It would be similar, yes: I knew almost all the grammar in each chapter of Tobira before I studied it because I had already seen it in anime and looked it up at some point.
Yeah. What I would say is that the point of the textbook is that it aggregates a certain amount of material with specific characteristics so that the learner can be exposed to it. The advantage of a textbook is therefore that it allows one to rapidly come across specific structures and learn about them, provided it’s well written. As such,
I’d say that textbooks just exist to help you learn faster and to reach a certain basic level of understanding more quickly so that you can move on to the next stage of your journey. I don’t think there is really a single ‘best’ way, particularly since what you need right now probably depends on how advanced you are at the moment. Someone who already knows more or less everything that comes up in most textbooks would probably benefit a lot more from immersion than from further structured resources. Someone with too little knowledge to avoid hitting a roadblock every ten characters/syllables with native material should probably stick to textbooks for now. Someone who struggles to understand conversations should probably listen more, and someone who struggles to speak or write fluently (or to repeat what’s being said at the same pace as a native speaker, which is what I’m struggling with now) should probably do more production practice. It’s not so much a question of what’s best as of what you need to work on and what’s hindering your progress at present.
I only read a little bit of what is written in the tobira book. But the little bit I read seems to be much easier than real life content. At least I am struggling much more even reading manga than compared to the texts in the tobira book.
I worry a little bit that working through the Tobira book won’t improve my understanding of real life japanese content that much.
Manga… depending on the domain/the setting, yeah, it can be a lot harder than Tobira. Reading a manga set in a hospital, for instance, is going to be really hard even if grammar used in general isn’t too complex, because the vocabulary will be very specific. However, I think that Tobira does cover some slang and contractions, which are really helpful for informal language in manga and anime. That aside…
It will help with stuff like news articles. I’m pretty sure of that much. But perhaps not in the vocabulary department because news articles are often more technical. Tobira really isn’t useless: it’s just that manga is often really informal, which often means you need to know more slang than there is in the textbook, or you need to know how to get from formal Japanese to informal Japanese via a set of rules and common patterns.
I would say anime and manga is usually a very mixed bag, because depending on the setting, characters, etc. different speech patterns can be observed and they’re typically super exaggerated. In the same series you might get people speaking keigo and slang, and talking to each other fast. Fortunately, Tobira seems to cover quite a lot of different styles, from very formal to very casual. Chapter 2 is actually about スピーチスタイル.
That I totally agree with . So far (I know, only chapter 2…) it seems to be way heavier on grammar and general exposition to native text, but has a strange approach to vocabulary, because a lot of the words it teaches or even explains are very, very common and appear in WaniKani. I was surprised when in an example sentence there was a translation for 変化, for instance. Use of kanji is also kind of N4 level for now at least. Nothing too fancy.
What I don’t like so much are the 文法ノート explanations, because at least to me they feel convoluted and only the attached context sentences really show how a specific grammar point is used. The grammar itself is more about nuances and by chapter 2 I’m gradually getting used to the step up in difficulty from Genki.
Alongside I started reading 怪人二十面相 (EN: The Fiend with Twenty Faces) by Edogawa Ranpo and from that I’m already learning way more vocab, even though it’s a massive struggle because hardly any kanji is used and I have to parse text in blocks. It’s a children’s book, though, so the grammar is easy.
I will properly open a different thread with some reading experience of the Aozora Bunko books so people can pick a freebie or two to try .
There is a thread about them already It even contains a list of them ordered by WK level of the contained kanji. There hasn’t been an in-depth discussion of individual books but it should fit well to have it there, I think.
. So far (I know, only chapter 2…) it seems to be way heavier on grammar and general exposition to native text, but has a strange approach to vocabulary, because a lot of the words it teaches or even explains are very, very common and appear in WaniKani. I was surprised when in an example sentence there was a translation for 変化, for instance. Use of kanji is also kind of N4 level for now at least. Nothing too fancy.
It even contains a list of them ordered by WK level of the contained kanji. There hasn’t been an in-depth discussion of individual books but it should fit well to have it there, I think.