I've just begun my studies of Japanese.

I have access to the following resources and courses through my university:

Genki 1, 2
Japanese for Busy People
Japanese for Everyone


Which above the above methods is better? I can't seem to choose which one I want to do. My plan is to go through Remembering the Kana and start a course while going through remembering the Kanji.

I've heard that it's good to do RTK first, but I'm not sure I could actually make it through the books if I don't learn anything else in tandem.

If you can recommend a course that is better than the three above, please do so. If one of these is your favorite, tell me why!

i'm not all that far in my studies of japanese so I don't know how helpful I will be however I have finished RTK1 and I'm working on RTK3 while going through Tae Kim's grammar guide. After that I plan to do KO2001 and perhaps the Core Sentences from Smart.fm. As for those I haven't really heard that much about them but I think it's funadmental that you learn the kanji first and then move on from there. It will make everything a lot easier for you.

Since you have access to them I'd like to throw in my vote for Genki 1 & 2 as a good beginner set.

Just a side note about doing both Genki and RTK1 simultaneously. Throughout the Genki course you are required to learn (would be very slow going if you didn't since you'd have to look them up) around 300 or so kanji with their readings. This means you are likely to come across kanji in Genki before you have learned them via RTK1, so I'm not sure how one would handle that situation. For the most part you can't just skip ahead in RTK1 very easily to learn the new kanji without first learning it's prerequisite components earlier in the book. You might be able to come up with a method though. I'm sure this same problem will exist with the other texts as well if they teach any kanji.

Edit: grammar is good

The kanji issue is not a huge problem. You just:

1) Look up the character in KANJIDIC to get the RtK number.
2) Use the index to find the components if you don't know them yet.`

While it is certainly possible to do another course next to RTK, I'd personally advise you to just put all your time in just going through RTK1 as soon as humanly possible. It will pay off in the long run, since working through genki or whatever will go a lot more efficiently if you have the kanji nailed down first.

If you fear you wont get enough satisfaction from learning something that doesn't directly teaches you Japanese, then probably a better idea is to start immersing yourself more instead of doing another course at the same time. If you aren't doing so already, its a good idea to watch a LOT of Japanese to increase your listening skills. This will automatically give you some very basic vocabulary as well.

If you HAVE been listening for some time, like I had when I started RTK, and if you are into anime / manga, you could buy some manga of anime series you already watched. If you first study hiragana and katakana, and buy manga which has furigana on all the kanji (aka the pronunciation of the kanji in hiragana) then you can really practice your kana reading speed, and from knowing the anime plus knowing the rough english meanings of the kanji you can very vaguely understand what is going on. Now you shouldn't do this and hope to understand everything, or even 5% of it, its just something to get you used to reading Japanese and to see how you are progressing on the kanji.

Although I haven't updated the Kanji spreadsheet on Google, I'll be adding the KO2001 number list to it. So, one could get the spread sheet and sort it by KO2001 list. Then take the first 555 kanji and sort those by the Heisig number.

Learn those 555 using RevTK or Anki which should take about 50 to 60 hours. Those 555 will cover virtually anything you'll run into in any of those beginner books you listed.

jadoo1989 Wrote:I've just begun my studies of Japanese.

I have access to the following resources and courses through my university:

Genki 1, 2
Japanese for Busy People
Japanese for Everyone


Which above the above methods is better? I can't seem to choose which one I want to do. My plan is to go through Remembering the Kana and start a course while going through remembering the Kanji.

I've heard that it's good to do RTK first, but I'm not sure I could actually make it through the books if I don't learn anything else in tandem.

If you can recommend a course that is better than the three above, please do so. If one of these is your favorite, tell me why!

First of all, those are books. Not courses. Do you mean there are different sections of Japanese classes offered that use each book, and you want to decide which course to take by the book they use? If so, then you could always stop by the college bookstore and peruse the copies on the shelves. The school library probably has a copy you can check out. Try it for a few days and see how it fits your learning style...

