Bought this book when I was in japan last year as one of my teacher was a big advocater of the method. I was pretty intense on it for a couple of month and then... nothing. I got nowhere and I'm afraid I forgot most of those insignificant piece of conversation . There's no structure whatsoever , obviously no specific interest in the material , it's divided in 5 level of difficulties but this division is a bit arbitrary and what is more bothersome it doesn't cover enough ground to be decisive (when it comes to kanji for instance KO2001 is not something that I would qualifiy "engrossing" nevertheless it's damn efficient. Same thing goes for RTK and you can even get some laugh with this latter)
I would say it's useful for having SOME reflexes, some very nice sentences you learn by heart.... but that's the kind of thing you can get and at a way higher level if you're really into the AJATT method , especially now with subs2srs . The little chit chat... take a casual highschool anime and break it with subs2srs to get all those little lines that makes a conversation lively . You don't need this book which can make you look like fluent for ....10 seconds to 1 minute (optimistic point of view) . The extent and depth are just too narrow. You need thousands and thousands of little expression to have real fluency .
I pass on that and I would disadvise anyone from spending some bucks on it . It's like most of the japanese book : not bad but not seminal . Except if you got load of cash and time you've got investment with better rate .
> nest0r
To answer your post post , I never USED I know (don't intend to either after KO2001 but I find it some real value though) but I took a look at it and it's just totally different . Shadowing aims at some kind of verbal fluency (very limited I must say.see above) . Iknow aims at a more general result in proficency . Iknow could be a rival to KO2001 (and KO2001 would win hands down
) not to shadowing.
As far as I'm concerned one should have real motives and very ACCURATE OBJECTIVES to use grammar/kanji/formal book . Otherwise it's about learning general japanese and the REAL japanese (newspaper , drama , anime , technical books , forums, etc....) is just better . In my opinion so far I've only found two books that are definetely in the first category : RTK and KO2001 . Otherwise you have to set clear goals : if you want to learn keigos then OK you can buy keigo books , if you want to pass JLPT OK you can buy unicom's , kanzen , etc.... whatever . Shadowing is NOT a subtitute to real stuff so there is no real goal and interest in buying this book.
I would say it's useful for having SOME reflexes, some very nice sentences you learn by heart.... but that's the kind of thing you can get and at a way higher level if you're really into the AJATT method , especially now with subs2srs . The little chit chat... take a casual highschool anime and break it with subs2srs to get all those little lines that makes a conversation lively . You don't need this book which can make you look like fluent for ....10 seconds to 1 minute (optimistic point of view) . The extent and depth are just too narrow. You need thousands and thousands of little expression to have real fluency .
I pass on that and I would disadvise anyone from spending some bucks on it . It's like most of the japanese book : not bad but not seminal . Except if you got load of cash and time you've got investment with better rate .
> nest0r
To answer your post post , I never USED I know (don't intend to either after KO2001 but I find it some real value though) but I took a look at it and it's just totally different . Shadowing aims at some kind of verbal fluency (very limited I must say.see above) . Iknow aims at a more general result in proficency . Iknow could be a rival to KO2001 (and KO2001 would win hands down
) not to shadowing.As far as I'm concerned one should have real motives and very ACCURATE OBJECTIVES to use grammar/kanji/formal book . Otherwise it's about learning general japanese and the REAL japanese (newspaper , drama , anime , technical books , forums, etc....) is just better . In my opinion so far I've only found two books that are definetely in the first category : RTK and KO2001 . Otherwise you have to set clear goals : if you want to learn keigos then OK you can buy keigo books , if you want to pass JLPT OK you can buy unicom's , kanzen , etc.... whatever . Shadowing is NOT a subtitute to real stuff so there is no real goal and interest in buying this book.
Edited: 2009-02-18, 10:08 am