Japanese Language Learning Reviews

Teach Yourself Japanese by Gilhooly & Mikiko Kurose

Score:
5 / 10
Pros:
plenty of material covered (grammar and language structure); dialogues and examples introduce a lot of standard, polite Japanese conversation skills; variety of exercises and challenges keeps the course helpful and – sometimes – engaging; audio CD good for pronunciation practice

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.