If you want my own opinion, then here are my ratings of each of those books: Japanese for Everyone > Genki > Japanese for Busy People. I'm not fond of Genki, personally, since it tends to dumb the language down a great deal and then gear the vocabulary towards student life. However, it does cover plenty of material. Japanese for Busy People is good, succinct and effective, but is unsatisfactorily less comprehensive than the other two. Japanese for Everyone, while my favorite of the three, is also unsatisfactory for use by itself because the pacing is quite fast and the audio component is either out of print or prohibitively expensive (however you want to look at it). Kanji will be a problem, as others have mentioned--not because you can't learn kanji easily: you can, but because it's inefficient to learn them unsystematically, as textbooks will present them to you.

A solution is to take a multi-forked approach. Use more than one book simultaneously. If you want to avoid kanji at first, Jorden's Japanese: The Spoken Language is entirely in romaji and provides more thorough grammatical explanations than each of the three books mentioned above (although I think Japanese for Everyone comes the closest). Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar is great--more logically organized and thorough than any textbook I've seen. It's also important to expose yourself to native material, both so you can learn to recognize when a textbook gives you a sentence that's been simplified past the point of being natural, and so you can start to internalize as much of the language as possible. Other people on this forum can tell you more about this, I'm sure.

Personally, I started on RTK about 6 months into my Japanese studies and finished it about a year and a half after I started my Japanese studies. I actually didn't take a year to complete it. Rather, I was casual about it for the first 9 or so months and then rushed through the final 1800 in about three months' time. I don't get how anybody can--much less that they'd want to--learn so many characters with no understanding of how the language works and no ability to use the characters in a sentence.

There is a kana-only version of 'Japanese for Busy People', so you could get away with studying that + Remmbering the Kanji simultaneously. In fact that's exactly what I did.

Honestly though I found JFPB quite dull and really not suitable for self-study, but used with a class or tutor it'll give you a decent introduction to the language.

Instead of taking a class, I would just start watching Japanese tv shows and not worry about understanding everything they say.

You'll pick up some words here and there and it would be good for listening practice.

Like everyone says, rtk1 is more important. So focus more on rtk1.

For grammar, try Tae Kim. It's free and a good starting point for beginners.

By course, I mean books comprising with the audio and study aids, therefore they are not just the books, but course components as well. It'll be self study in all circumstances. Basically, I have access to all the audio and course components to those books.


I notice one poster said that a complaint for JFE was lack of audio. My university has the audio available, so I already have the audio for that. It looks like I'll learn Kana, then do RTK, and then do JFE with audio.

Out of those, Genki 1 and 2. But I wouldn't recommend it compared to the Tae Kim way.

I'm not familiar with Tae Kim. Is there somewhere I can read up on that?

Just google him. Tae Kim is a guy with a website on J-grammar. A lot of people like to follow his approach. But there's no audio.

I'd agree that Genki is a bit lacking in "meat." JFE isn't bad. Either one would be fine. I was never too keen on JFBP.

In the end, any system will work if you stick with it thoroughly and finish it to the bitter end, and you have a useful review system to keep the info fresh in your head.

Genki is a great introduction to Japanese. Get the basic grammar, vocabulary, and some kanji too. Make sure to use the CD and the workbook to get the most out of it.

Don't worry about learning the kanji from genki before finishing RTK. When I started RTK I had already worked through well over 1,000 kanji.

My basic policy is this, there are plenty of hours in the day to work on both and getting a start on genki or learning some basic Japanese grammar before finishing RTK will in no way slow down your Japanese progress.

jadoo1989 Wrote:By course, I mean books comprising with the audio and study aids, therefore they are not just the books, but course components as well. It'll be self study in all circumstances. Basically, I have access to all the audio and course components to those books.

I notice one poster said that a complaint for JFE was lack of audio. My university has the audio available, so I already have the audio for that. It looks like I'll learn Kana, then do RTK, and then do JFE with audio.

So... instead of course, they're just books in the library that you can check out, free of charge? Dude, get them all. That's the great thing about university. You've got access to their libraries. Take advantage of it while you can.

chamcham Wrote:Instead of taking a class, I would just start watching Japanese tv shows and not worry about understanding everything they say.

