pimsleur sucks IMO

Why not just bite a hole in your shoes?

Pimsleur's not too bad for beginners, as long as you don't pay for it. You could accomplish more in the 30 days via other methods though.

In my experience, Pimsleur and Rosetta Stone are both awful. Way back when I first started Japanese I used (but never did finish) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Let's_Learn_Japanese

It's a bit goofy but it's more entertaining and useful than all of the other basic Japanese media I've seen out there.

Peronally I think the Genki series is probably the worst series of books ever written in any language on any subject. It is almost all in English, there are almost no examples, it focuses almost exclusively in translating En - Ja, the content is bad at best, negligent at worst and moreover it is brutally slow. It is the antithesis of the AJATT method. Schools use it because it seems incredibly easy, so people wont be scared off, but on the flip side people at those schools don't learn any Japanese.

I've used Pimsleur, and I think it is pretty good, but I did find it very dull and after a while I started to get frustrated because the pronunciaction of words was not always obvious. Also they don't introduce grammar in any kind of structured way, well I think.

Tim Kae's site is fantastic, so are those grammar dictionaries (the yellow, red and blue ones) and I think that although the content of minna no nihongo isn't wildly interesting, it is academically very solid and has lots of example text in Japanese which is approachable.

I'm of the opinion that doing other stuff with RtK is a good idea, but personally I haven't done any real study (although lots of Japanese exposure) because I have just wanted to get RtK finished as quickly as possible, since whilst "fun" it is kind of useless in and of itself, and it's felt to me like to start using what it teaches I need to have it all under my belt.

Thumbs up for Japanese the Manga Way, and I agree with Jarvik that Let's Learn japanese is a bit hoaky, yet for a beginner it's not bad. At least the dialogue is a natural pace.

I think Japanese in Mangaland is probably the best text book I've seen for learning Japanese especially for the grammar as its much easier to understand and follow than tae kim in IMO and its actually fun to read with the manga examples some good sentences to mine too.

Tobberoth wrote:

I'd personally stick to JapanesePod101.com though. (Too bad Chinesepod.com is MUCH better Peter sucks ass).

Is Peter that male speaker with the slightly.... feminine... tonal range? I remember first checking that out while I was learning Korean. I heard a guy speak a little bit and got annoyed after less than a minute. It sounded like he was whining.

Btw, one more thing: I think it's extremely silly to criticize Pimsleur just by saying "...but it doesn't teach you grammar!" Uhh, yeah? NO WAY! So does Heisig...

Divide and conquer, step by step baby.

Last edited by stoked (2009 January 20, 6:13 am)

Jarvik7 wrote:

bandwidthjunkie wrote:

Peronally I think the Genki series is probably the worst series of books ever written in any language on any subject.

I think the problems with Genki stem from the fact that most schools don't use it as it was intended. Kansai Gaidai (whose professors wrote the book) covers each book in one semester in the conversational class (which met every weekday). There was a separate reading & writing class that used other materials which met 3 times a week (for a total of 8 Japanese classes per week). Most schools I've seen in the west which use the series do one book over two semesters, with no supplementary material as at Kansai Gaidai with the reading/writing class. Thus they are only covering like 1/4 of the material in the same timeframe. Plus there is the Japanese immersion that the users of the book are expected to have (notice the ryuugaku theme) but a student in the west would lack. It is really a book meant for intensive schools located in Japan.

note: I was a student at Kansai Gaidai but I tested into 4th year studies and thus didn't use Genki to learn, but I have gone through both books.

Actually, my first experience of Genki was in an intensive school in Japan, I won't say which one, but the name of the book is a hint eh. After a month I realised that I would never learn any Japanese there beyond "こんいちは。おおきいぬがすきです。"　(you'll never get out of play-play time kana and textbook mornonese at these places) and so I felt it was more productive to study by myself.

It's your right to defend a book you think works, but is used badly, but, come on, Genki is a cash cow for the Japan Times and using it well is, as evidence suggests, if possible very hard. To me that's a bad book. I've read good books, after I've worked through them I feel like I know stuff; with Genki I find it hard to find things to actually learn beyond random vocabulary lists. i like the way they choose to teach the verb for knitting 編む (of course in babyese あむ） before the verb for love. why on God's good earth do i want to know the verb "to knit?"

bandwidthjunkie wrote:

Actually, my first experience of Genki was in an intensive school in Japan, I won't say which one, but the name of the book is a hint eh. After a month I realised that I would never learn any Japanese there beyond "こんいちは。おおきいぬがすきです。"　(you'll never get out of play-play time kana and textbook mornonese at these places) and so I felt it was more productive to study by myself.

