brianobush Wrote:It uses a crazy version of romaji that makes no sense to the untrained.
This is a bit mis-leading--it basically uses the same romaji as most Japanese people use when they type. Based on that fact alone, I find it weird to call it crazy. The romaji used in the book is not made to line up with English, but rather made to line up with how the kana are written. You're supposed to learn the conversations and such in the book through listening to the CD, not by looking at the romaji.
As for your comments Asriel, I recognize the reasons for some of what you mention. For example, I would expect anyone who did JSL to be better at grammar than vocabulary. The author's idea was that the easiest thing to pick up in the Japanese language once you're in Japan is vocabulary, whereas grammar and such is harder to pick up. Therefore the book doesn't introduce as much vocabulary as many textbooks (when I studied abroad in Japan we did Genki 2. I had just finished JSL 1, and I had to learn a ton of new vocabulary quickly to save myself from confusion--there's so much more vocab in Genki).
However, I find the Keigo comments strange. JSL introduces some keigo way before most books (maybe chapter 7 of the first book), but it also introduces casual Japanese faster than most textbooks (certainly a lot earlier than Genki). Also, one good think about JSL is that dialogues between friends are actually done in very casual Japanese, whereas dialogues between business people are done in more polite Japanese. One frustrating part about reading dialogues in Genki was that in early chapters friends talk using です and ます (which is completely ridiculous), and always in a really unnatural way (the way that English textbooks sound in Japan).
The person with the bad accent is suprising however, since usually that's stressed a lot by users of that textbook.
Note that maybe I'm a bit biased because I had really good teachers. The woman who wrote the textbook (Jorden) taught it at Cornell for many years, and when she stopped my professor taught it there for a long time. After that he switched to my college, and I learned under him and a lovely Japanese woman. He was good friends with Jorden and often kept in touch with her about teaching the textbook and so on. I also met her through my professor a couple of years before she died; she was a very charimastic old woman!
