Japanese for Busy People: v.1: Vol 1
£18.98
Incredibly dull and poorly laid out - I have been studying Japanese and this is by far the most uninteresting coursebook I have had the misfortune to come across.It s accent on business Japanese scenarios is anachronistic and it steers clear of casual Japanese to quite late on.It tries to pack too much in to each chapter, with a lack of adequate explanations of grammar points and general usage.I found the Minna no Nihongo series much better, and as a 1 volume course book, Japanese for Everyone is excellent.
In at the deep end - This book does throw you right into the entire language and culture of Japan... it doesn t mess around with all of the little pieces that you may only need to know for 1 occasion, but gives you enough to get by on a day to day basis, would reccomend that you get other books with this if you want to know more about the more divers and wider life in Japan.Does give you a good grounding with writing japanese and speaking as well as language structure, although not much about female/male politness..over all a good start!
Good book but you can do better ... - If you’re serious about learning Japanese, don’t buy this book without first checking out the kana version. Japanese for Busy People I comes in two versions. They cost the same, cover the same grammatical ground, using the same dialogues and the same vocabulary. The CDs and workbooks that you can also buy are equally applicable to both. The only difference is that this version uses mainly western characters (known as romaji), and the other uses only Japanese characters (known as kana) to write Japanese. I bought this romaji version, but less than halfway through spent the money again, to buy the kana version.
Excellent, but get the Kana Version - As for content, this book seems very good. It doesn t swamp you with a lot of irrelevant vocabulary, like other books I ve seen. However, I would recommend you first purchase Remebering the Hiragana / Remembering the Katakana double book, and then buy the Kana version of this book. You will find it much easier to progress and will make less errors on pronounciation should you do it this way - and you really, really should!
If you want to learn Japanese, buy it - This is a great book - especially for anyone whose experience of language textbooks are the really boring kind they use in schools. It it interesting, the lessons are relevant, especially for a business people, and the whole thing feels really classy.However - there are a few strange omissions and some of the really simple stuff you expect from a beginners book isn t there, or is scattered around. For example, it would be really good to have a list of the basics right at the start, e.g. numbers (1-100), useful phrases, key words, basic grammar points, etc. However, these are introduced within the text, which generally works quite well, but can be frustrating if you want to quickly look something up, e.g. Japanese numbers appear as notes to exercises as if they are an afterthought, and key phrases are only introduced within the conversations. I have yet to find some of the most basic ones you might use in real life, e.g. I am X years old. These are minor faults, and my advice to anyone interested in studying Japanese is : buy it - it kicks the ass of every other Japanese textbook out there.