I use Genki with my Japanese class and as far as textbooks go I like it. Havent had a chance with the other one yet. Out of curiosity how far did you look into the Genki books?

If JFBP goes like the average textbook I've seen/heard about (Genki does it too), then it starts out with focusing more on the grammar with "long" forms of words instead of stuff involving the "short"/dictionary forms. By this I mean it first teaches you about the -ます forms of the words and how that gets conjugated (-ます、-ません、-ませんでした、-ました, etc.) and then starts teaching you more about the "short" forms, and grammar involving them, which involve the form of the word you see in the dictionary (like "to eat" would be shown as たべる in the dictionary, this is it's short form). The short forms end up being more important for some later grammar, and also isnt necessarily as formal as the long forms.

It's not that Genki teaches more informal speech (although it does deal with informal speech and phrases somewhat), it just deals a lot with the short forms of words (mostly starting in the 2nd half of Genki 1 if I remember right) which is something that is helpful to know for structuring future grammar. Personally I wish the book did short forms before long forms, but I guess I can't complain since I learned it eventually

Like Aikynaro said, you probably won't learn the really good informal stuff from a textbook (aside from maybe one geared towards informal speech). But a lot of anime characters and tv show characters will likely use informal/short forms a fair bit (anime especially), and knowing them definitely helped me in understanding what they were talking about (it took me a while to realize I actually did know vocabulary in some of the shows I was watching, they were just using short forms of the words).

I'm obviously a bit biased towards Genki as I enjoy it as a textbook, but regardless, as long as JFBP is working for you then feel free to continue with it. You could always get both if you have the money and just get as much useful material as possible. Genki also has accompanying workbooks, I don't know if the other has that

Last edited by mc962 (January 08, 11:52 pm)

Other than 'Japanese the Manga Way' and 'Japanese in Mangaland', I really didn't look very far into any textbooks. In fact, the main reason I looked into the two above was because they used 'real' examples. The latter also throws away romaji fairly early, which was also decent incentive to try it, though it's examples were reskinned to avoid copyright issues.
In the end, I didn't really find any of them particularly helpful and gave up trying to find a decent beginners textbook.

I found Tae Kim's guide to be much more accessible and comprehensible, though I didn't really start studying it until recently (almost two years after I started learning), so I already understood a decent amount of the grammar points in the first section.

I like the fact that it bases everything off of the dictionary form, which I find to be a much better way of learning conjugation. I did learn about the basic form of verbs pretty early on though, so I don't have much of any experience in trying to learn words in －ます form.
I guess, if you want to consider Tae Kim's grammar guide to be a textbook (it has been turned into a PDF and an actual book, so I guess it could be called that), then I'd recommend that.
Best of all, it's free, as long as you have a computer or smartphone.

That sounds odd... Isn't it a book for people who want to pick up Japanese, but don't have a lot of time to devote to it? I would have thought they would move faster than that in that case...

fabriciocarraro wrote:

Yeah, but apparently it moves at the pace of a snail. =P

Btw, how do you guys like "Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese"? Would you say it's better than a textbook?

It's ok.. I found the explanations in the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar are so much easier to understand.  I would definitely recommend the DoJG series.

[EDIT]: Japanese the Manga Way is also a great beginner resource for Japanese grammar.  It's easy to understand and interesting because it has examples taken directly from manga.

Last edited by rokudo (January 20, 7:52 am)