After years (okay, decades) of wanting to learn Japanese, I’m now almost 40 and getting stuck in. A friend of mine actually attended a BA in Japanese culture, and they used “minna” as their course. She just delivered me all the books she had from the series, a stack of about 25cm (10 inches in freedom units).
It’s a precious edition, but the content should be solid.
However… There are so many books, and it seems they are completely in Japanese. How do I even start with that series if can’t even understand what each book is? Do you guys n girls have a suggestion how to approach this? Or should I look for something friendlier for self-study?
In the mean time, I’m starting WK at a leisurely pace of 1-2 level a month I hope. (Goal is completing level 20 in 1 year… combined with “adult life” and all that.)
Iirc, there’s a translation and grammatical notes book published for it. It was made to make it fit a bit better for self study purposes, but minna no nihongo is more suited to a classroom environment.
I am currently just finishing the Minna no Nihongo beginner series, and I used it entirely for self-study without any teacher or tutor, and it worked out fine! You absolutely do not need to use it in a classroom.
I own the first core book in the series, 初級Ⅰ, as well as the Translation & Grammatical Notes in English, and two of the workbooks: 標準問題集 and 書いて覚える 文型練習帳 (I talk about them in more detail in this study log entry). I also own the same four books for 初級2, the second book in the beginner’s series. I personally don’t feel like I needed any more books in the series than that.
I also made a MNN kanji by WK level spreadsheet, which I only just recently completed! It’s sorted by MNN lesson number by default, but you can also view it sorted by level if you sort that column from A to Z. It’s a neat representation of how far a particular WK level will get you with the textbook, and also a good representation of how many kanji here come up in extremely common words.
Copying over my explanation for my personal strategy that I wrote about in my study log:
I try to complete at least one MNN new lesson before leveling up in WK (so, about every two weeks or so). I can go a little faster if I push myself (by starting to learn the vocab for the next chapter before finishing the previous one), but it does increase the SRS strain, so I have to be careful.
The first thing I do when starting a new lesson is add the vocab to Anki. Then I spend several days just running through the flash cards until I feel comfortable with it. When I started out, I would also learn to write all of the unfamiliar kanji, but I eventually ran out of time to do this. Thankfully, my WK level has gotten high enough, there aren’t very many unknown kanji each level.
After learning the vocab, I read the grammar info for the chapter, then put down the translation book and attempt to work entirely from the Japanese-only main text as much as I can. I read the lesson, then do all of the exercises, except for the last one.
At this point, I do the exercises for that lesson in my two workbooks. I start with 書いて覚える 文型練習帳, then do the excercises in 標準問題集 after. If there are any additional review sections in the workbooks after the lesson, I do those, too.
When I’ve finished the workbooks, I go back and do the last section in the textbook, as well as any further review sections.
Before moving on to the next lesson, I add all of the grammar information from the previous lesson to my (physical) notes.
I try to make at least some progress on the textbook every day. Some days, this means more work than others! No matter what else I have going on, though, I always make sure I at least clear my Anki reviews.
I really like the series, personally, and I’m glad that I went with it, though it’s not the textbook for everyone. I really like that it has you read in Japanese without even having the option of falling back on a direct translation for a lot of the text. I think it does a good job with sort of bridging between the absolute beginner phase and starting to read actual Japanese content.