You'll pick up some words here and there and it would be good for listening practice.

Like everyone says, rtk1 is more important. So focus more on rtk1.

For grammar, try Tae Kim. It's free and a good starting point for beginners.

I, personally, do not advocate this point of view. I'd agree that RTK should be "done," so to speak, early in one's studies. Knowing any amount of Japanese without being able to read it will frustrate most students, and haphazard study of the kanji is inefficient. But more important than actually learning the language? This seems like an almost guaranteed way to make someone give up on the language altogether. To "know" 2000+ characters and be unable to use them? But that's just me. I think both speaking and writing skills must be learned, if not simultaneously, then at least in turns.

I'd agree that exposure to the language, be it through passively watching TV programs or whatever, is extremely helpful, and Tae Kim strikes the best balance between logical, complete, and easy-to-use grammar guides, plus his guide is 100% free (though I'd pay for a paper copy if there ever were one).

No one is mentioning Japanese in Mangaland. This book is designed for self-study; that's why you should use it. The others you mentioned are not designed for that. It won't stop you from learning from those other books though. This book uses a different approach than most others, you have to respect it for that. You start by learning hiragana/katakana, then you learn common expressions, then you learn ultracommon kanji compounds. They teach patterns too. None of that is super different from the other books (except for the kanji compounds part). Each pattern has at least one manga example followed by analysis and deconstruction. There's a short quiz at the end of each chapter.

Good points jajaan, but I think most people on this site are fixated on doing RTK1 first!

There is a lot of collective wisdom on this site, but ultimately a reasonable portion of it is just personal opinion and not empirical fact. So I recommend people don't get too hung up on finding the one right way. The human mind is not a machine that has to be programmed in a certain way.

I think Genki is as good a place to start as any. JFE is also good, I went through it a while back and it was a good refresher, but I think a complete beginner would be overwhelmed by its busy format.

I have to put in a good word for JFBP. I worked through the first two books of the series during a course when I was in Japan, and started the third. It was a good experience. The one advantage is that each book comes with a workbook, and the audio is generally good. After completing the second book, I passed the JLPT4 (old level system) with no trouble.

I am well passed university, and personally found genki to be too geared to the university crowd. It seems like you are in university, so it might suit you better.

Having said that, my one complaint with the JFBP series is that it is almost too focused on business Japanaese (です・ます）, to the detriment of learning the more colloquial form of speech. Personally, I have found this to be one of the more frustrating things about learning Japanese. I studied business style with JFBP, but my friends all spoke in the colloquial style, and when I would go to Japanese inns (ryokan), the innkeepers would speak the highly polite style. This was more frustrating than the kanji for me.

In any event, I have since picked up Japanese in Mangaland and have started working through it. It is enjoyable and I am finding that it is filling in the colloquial areas quite nicely.

So, I agree with those above: pick up a number of different sources. I would pick one as your primary source, and then supplement with the others.

Good luck!

I finished Japanese for Everyone before ever even knowing about RTK and I didn't have any problem with the kanji. It's been a while but I think the number of kanji presented in any beginner textbook (I've done Genki and JFE, not JFBP) will be so minimal that it really won't be a problem. There is nothing saying that you have to "learn" the kanji you come across a la RTK. You can simply learn to recognize it by site, know the meaning and reading (which will probably be printed right there on the page) and move on. Besides, the type of kanji that they will introduce will be quite easy for you to learn just through rote memorization and you really won't need RTK for anyway. Words like 日月花 don't really need to have stories made up about them to be able to remember how to write them. Kanji is just one small part of Japanese. It isn't any more or less important than any other aspect of the language and it isn't anything that has to be learned first.

That being said, I am a big fan of JFE. I was able to speak and understand to a fairly desent level by the time I finished that book after about 8 months or so.

The original question was about books and self teaching but one might also consider on-line (virtual classroom) courses. Imho, it is also a great option, especially when it comes to activating your passive language abilities. At least in my case, since I have started about one year ago (with Japanese Online Institute), I am quite happy with that approach. I should mention that I am not living in Japon and therefore need opportunities to interact with Japanese speakers.