Textbooks

[ObsidianSnake]

I was just wondering, I want to get some books to further my knowledge, but I don't know what books to get. I am going to buy them at Barnes & Noble if that can help you figure out what I should get.  

[Tenzin Chodron]

I tried to order my Nakama 2 workbook from B&N, but it became unavailable. So I had to buy it before my class began today. It was expensive! Takai dayo!  

[chinotenshi]

ObsidianSnake

I was just wondering, I want to get some books to further my knowledge, but I don't know what books to get. I am going to buy them at Barnes & Noble if that can help you figure out what I should get.

Everytime I browse a Barnes & Noble I don't see anything worth getting, cept maybe the occasional particle guide. My only advice to you is to stay away from any book called "Japanese: The Spoken Language" as they are horrible textbooks. Supposedly "Japanese For Busy People" which I've seen in a Barnes & Noble is a good series of books, but it you have some knowledge already it may be a bit too easy.  

[XDarkodachiX]

At my college, we''re using the "japanese for busy people" series. it''s pretty good. It has various dialogs in both romaji and hiragana/katakana. it also has the typical vocab ect. the only problem i have with it is that all of the pictures in the book are horribly cheesy and poorly drawn.  

[chinotenshi]

XDarkodachiX

At my college, we''re using the "japanese for busy people" series. it''s pretty good. It has various dialogs in both romaji and hiragana/katakana. it also has the typical vocab ect. the only problem i have with it is that all of the pictures in the book are horribly cheesy and poorly drawn.

I've used their dumbed down version for middle school students, "Japanese for Young People" and really liked the setup. The pictures are horribly cheesy and poorly drawn, but the set up is quite nice. I've found that books that have cheesy drawings sometimes actually have better set ups than books with fancy drawings or no drawings O_o  

[XDarkodachiX]

chinotenshi

XDarkodachiX

At my college, we''re using the "japanese for busy people" series. it''s pretty good. It has various dialogs in both romaji and hiragana/katakana. it also has the typical vocab ect. the only problem i have with it is that all of the pictures in the book are horribly cheesy and poorly drawn.

I've used their dumbed down version for middle school students, "Japanese for Young People" and really liked the setup. The pictures are horribly cheesy and poorly drawn, but the set up is quite nice. I've found that books that have cheesy drawings sometimes actually have better set ups than books with fancy drawings or no drawings O_o

well it makes sense when you think about it. the publisher was more concerned with good content and setup than good pictures. whee xp  

[chinotenshi]

XDarkodachiX

chinotenshi

XDarkodachiX

At my college, we''re using the "japanese for busy people" series. it''s pretty good. It has various dialogs in both romaji and hiragana/katakana. it also has the typical vocab ect. the only problem i have with it is that all of the pictures in the book are horribly cheesy and poorly drawn.

I've used their dumbed down version for middle school students, "Japanese for Young People" and really liked the setup. The pictures are horribly cheesy and poorly drawn, but the set up is quite nice. I've found that books that have cheesy drawings sometimes actually have better set ups than books with fancy drawings or no drawings O_o

well it makes sense when you think about it. the publisher was more concerned with good content and setup than good pictures. whee xp

Exactly. And actually, cheesy pictures teach us more than fancy pictures or just plain text because we make fun of it. Without realizing it, by making fun of the picture we learn what the picture is trying to teach us because the cheesiness in the picture becomes attached to whatever vocabulary is being taught.  

[Fuyana]

At my highschool we don't have a text book. The teacher teaches us with hand outs and his knowlegde of the language. He told us the first day that Romaji is evil and to stay away from it. So when ever he usese it I hiss and say sensei you said it was evil. I'm actually glad we don't have a text book  

[bokugakowaii]

ObsidianSnake

I was just wondering, I want to get some books to further my knowledge, but I don't know what books to get. I am going to buy them at Barnes & Noble if that can help you figure out what I should get.

There's a fairly nice, but advanced, textbook named "Intermedate Japanese" , written by Nobuko Mizutani. You should at least have studied the language 300 hours before buying the book.

To answer the topic - I don't go in highschool, just doing some selfstudies.  

[Yilei]

I just have some interesting information about textbooks from taking a foreign language pedagogy course this past quarter.

In any case, some interesting FYI is that the three most used books in the country are Yookoso!, Nakama, and Genki, not in any particular order. The first of course I mentioned was written by the University of California, San Diego and some people (like myself) have some qualms with the romaji system used in it. Nakama was written by a professor from back east that specializes in grammar and Genki was written by a team of teachers in Japan working on a project to help teach Japanese to students who were abroad within Japan.

With that information in mind, I learned this past quarter that choosing a textbook is a difficult task as no one textbook is perfect and you have to decide what the textbook is missing and how to supplement it. As far as romaji is concerned, it was mostly created to just create the transition between English and Japanese smoother, but you can see how it can be confusing with the different systems available and some systems focusing more on pronunciation rather than the characters that are actually there as in Yookoso!.

Generally speaking though, it is thought that teachers should get away from romaji as soon as possible because if students become too reliant on romaji, it'll be more difficult for them to actually be able to read Japanese. There's another textbook made by the University of Hawaii, I believe, that has great grammar study, but is also *very* dry and uses romaji too much and doesn't pull away from it fast enough.

With Nakama though, I've looked at it and I really like the textbook because the grammar is very clear in it, however, according to my instructor, it actually focuses on grammar too much and doesn't give students a lot of chance for excercise or creation within the language, which is also essential because to know a language is to take ownership of it. So in practice, an instructor would also have to supplement the book with activities like roleplays.

Genki is also more grammar thick and is also fairly dry for a classroom in say the U.S. The reason being is that while it worked really well for the students in Japan, it was because those students in Japan would get heavy exposure to the language outside of the classroom also so they would pick up lots of vocabulary and context and culture and would only really need grammar instruction in the classroom.

For Yookoso! it's actually a pretty handy book, but I think some of the grammar instructions could be more concise. To this day, some things I'm still iffy about or I forget, but it is otherwise somewhat balanced. Often times teachers supplement the book with extracurricular writing, roleplays, and videos so that students can be creative, have room for error correction, and also get in a certain amount of cultural learning because part of learning a foreign language is also learning the culture because you have to know "social appropriateness" and phrases for different circumstances.