I'm nearing the end of the Genki series of textbooks, and thought I believe in all the "wonders" of immersion and getting into native material, I would like to get a little more experience through another textbook before leaving the world of instructional material in English.

So, I was wondering, has anyone used the Tobira textbook? And if so, what did you think, and did you use the workbook?

Where I am now, the students do Tobira in 3rd year after finishing Genki 2 in 2nd year. It's a jump, but they manage. I'm going to teach from Tobira for the first time in the fall -- it looks like a good book with a lot of interesting information and activities.

It's a good textbook. I did it after Genki 1 and 2 and also after Core 6k. By the way, after Tobira, I would recommend the Kanzen Master N2 and N1 grammar workbooks.

We used it in my 2nd year Japanese class at university where we spend about 4 months going through it. I really liked it and it's probably my favorite out of the textbooks I have tried - mainly because the texts were so interesting and varied (there are sections with information and explanatory texts about something related to Japanese culture, there are dialogue sections, and there is even a little bit of manga). The grammar explanations are also pretty straightforward with some nice and simple example sentences.

I don't know how it compares to Genki in terms of difficulty, but I remember that it was a big step up from the texbooks we used on 1st year (A Course in Modern Japanese from Nagoya University Press). And I also think it makes sense to do Kanzen Master N2 after finishing Tobira.