find much help here. All in all, though, it’s a thorough introduction to the basics of Japanese, and a stable stepping stone to further study.

Cons:
author’s discussions will put off readers looking for more direct exposure to the language; connection between language skills in each chapter and dialogues and examples is often loose; only exercises are the short “fun and games” section on the last page of each chapter; vocabulary lists to memorize; no methodical teaching of grammar; no writing (kana or kanji)

If you’ve ever flipped through a …for Dummies book before, Sato’s Japanese for Dummies won’t surprise you. The series’ formatting, look and casual language shine through here, too.

Chapters one through sixteen set out to teach you the basics of conversational Japanese. In the first three chapters, you’ll learn about Japanese words you may already know, English words borrowed into Japanese, how to count, the absolute basics of grammar, and how to introduce yourself and greet people.

Chapters four to sixteen each deal with some general topic, like “talking on the telephone”, which the author uses to introduce relevant language skills and vocabulary words.

Each chapter gives plenty of vocabulary and explanations of specific words and phrases. You’ll also find multiple dialogues, which the author doesn’t always relate to the specific skills you’re learning in the explanations. You’ll find Japanese grammar points (like past tense verbs) used in early dialogues, but not explained until later.

The disconnect between language goals in the explanations and the actual language used in example conversations will make it difficult for students to track their progress in learning Japanese. On top of that, the exercises are short, maybe amounting to a half-dozen simple fill-in-the-blanks at the end of many chapters. That makes it tough to test your linguistic abilities.

You’ll find this isn’t a way to teach yourself about Japanese writing, either. Also, the course doesn’t systematically introduce grammar. It does offer an appendix with verb forms, a short English to Japanese and Japanese to English glossary, and a good index.

The audio CD reads the dialogs and some of the early pronunciation samples to you. It’s not a complete audio lesson approach, but it’s a plus. The pronunciation guide is basic, but helpful, and will teach you to read the book’s speech transliteration code. For instance, the book uses “ah” to help you pronounce Japanese romaji “a” (short A), and “ahh” to guide you to the correct pronunciation of romaji “?” (long A). Transliterated Japanese appears throughout the rest of the book: when you learn the word “d?mo”, you’ll see “dohh-moh” written beneath it.

Japanese for Dummies can’t compete with results-driven courses. It’s missing too many of the essentials that comprehensive methods provide. If you’re looking for an introduction to audio conversations, grammar, writing or vocabulary, there are better resources for each – take a look at my review categories on the right. If you want some exposure to a range of basic Japanese with engaging explanations, and can overlook the flaws I mentioned, you’ll be somewhat content with this book and CD.