I’d be curious about Quartet as well, since it’s effectively Tobira’s counterpart in Genki series. (Written, or published, by the same company, as Genki, if I remember correctly.) I feel like I’m still to far away from those to look, as I’ve found I’m only going succeed at learning this language if I take it one day at a time.
If that ramp up holds in the usual textbooks for intermmediate levels, and the OP really does prefer a strict exploration of the spoken language, then I would definitely consider recommending the Japanese: The Spoken Language series.
The Beginner Tobira feels like it tries to cover the same grammar, too, but in a different order. One that I find more practical, personally.
I only mean that it’s dismal in respect to thinking of these books as their main part being about the written language. In another context, though, I’d agree that such a statement could be considered disingenuous. Of course, if the ramp-ups mentioned previously hold across series, then I’d be completely willing to change my opinion. (As mentioned earlier. )
That’s good to know. That brings it well up to 25%, in which case I would say that it does have a significant amount of the written language within it. That is, to the context in which is spoken here, anyway. (25% is still a small amount when it comes to the entire language, of course.) That series always did seem to be the so-called “red-headed stepchild” of the main textbooks to me. Lol.
Well, this person attests their spoken japanese excelled due to the JSL series. Mind you, they say they spent 3 years covering the series in university.
As for my own personal experience….it’s hard to say. I was only taking Japanese as an elective and just for fun, so I didn’t have any plans to become fluent. I did study hard because I really liked the language, but I gravitated more towards writing. I tried to focus on the listening and speaking more, but the audio tapes absolutely bored me to tears.
Speaking of which, I finally found the audio files on the OSU website.
Very little of みんなの日本語 uses open-ended exercises in the beginning levels 初級 I and II. It’s predominantly closed exercises with multiple choice and fill-in-the-blanks kinds of exercises, with an answer key in the back. The 中級 book does have a few open-ended exercises. As far as ‘the spoken language’, one of the strengths of みんなの日本語 in this area is also the challenge - the listening exercises are quite fast at times, even at the beginner level. They’re manageable, but it sometimes takes repeated listens (which most good listening exercises should have). Also, all three texts (Genki, MnN, and Tobira) do introduce their units with clear contextual conversations.
I think there are some decent Listening resources that are conversation-based and which ask for the listener to identify either specific details or implied intentions (and even follow up dialogue?) as part of the prompts, so while the learner is not required to speak themselves and create output, they are at least prompted to intelligibly comprehend what is happening while others are speaking, which is an important skill and something that is necessary for engaging in real-life speaking tasks.
But yeah, as far as I understand, the JLPT still doesn’t really assess speaking/writing tasks.
I don’t think that one can state that the amount of Kanji taught in a textbook is a good indicator on if that textbook is a good source for learning written language or worse, as an indicator if the that textbook is - as a reverse conclusion - a bad one in teaching the spoken language.
Hell to MNN!!!
This series sucks, and I would recommend anyone who is told to use it to change classes asap.
Of course not. This wasn’t a measure for how well the books taught the written language, nor for how well they taught the spoken language, either. But rather, how much of a focus they placed on one versus the other.
When you wrote “the main part of” above, that came across to me as meaning “majority” or “focus”. But, from this response, it sounds like you actually meant something closer to what I might call intesntity.
Ultimately, that’s the reason I switched to the Beginner Tobira series. It takes a slightly more technical approach and has pitch accent for words. Unfortunately, it doesn’t go into phrasal adjustments thereof. And, had I known about the series you’d posted when I was making my switch, I might have chosen it, actually.
If intensity is what you’re looking for, than the series you posted is definitely the most intense I’ve seen. And, in that case, sounds like the perfect series for your goals.
I wouldn’t necesarily go that far for MNN, but definitely for Genki. Different strokes for different folks, eh?
I would recommend people to consider if Minna no Nihongo (or any other resource) suits their needs, and not throw away a good teacher because of preconceived notions about a book.
