So has anyone used An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese? Here's a link to the Japan Times site: http://bookclub.japantimes.co.jp/act/en/...do?id=0741

Basically, at my University we used Genki I and II for the first two years (slow, I know), and now we're using the advanced book from Japan Times. In other words, this book: http://bookclub.japantimes.co.jp/act/en/...do?id=1039 (but these are just the CDs).

So, basically, has anyone used this book? And if so, how would you rate it?

Thanks for the help!

How do you feel about 中級から上級への日本語 after completing Genki II? I would think it's a pretty big jump, but if you feel fine, then it's a good book for you.

FYI, I believe most people do "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese" before doing 中級から上級への日本語。

It seems like your University program's pacing is a little screwy. I would say Genki I & II for the first year, "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese" for 2nd year, and 中級から上級への日本語 for the 3rd year, with a lot of Kanji and grammar picked up along the way.

Well... It' funny you should ask such a question. I am of the same opinion as you. When I proposed this idea to the head Japanese teacher, she went off about how there is no problem, we can't do both genkis in one year, blah blah blah. Now to answer your question: I hate it. Even with doing half of RtK and learning about 300 sentences over the summer (plus constant listening to Japanese), the only thing I was successfully able to do was understand almost everything the teacher said. I personally think my time would have been much better spent learning on my own instead of struggling to do uninteresting things way above my current level. Luckily, next semester I can drop it and still complete my major.

So, sorry, but that was my rant for the day. Anyway, have you used the intermediate book? What did you think?

P.S. - Interesting fact: We only managed to do 2 lessons in a full 16 week course. Talk about boring!

dang!! only 2 lessons? that's pretty sad man >_< i have the genki 1&2 books and the intermediate book... i've been concentrating on iKnow instead of bookstudy though so i haven't read the intermediate book yet... i actually read most of the 1st genki book a couple days ago (in one sitting) it's amazing how fast you can read after you complete about 500 items in iknow... i knew almost all the words so i just looked at how the grammar linked everything together... if it were up to me, i would say do one book a semester but most colleges are slow as hell i think >_<

Wow. That's a pretty huge jump in difficulty. We used the Intermediate Japanese book for our 3rd year text at my Uni... after using Nakama 1 and 2 for the first two years.

I don't have it with me in Japan, so my memory isn't the best... but I remember liking it. I think the only big annoyance I had was that they didn't have any furigana in the vocabulary/kanji lists for each chapter, so I remember looking up the new words being a bit frustrating. But my kanji knowledge was pretty limited at that point, so you might not have the same problem. The only chapter I remember is the one about weddings..... haha. I believe there's a revised edition out now as well... I haven't had a look at it, so I don't know how it differs from the edition I have.

I did a bit of 中級から上級への日本語 after that and didn't have too much trouble. Set it aside to focus specifically on the JLPT though, and haven't gotten back to it.

"An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese" (IAIJ) is an excellent textbook. I have gone through the entire book with an instructor. When I was at UC Berkeley, IAIJ would be completed over two semesters. While studying this text with an instructor here in Japan, I was able to finish one chapter in about 10 days, if I studied hard. This book contains furigana and its vocabulary is less intimidating than 中級から上級への日本語. I would peg IAIJ's level to be pre-JLPT2.

中級から上級への日本語 is a step above that. The first 2 chapters took me over a month to complete (that's after having completed IAIJ and working at the same time). There is no furigana and all vocabulary is in a separate booklet, with no signs of English anywhere. Even the booklet just contains pronunciations for 熟語. I would peg this textbook to be JLPT2 to JLPT1 level.

If your university is skipping IAIJ, I would expect the drop-out rate to be high for students taking Japanese at your school.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:P.S. - Interesting fact: We only managed to do 2 lessons in a full 16 week course. Talk about boring!

This is a sign that the textbook is too difficult. At that rate, 80 weeks (1.5 yrs!!!) to finish that textbook! Granted, the time required to do 中級から上級への日本語 exercises is about 2.5-3 times as long as IAIJ, but 16 weeks is messed up.

You are paying good money and spending a lot of time and effort to take your classes. If many of your classmates feel the same way, you should all get together and talk to the instructor and/or the Japanese head. If they cannot help, you can try going higher.

