Welcome to Gaia! ::

I'm in year 12 and my class has been using the Wakatta! text book this year and last year. It's really good my only complaint is the book is really badly bound so everyone's pages are falling out randomly xp lol

Both in high school and now we're using the book Yookoso! which is made by the University of California, San Diego. It's pretty interesting, but it uses a different school of romaji than probably most other textbooks. The emphasis on the romaji in the textbook is on proper pronunciation so things like "ou" will be written "oo" to emphasize more how you'd actually say the word. 3nodding

Yah, that's pretty much my biggest qualm with it as well. It's helpful for getting fluency and all, but in actuality I think it makes things a bit more difficult since you'll only use romaji for a short while before transitioning into really using kana and kanji all the time, so for me it just made things more confusing. I picked up on hiragana and katakana myself though before ever taking a class, so I might have a bias because of that, but to me it seems more difficult. I've TAed for a first year Japanese class in high school too, and the system focusing on pronunciation really doesn't help much with fixing students' pronunciation, so I don't see the point of it. sweatdrop

Kimono is sooo cheesy domokun We had those at my high school for a few years. During my second year though they switched to whatever textbook my teacher was using in her college Japanese course she took to keep her certification up.

I actually miss the cheesiness that is Kimono sweatdrop


I started with hiragana right off the back. Kimono required hiragana knowledge right from the start so I had to use it. We switched to a book with romaji the next year, but it didn't bother me that much. After I got back from Japan and started using the JSL and JWL books, I couldn't stand the romaji. I still can't. They don't go all the way to pronounciation like most books. It has "ou" as "oo" but it has "sha" as "sya" and "ja" as "zya" which confuses the hell out of me.

eek you miss it?!
want me to scan in a couple pages?

Nyx: thats because I try to relate it like I did when I first started, what it sounded like it should be writen in English.

hehe so far my favorites are where Teri says that the kiddy pool is the reall pool, then someone yells at them for lying and theres the slasher music in the backround. (first book)

then the whole Teri babysitting thing. (second book)

My University uses Nakama 1 and Nakama 2 for its first few Japanese classes. Nakama 1 takes you from Japanese 100, through Japanese 101, and into 102. Nakama 2 starts you at Japanese 200 and goes from there. There's also workbooks that go with the textbooks, which are very helpful, I find.