The interesting thing about this book series to me (as an actual linguist), is the book is kind of trying to be a middle ground between a textbook aimed at non-linguists and something that a linguist would use as reference material. It has some really good things to say, but by trying to put it in this middle-ground language, it makes it too verbose for a linguist to quickly flip through and find explanations of the stuff they are looking for (and, funnily, a linguist is also gonna be annoyed by the weird half-phonetic script they write the book in. It’s much much much much easier to see sound changes and phonology stuff when you write stuff in IPA), but also assumes that a normal user is going to have knowledge of a lot of stuff that a they are absolutely not gonna have.
I own the first volume and have looked through it a bit, but found that https://www.amazon.com/Introduction-Japanese-Linguistics-3rd/dp/1444337734 was a much better approach to the language from a linguistics perspective (this was also the textbook for the Japanese Linguistics topics class at my school). On the language learner side, I still prefer Tae Kim to a lot of the other beginner textbooks, but admittedly I haven’t looked at many of these outside of a handful of the popular ones
I think I got my copy for like $5, so it was definitely worth it for me, but I definitely wouldn’t go out of your way to invest in this book over other textbooks
This right here……I have not found it to be a good reference at all. There absolutely is fantastic, nuanced information all throughout the book, it’s just so hard to find.
Also, @javerend, your profile has your location as Bellingham, WA. I’m from Bellingham (moved away about 20 years ago). In fact, I went to WCC where I first took Japanese and slaved through “Japanese the Spoken Language”. I wonder if Buckley Sensei is still using this textbook for her classes
That’s wild! I went to Western and graduated a few years ago, but I did take a few classes at WCC! Stuck around just because I love the area so much (graduating during covid also didn’t exactly make it easy to move lol). I checked the WCC bookstore and it looks like Buckley Sensei is still there teaching, but has switched to using Genki
The world is at once both impossibly large and impossibly small; nice to meet you!
Bit late to this thread, but this was the textbook series I used in my two years of Japanese study at university. I understand they’re not the usual picks, and I haven’t used any other textbook so I can’t compare exactly, but I thought JSL was good. A lot of what people have said makes sense to me: it’s more linguistics-focused, so YMMV on whether it’s helpful or dry. It’s focused on English-speaking learners, which I think is useful (if that is your native language). It uses pitch accent markings which is wonderful for getting your speech closer to what it should sound like (and getting more used to what things tend to sound like). It uses nihon-shiki or similar romanization which is dreadful for readability, but I recommend getting the Japanese-script booklets and reading those wherever appropriate instead. You don’t really want to get too reliant on romaji (of any sort).
Mostly my liking for these textbooks comes down to really respecting my Japanese program, which of course involved a lot more than just textbook learning. But because I respected my teachers and the head of the program, I respect their choice of textbook. If I were buying this outside of a classroom that required it, I’d probably decide based on price. If it’s hundreds of dollars for the series it’s harder to say that that’s worth it.
I also have a degree in linguistics, so you’d think JSL would be right up my alley, but… I looked at the book briefly (first 2-3 chapters) when I was starting out, and I didn’t find it particularly appealing at the time.
A linguistic reference is something different than a learning resource - and when I have my language learner hat on, I don’t necessarily want to deal with all the nuances right away. I found the explanations around e.g. all the differences in usage between よ and ね to be way more detailed that one needs at that stage.
(And when I do put my linguist hat on, it’s not a good resource either - it doesn’t contain the precision and rigour one would come to expect from a proper linguistic text.)
Hence why I think that Genki is a good book - yes, the grammar explanations are frequently “crap” (oftentimes they’re not even explanations as much as vague descriptions) - but in my experience, that’s what grammar notes look like in most learning resources across all languages. Explaining all the nuances between は and が fills entire chapters. I find it more important to understand the general idea of a construction so that you can then absorb the proper usage by encountering it over and over. And once you have the fundamentals down, you can still look into a more dedicated grammar resource to really pin down the nuances. (That’s not to say that I didn’t wish that Genki would explain Japanese sentence structure in a more systematic way somewhere - that would certainly be a helpful addition - but I was able to get that information from elsewhere.)
There’s a myth that proper teaching means you have to start with a 100% correct explanation or you will confuse people forever, but we also don’t start teaching kids about relativity before we teach simple Newtonian mechanics, so I don’t really buy that argument.
That said, it would be a fun exercise for me to go back now, after completing Genki I and II and review the material in JSL. I think at that stage the more verbose and complex explanations might be much more useful.
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