Yeah, that's a totally messed-up progression there. When i was in college, it was Genki I & II, Then the Intermediate Japanese book by Bojinsha (Can't remember the name, but it was mainly, read this long article, while all the grammar came from the prof explaining the grammar in the article that the book didn't explain... convoluted as hell.) And then only in the upper level classes, (after the first 6 semesters) did they start to use 中級から上級への日本語, and that was mostly as handouts from the workbook.

Jumping into that book after only Genki I and II is just nuts.

you might want to consider studying ahead during christmas/summer break if you can >_<

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1784
I wrote my "review" of this book in this thread at some point.

i would skip using the intermediate approach and try this one:

http://www.sasugabooks.com/images/sasuga/4883190447.jpg

i find that the essays are more interesting and more useful. and there aren't many "dialogues," which i like. also, you can move on to J501 when you're done, which is a great bridge into the "advanced" stuff.

just be careful... the book is in chinese, korean, and english. so make sure to get the right edition. on a side note, the fact that it's designed for a more international audience makes the reading passages far more interesting. i always hated the america bias it seemed IA had.

if you want a book that's more focussed on oral communication, i'd go for something like sura-sura. not many people talk about it... but it's a nice little textbook that a lady over at Yale made. when she designed it, she tried to only include grammar that would help the students. in other words, she didn't draw all the grammar from the JLPT.

good luck!

Thanks for the replies, everyone!

Yeah, I agree with all of you. It's really been rough making it through these two lessons. The teacher is awful, too, and really doesn't want to listen about how this isn't the proper book for us to be using. The main problem probably stems from taking a whole year to do Genki I and another whole year to do Genki II. Those books should take much less time than that.

As for the book (IAIJ), thanks for all the reviews! It seems like it is a very much appreciated book, and also looks quite promising. I think I'll pick it up as a nice reference even if nothing else. But I'm sure I can make use out of some of the grammar points, especially if cross-referenced with the grammar dictionaries.

TGWeaver: Thanks for your suggestions! I did check out those books, however I think I am the type of guy who prefers the dialogues over the paragraphs, especially after this semester with 中級から上級への日本語. Also, my current focus of my Japanese is conversational, so that when I study abroad at 東京外大 next semester I can hold conversations well. Thanks though!

So thanks to everyone who replied! It looks like I will be getting this book!

P.S. - I've also located a teacher in the department who cares how the languages classes are going! I'll be sitting down with him soon to discuss ideas for a new curriculum. If you've got any suggestions, please share 'em!

There's an old thread about a class based on RTK -- sounds like it worked out well. http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=1152

I've used both the texts you mentioned, and I thought they were both fine. There's no magic textbook that will do everything, and good dictionaries and so forth can help you through the harder texts. So much depends on the effort put into it -- both from you and from your professor.

At this moment I am studying sentences in KO, and reading this book. I find it is really interesting because it comes with a CD so you can listen time after time the dialogues. So, with KO (I am now at frame 210) I am learning to read, and at the same time I am learning vocabulary + grammar + listening from this book.
I know I would finish KO sooner if I devote all my time to KO, but I find it really tedious to study only by reviews, and I think better learning is achieved when you get input from different sources.
So, I am thinking that it would be a nice complement to my KO studies, to have the grammar examples of this book AIATIJ in ANKI.
AIATIJ has 15 lessons , and each one has around 10 grammar points with examples. I think that we can make a deck with the examples (2 fields: Japanese and English), and we could use a third field to input some explanation about the grammar point in question, but this third field depends on the user, as different users may want to input different info depending on their grammar knowledge.

Yeah, I'm actually waiting on using this book for a bit until I finish KO. I was debating trying to do both at the same time, and actually tried to do KO while studying other stuff at the same time, and the result was that my KO progress ground to a halt. Now I've just decided to throw all of my effort into that KO for now, maybe tossing in a little grammar here and there to keep from going insane (-er?), but nothing major.

The only thing that bugs me about this textbook is that there isn't an answer key, so you need a Native Speaker (or better yet, and actual Japanese teacher) handy to correct your answers if you use the workbook.

Yes, but we can practice some good listening as well. Just doing KO is kind of boring..

