Are they actually good? I did some searching here and one guy said it was amazing, but all the Amazon reviews say otherwise. The courses at my college teach using Nakama, and I have only used Genki before. I'll probably taking Japanese in January, so I wanted to get an idea of the book. Pretty expensive, regardless...
2011-09-20, 6:03 pm
I had a class that used Nakama book 1 a while ago, but keep in mind that I haven't used Genki, so I can't compare the two, and that most of my criticisms of the book are things I would also apply to classes in general (not really a language classes sort of person). Also, it looks like they have a new edition out. I used the older one with the green cover.
The good points:
* It introduces kana very early on, and stops using romaji after the first few chapters. (After using Japanese: The Spoken Language, this was refreshing.)
* Some of the culture notes were sort of interesting to read.
*They had nice, easy to understand tables for things.
The bad points:
* The way my class did it, you learn hiragana in class 101, and katakana in class 102, AKA it takes two semesters to cover all the kana. (Granted, I wish language classes moved faster in general)
* The chapters are long, I mean, we did like 3 a semester, and most of the content was devoted to drills, and a little roleplay. Most of the time they felt like they dragged on and on.
The good points:
* It introduces kana very early on, and stops using romaji after the first few chapters. (After using Japanese: The Spoken Language, this was refreshing.)
* Some of the culture notes were sort of interesting to read.
*They had nice, easy to understand tables for things.
The bad points:
* The way my class did it, you learn hiragana in class 101, and katakana in class 102, AKA it takes two semesters to cover all the kana. (Granted, I wish language classes moved faster in general)
* The chapters are long, I mean, we did like 3 a semester, and most of the content was devoted to drills, and a little roleplay. Most of the time they felt like they dragged on and on.