Weeding out a bunch of Textbook/Audio courses, suggest the best ones

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Reply #1 - 2013 July 18, 12:46 am
PkmnTrainerAbram Member
From: Vero Beach FL Registered: 2009-05-20 Posts: 149

I am going through a bunch of older materials/courses I have lying around that I never finished and want to put the best ones to good use if I can salvage them. Help me choose which ones get the boot and which ones are worth saving. I've done the research on all of these and if possible would like to use these sources rather than spend money on more learning resources. All the ones I'm suggesting have gotten good reviews for the most part on Amazon, but they all seem to have Romanji in them in one way of another.


My Aim and other info: I want to use these to up my listening comprehension and get the rules of grammar to a decent level. I already have Japanese in Mangaland and gone through 1/3 of Introduction to Modern Japanese at one point. I completed RTK and have 500+ vocab studied in Anki from the Core 6k deck, but I've been slow going at it lately, only completing reviews and not getting many new terms covered over the past few days. I've been listening to native news mostly since starting RTK but it's been on and off for a while now. I have trouble with understanding sentences as a whole but feel like I got most of the sounds and distinctions between words down(but we all know it's not perfect). If anyone has personally used these of has any tips on getting the best use out of them, suggest away.


Anyway......

Tuttle: Japanese for Beginners

-I have the edition with the CD. A course that is supposed to teach practical phrases and help understand informal Japanese. Unfortunately it seems the book uses only romanji.

Japanese Demystified

-Unfortunately I don't have the version with the CD, but the book is supposed to help teach Vocab, grammar and sentence structures. It uses kanji/kana/romanji for everything. Is it worth looking into buying the version with the CD?

Living Language Japanese

-This book uses romanji as well, and disgustingly so, but I hear the 2 CDs are top notch for learning. 40 lessons, culture notes, vocab lists, conversations, quizzes, the works. It's just all in romanji.

Reply #2 - 2013 July 18, 1:43 am
uisukii Guest

buonaparte/aYa has uploaded an enhanced version of Hugo Japanese in Three Months PLUS, which contains audio. While it isn't on your list of current resources, you may find it very useful in respect to grammar and listening comprehension. A download in three parts:

http://www.mediafire.com/?3wxhc1991p22rmx
http://www.mediafire.com/?j81sq0m8fpum7be
http://www.mediafire.com/?rynevzonn4t878s

Listening comprehension in general, I have found parallel reading with audio files far superior to any audio course I've tried -but everyone responds to stimuli differently. A large amount of comprehensible audio content is pretty much the core aspect of audio courses. The "best" one would probably be whichever one you are going to enjoy enough to listen to more actively and longer than the others.

Last edited by uisukii (2013 July 18, 1:57 am)

Reply #3 - 2013 July 18, 7:41 am
PkmnTrainerAbram Member
From: Vero Beach FL Registered: 2009-05-20 Posts: 149

uisukii wrote:

buonaparte/aYa has uploaded an enhanced version of Hugo Japanese in Three Months PLUS, which contains audio. While it isn't on your list of current resources, you may find it very useful in respect to grammar and listening comprehension. A download in three parts:

http://www.mediafire.com/?3wxhc1991p22rmx
http://www.mediafire.com/?j81sq0m8fpum7be
http://www.mediafire.com/?rynevzonn4t878s

Listening comprehension in general, I have found parallel reading with audio files far superior to any audio course I've tried -but everyone responds to stimuli differently. A large amount of comprehensible audio content is pretty much the core aspect of audio courses. The "best" one would probably be whichever one you are going to enjoy enough to listen to more actively and longer than the others.

Thanks for that resource but what program is used to open those types of files?

Last edited by PkmnTrainerAbram (2013 July 18, 7:41 am)

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Reply #4 - 2013 July 18, 8:00 am
bambi73 Member
From: Czech Republic Registered: 2012-08-15 Posts: 16

7-zip

Reply #5 - 2013 July 21, 12:24 pm
PkmnTrainerAbram Member
From: Vero Beach FL Registered: 2009-05-20 Posts: 149

Thanks.

If anyone could rate the resources I listed before, that would be great too.

Reply #6 - 2013 July 21, 4:58 pm
tashippy Member
From: New York Registered: 2011-06-18 Posts: 566

Of those you listed, I only had Japanese Demystified. I think it's a pretty good textbook actually and does what the title says. It's kind of like light reading as far as textbooks go, and it's aimed at self-learning, so it doesn't have that 'works better if you're doing it along with a class' caveat that Minna No Nihongo has.

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