It's your right to defend a book you think works, but is used badly, but, come on, Genki is a cash cow for the Japan Times and using it well is, as evidence suggests, if possible very hard. To me that's a bad book. I've read good books, after I've worked through them I feel like I know stuff; with Genki I find it hard to find things to actually learn beyond random vocabulary lists. i like the way they choose to teach the verb for knitting 編む (of course in babyese あむ） before the verb for love. why on God's good earth do i want to know the verb "to knit?"

Umm, that sounds like the very definition of "not an intensive school". The reason that it would be in "babyese" kana is because Genki1 is meant for first semester students who do the whole book in 3-4 months (plus another bunch of material in the other class) starting from 0 Japanese knowledge. Even at an intensive school you don't learn enough kanji in the first semester to get to 編.

It may be a cash cow for Japan Times, but like they're gonna say no when a school with a bad Japanese program wants to buy it. There is a LOT more important to being a good language school than what textbook they use. A lot of decent Japanese programs I've seen actually use no books. It sounds like the school you went to would have been awful no matter what book they used.

I don't know how the professors used the book in class other than the rate at which the book was used. But in the 4th year class I took we only used the textbook for a small part of the class. It wasn't the class in and of itself. I've somehow ended up defending (good) schools and Genki at the same time, but really they are integrated. I don't know how good of a book it would be for self study.

Note: Kansai Gaidai isn't a school for Japanese like the one you went to. It is one of the top universities in Japan for foreign language, that just happens to have an intensive Japanese program for ryuugakusei. It's a good thing I went on a 交換留学 otherwise I'd have been paying $8000 per semester.

Last edited by Jarvik7 (2009 January 27, 5:24 pm)

Jarvik7 wrote:

I've somehow ended up defending (good) schools and Genki at the same time, but really they are integrated. I don't know how good of a book it would be for self study.

For folks using it for self-study, I noticed there's a list of sites offering self-study exercises for the kanji, grammar, vocab found in Genki.
http://genki.japantimes.co.jp/self/self.en.html

Jarvik - I also went to Kansai Gaidai. I suspect our group may have been the guinea pigs for Genki.

bandwidthjunkie wrote:

It's your right to defend a book you think works, but is used badly, but, come on, Genki is a cash cow for the Japan Times and using it well is, as evidence suggests, if possible very hard. To me that's a bad book. I've read good books, after I've worked through them I feel like I know stuff; with Genki I find it hard to find things to actually learn beyond random vocabulary lists.

If you couldn't find stuff to learn, maybe Genki was just too easy for you? The books also include expressions, grammar and dialogues. I imagine the kanji level will be similar in all elementary books - so self study is the only solution there.

Genki is used in a large number of major universities and colleges (I stumbled on a list on the Genki site). I would think more than a few are using it well. Sounds like you had bad luck with your school. I can see that the foreign student theme might not appeal to everyone, though.

I haven't used Pimsler or Rosetta Stone, but I can't imagine I would enjoy them too much.  However, you need something.  Listening to Japanese all day through tv, anime, and the like really is NOT going to help you at all without using an outside source.  I've lived in Japan for a year, and I pick up almost nothing without studying it first--and this seems to be true of almost everyone I know who is learning the language here.  Just look at all the JETs and people working at conversation schools.  Most of them, even ones who have lived here for a while, are just awful at Japanese.  They think that by living here they will pick up Japanese, but it doesn't work that way.

Remember the closet in Idaho theory--Idaho is a pretty crappy place, but you can learn just as much Japanese in a closet in Idaho as you can in Japan.  Likewise, you can learn just as much Japanese without watching anime and listening to J-pop all day.

Once you learn something out of a textbook (or any method to teach you Japanese) then it becomes easy to pick it out when you listen to real Japanese.  And once you start to study grammar and vocabulary you gradually start to hear more and more of what you're learning in what you're listening to.  In this way, listening to native Japanese really reinforces your Japanese, and also gives you knowledge about how what you've learned is used in real world situations.  But that's only after you've already learned these things a bit.

Without a method to learn, you get essentially nothing.  Get a textbook.  I'd recommend minna no nihongo or the manga series myself.  Japanesepod101 and others can be a nice suppliment to this.