So now that this thread is back, I guess I'll check in to say I've got the book (finally!) and I'm loving it. Haven't got to work with it much, but I had a friend (native Japanese) read through pretty much every dialogue (he was bored) and said that after the first two or three chapters they are really pretty damn good. Also, he said the audio was very good for a textbook. So I'm overall very happy with my choice.

Thanks again to everyone for the help!

Congratz. Good motivation is usually a sign that you are doing something right.

I've just started this book after finishing Japanese for Everyone, and I'm really enjoying it so far. The grammar taught is good (most I haven't encountered before), the dialogues seem to be okay and although there aren't as many exercises as JFE, it still seems to be enough.
Also, the audio is available here for anyone who's interested.

Just wondering if anyone knew but, how does this IAIJ book compare to Tae Kim's grammer? Is it like this massive book with all this grammar that tae kim has never gone over or something? From what I've seen so far though, is that Tae kim covers a bitover what genki 1&2 does.

cloudstrife543 Wrote:Just wondering if anyone knew but, how does this IAIJ book compare to Tae Kim's grammer? Is it like this massive book with all this grammar that tae kim has never gone over or something? From what I've seen so far though, is that Tae kim covers a bitover what genki 1&2 does.

Yes, but genki is super-basic. Tae Kim's grammar is around JLPT 3kyuu - also very basic. IAIJ will let you work towards JLPT 2kyuu (intermediate). IAIJ is not a reference book - it's a textbook with readings/conversations showing examples of
grammar usage. I suggest you browse before you buy to see if it fits your level and interest.

I personally enjoyed the book. I went over the entire thing in 10 weeks over this last summer.

I'm not sure how valid my opinion is -- I had one of the authors teaching it to us. We had 12 people in the class, so it was very personal. She's actually my professor right now, as well.

The other author I sit down and talk with almost every Friday. He's a cool old guy, but maybe a little intimidating.

It's a good book with a lot of grammar points. A lot of the grammar in there is used all the time, and I find myself questioning why it wasn't included in more basic books (〜によって; and lots more)

What I didn't learn, however, is how to read all the kanji in there. They throw a crapload of words at you, all in kanji. This shouldn't be a problem for someone who has completed RTK, but I can guarantee there's kanji that I learned in that book that I don't remember.

Asriel Wrote:What I didn't learn, however, is how to read all the kanji in there. They throw a crapload of words at you, all in kanji. This shouldn't be a problem for someone who has completed RTK, but I can guarantee there's kanji that I learned in that book that I don't remember.

That's great that you have the author as an instructor! I actually liked that textbook, too. As for the Kanji difficulties, I know how you feel. Around the level of IAIJ, the Kanji flood starts to come in. At first, you will want furigana, but after a while, you may not want it.

If anyone is interested, here's a link to all the flashcards I used over summer:

http://www.megaupload.com/?d=OST50M6M

They are, for the most part, organized by Chapters (1-14, we skipped 15)
I don't know what the difference is between 'vocab.anki' and 'vocab2.anki' anymore. I haven't studied them in far too long. Everything else should be fairly self explanatory.

Nakama 1 and 2 for the first two years aren't slow.
Neither is Genki 1 or 2, this is at university, not self teaching. If you find university slow uni is slow, don't go to it, certainly no one is asking you to go.

Not everyone spends their time 24/7 studying 1 particular course at University, be a little more considerate. If you actually go to University you'll realise that people do things like work on a thesis, have double degrees. If a university degree consisted of just ONE subject taken a semester purely in a language, then yeah definitely 1 and 2 would be slow for 2 years.

It's only in third year that things start speeding up and the figures get a little closer to the rate you guys work at, that's because people that start at 3rd year either moved up from 1st/2nd year, or are students straight out of high school. 3rd year at our uni is equiv to JLP2 afaik.

So I'll finish off with, you gotta learn how to walk before you run. Get your fundamentals down before you go rushing off. Every god damn thread I see here is about "finishing JLPT2 in 2 months" or some absurd nonsense. It's good to challenge yourselves, but not in this manner. It's one thing completing a book in a short time frame, and another having perfect production in all speaking, writing, reading, listening.