I’ve just read Akashelia’s “From 0 to Reading Every Day” guide (extremely helpful and much appreciated should Akashelia happen to read this) and that suggests not bothering to buy the Genki books as Tokini Andy goes through them all, and then you can do the exercises here. I’ve tried TA’s first lesson and looked at the exercises and for me there are several issues. Apart from it being much easier to make notes in a book, and find specific things by flipping through it, there seem to be all sorts of additional sections that are listed on the Genki website and referenced in the exercises that TA has missed out. The exercises seem good though the odd section didn’t work properly (wouldn’t accept an answer and then marked it wrong) but that’s ok and they were very comprehensive.
Given all that, my actual questions are:
Are there really sections of the Genki chapters that TA omits, or have I misunderstood something?
Are the online exercises the same material as the workbooks, or would doing both be useful?
Might also be worth mentioning that I already have the Elementary Japanese book recommended on the Tofugo textbook guide and it is quite good. However, there’s so much extra support material for Genki that I’m thinking it might be worth using both.
I went through Genki I fairly recently and I’d say Tokini Andy covers the grammar perfectly fine. I watched Game Gengo’s Genki I series for extra repetition as well as sometimes I found his explanations to hit home better than TA’s did. I compiled a YT playlist of both TA’s and GG’s Genki I videos in a single playlist, if you’re interested: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjFjJi2bXNa7u-tOOwZ7gxLBhSps2fiNk
I find that Seth Clydesdale’s site covers the exercises for each chapter fairly well, but you do miss on some things. His site has exercises related to the various extra bits in the Genki I book (culture notes, expression notes etc.) but the site lacks the actual explanations, IIRC. The exercises seem to be different than in the books and I found it worthwhile to do both on tougher grammar points.
Here’s what you miss on not having the physical books:
Written story chapters (you can still listen to the chapters for free if you download the OTO Navi app!)
Spoken exercises with a partner (which you won’t probably be able to do if you’re a solo learner anyway)
Extra bits (culture notes, expression notes etc.)
The vocab glossary at the back of the textbook (an Anki deck will probably be more effective for vocab anyway (and free!))
Kanji lessons (you’re on WK, so you should be fine!)
Written exercises with a pencil (which I find to teach me better than exercises on a screen, personally)
tl;dr You’ll be fine on grammar by just using free materials online, you’re just missing out on extra stuff which might or might not interest you.
I think this comes down to a personal choice of whether you enjoy owning a textbook or not. Some people don’t enjoy textbooks (or don’t want the expense) so just using the grammar content that’s free online is fine. Personally, I like owning a physical textbook to flip through and reread chapters if I want review, so I bought the book. (I did watch Andy’s videos as well and found them useful) Like the last reply said, ymmv.
It’s correct as per some answers here, that you can “technically” find the content of Genki in free sources and I agree Tokini Andy and Seth Clydesdale are both great (I used them in addition to my Genki books).
However, I think the power of the book is that things are really nicely structured, pictures help you to memorise things and there are all the overviews and indices. So even you can find the information per se also elsewhere, I would still strongly recommend to get both the text book and the work book unless you’re very price sensitive.
