I'd like some input from people that have worked with Genki and then put it in practice (ideally someone who's fairly proficient in Japanese and is somewhat familiar with the textbooks). I have both Genki I and II, and I got up to about Lesson 7 before I had to pause and work on RTK (the reviews were getting too big to do both every day). Anyway, I'll be finished with RTK by next week (hooray!) and was gearing up to get back into Genki this weekend. Then I went to Amazon and came across a scathing review that gave me some serious doubts about the text. It's a long read, so I've bolded the parts I'm concerned about below:
This book may be good for young students who anticipate homestays (and I'm skeptical even about that, for reasons below), but if you're an adult you may find this book excruciating. I recently moved to Japan, and finally determined to take some private lessons to get a more systematic grasp on the language than I have had hitherto. My school uses this text. I can't compare it with other college-style textbooks, which may mostly suffer from the same problems, but among the issues I have with it are:
@ The framing scenario is of foreign students living in homestays and interacting with their homestay families and with each other; there is also a lot of school-related vocabluary. This is largely irrelevant for an adult's experience. It is useless for business, BTW (though in my own case, I was looking more for daily life vocabulary and situations than business).
@ Even within this scenario, the book doesn't teach you how to really have conversation -- all classmates address each other with polite "-masu" form verbs. In real life, this would be distant or even rude with your pals. (Moreover, on the accompanying tapes female gaijin characters like "Mary" and "Sue" address their classmates and homestay parents in that saccharine, squeaky little-girl voice that is normally used by shop staff and female announcers on infomercials, not people talking to friends or family.)
@ In Japan, it is very rare for people to mirror back to you what you say, or for it to be appropriate for you to mirror back to them. This is especially true if your main interactions are with people in shops, where they will use a lot of "keigo" (honorific speech) or other specialized formulas. Simple example: A waitress will bring stuff to your table and ask "Yoroshii desu ka?" (Is that OK?), you don't answer back "Hai, yoroshii desu." Even saying goodbye is highly context dependent; e.g. when someone says "Sorry I'm being so rude as to leave before you," even if you can catch the Japanese phrase you will look like an idiot if you reply symmetrically (been there, done that). This book doesn't give you a clue about dealing with such situations, nor help you to unravel what Japanese people are saying to you when they respond to your questions or remarks. All dialogues and exercises are based on the mirroring principle (as well as indiscriminate use of "wa", the topic particle). So it's pretty useless for practical purposes -- unless you plan to use Japanese in class only.
@ While it's a plus that reading & writing practice are integrated into the text, the reading selections in early chapters are devoid of imagination. After several chapters of reading stuff like "Are you OK? I am fine. It's cold here in Japan. I took some pictures, studied Japanese and took a bath. My father is nice, but very busy," and so on, you just want to scream.
@ Although the publication date is 1999, at which time a dot-com boom was beginning even in Japan, this book is snail-mail all the way: you spend time learning about stamps and postcards, but there isn't anything about email, the Internet or texting. (Forget also about DVDs -- people watch videos.)
@ Japanese verb conjugation has a wonderful regularity, in that almost every verb has a set of stems that are based variously on -A-, -I-, -U-, -E- and -O- (e.g., negative, polite, dictionary, causative and "let's" forms, respectively). This tracks the order of Japanese vowels in the kana writing systems, so it's easy to remember. However, "Genki"'s presentation of verbs obliterates this useful pattern (see, e.g. conjugation chart @ 344 of Vol. I).
@ The book lacks any review chapters, appendices, exercises or quizzes to help you consolidate what you've learned in a chunk of preceding chapters. Schools don't necessarily take the initiative to review the material every now and then, so you may need to request special quizzes to force yourself to review stuff you studied weeks earlier. My teachers were amenable when asked, though my lessons are one-on-one, and this might be more difficult to do if the book is used in a class situation (you might ask about that before you sign up). If you're using the book to study on your own, you're on your own with this too.
Like most students of Japanese, I've stocked up on a shelfload of other books of varying usefulness. (Two of the best, Rita Lampkin's "Japanese: Verbs and Essentials of Grammar" and Jay Rubin's "Making Sense of Japanese", unfortunately are exclusively in Roman characters, or nearly so.) You will definitely need to to the same (or at least half a shelfload) if you use this book. But not getting bored by the boook will be a bigger challenge if you're older than 22. One possible tip might be to look for a book that has at least one gaijin co-author. This one is written entirely by Japanese authors; it could have benefitted from the perspective of a formerly-puzzled foreigner.
PS ADDED 2009/01: Now that I have more experience with Genki 2, I feel there are several additional caveats for prospective users of this text. First, the good news is that you learn more informal usage, and a little bit of polite language, especially in Genki 2. Unfortunately, many of the informal expressions are *too* informal, including several that I have never heard any educated person use, and which my wife (a native speaker) and my teacher (ditto) confirmed they would never use, even at home with family. This means that, especially in Genki 2, you can expect a constant struggle to calibrate the text with the spoken language; my teachers even skip some of the material because it's wrong or incomplete.
Also, more bad news if you're hoping to take the Japanese Language Proficiency Test. Although Genki 2 will get you into some of the Level 3 material, the set of Genki 1+2 still doesn't cover all the material even for Level 4 (the easiest level). I was amazed, and kind of steamed, at the new vocabulary (several dozen words -- all of them traditional, not new words that have become current since Genki was published) and grammatical constructions I had to learn just for the most basic level. And as one commenter noted, the sentence structures used in Level 4 are more complex than in Genki. This is not too tough to remedy, since there's plenty of review material available from other vendors. But given that the textbook was prepared in Japan by a Japanese publisher (The Japan Times, the leading local English-language newspaper here), this gap is more surprising. Please consider this before you embark on a course with Genki. You might want to check out the 2008 revision of "Everyone's Japanese/Minna no nihongo" -- not easy, but one that my teachers often use when Genki is wrong or obtuse.
Most of this doesn't bother me; I'm not concerned about dry texts or less-than-useful vocabulary, because it's grammar that's important. But he's saying that in some places it's wrong, and it makes grammar harder than it is. He even goes so far as to say some of it is WRONG. Would I be doing myself a disservice by using these books? I also have Japanese in Mangaland, but I've heard people say that manga is no good for mining, so this would be less than ideal...can anyone give me any helpful information?
Last edited by jmkeralis (2009 June 19, 3:51 pm)
- thank you.
