Japanese: The Spoken Language.

As the name suggest its all about the spoken word. Since it's all about the spoken word, the main type of drills are speaking drills. So if you learn something new expect about 3 or 4 different drills (each drill has about 5-12 actual sentences that you need to repeat and mimic from the cd) at first and then a few reviews as you progress through the bok. This book has worked magic for me because it has really wonderful grammar explanations and lots and lots of speaking drills. It has some application drills, but those are really just to make sure that you learned the stuff when you were doing the speaking drills.

As far as JLPT goes, I'm not sure where it will get you for reading (since it totally ignores reading from the start). I know that you will be able to hold conversations at native speed by the time you finish the book (when those conversations are within the range of the words and phrases you learned). but as long as you are doing RTK or sentence mining, that shouldn't be a problem.

there are two books, so I'll only link the 1st.

http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Spoken-L … 0300038348

idk about JSL. i know it has rave reviews, and ive never used it BUT

it seems that teachers/advanced students like this book

the students who used that i met cant speak that well. ironic. their grammar is wonderful, but their pronunciation is especially bad. one person always spoke in ridiculousl keigo and always used ?(ware) or ??(sessha) instead of anything normal.

i know these kinds of things are similar to bashing RTK because of a few users, but the students who used it also complained about it
just saying

Last edited by Asriel (2010 March 01, 6:10 am)

Any online resources？　（for drills that is)

Last edited by mezbup (2010 March 01, 6:34 am)

Is JSL good for self learning?

linksはとても便利だ

wccrawford wrote:

Thanks.  I did confirm from Amazon that it's got that horrid romanization.  It doesn't surprise me that the students using the book have horrid pronunciation, either, simply because words don't look how they sound.  In a phonetic language like Japanese, that's just unforgivable.

I teach using JSL; the students pronunciation is generally fine because in class, they have to speak without any book or notes and they get their pronunciation constantly corrected.

The romanization thing is a pretty small issue; the meat of JSL is the audio and the CD-ROM program.  Complaining about someone who has bad pronunciation because of JSL's romanization is like complaining about someone who thinks they can read Japanese with kanji meanings because of RTK.

That's close to the kind of romanization Japanese kids learn in elementary school anyway.

Is JSL good for self learning?

Probably not.  It was never designed to stand alone; at the bare minimum you need audio files to go along with it, and it was designed to be used in a particular type of class taught in a particular way.  If you have that particular format and are diligent it can produce really good results, but if not, I would only recommend it for the grammatical explanations.

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 March 01, 7:52 am)

Certainly some students do have bad pronunciation, but there can be any number of reasons for that -- pronunciation is one of those things that seems to be very hard for some people and very easy for others, no matter what the learning method.

For the drills, I guess that actually the drill material in JSL could be OK for self-study as long as it was being used as a supplement to other methods of learning -- the problem is that the cost involved in buying the textbooks and the audio files (CD-ROM, etc) is too high for the benefit you get, probably.  But I do think a certain amount of mechanical drilling on basic things like conjugation is helpful.  People tend to be disdainful of mechanical drills but they can provide a lot of benefit as long as it's not the only thing you're doing.

What I do like about the JSL drill material is that even though the drills are mechanical, they are in a small context and constitute a small conversation, so for instance just pulling a random drill from lesson 9 ("T" is what you hear and "S" is what you have to say)
T: おいしいお酒を飲みましたよ。
S: どこで飲んだんですか。

T: 新しい時計を買いますよ。
S: どこで買うんですか。

So even though this is just a mechanical drill of converting masu-form to plain form + んです, it gives a small context as well (and it encourages the students to think of contexts for them, and in class they are used in wider contexts).

Last edited by yudantaiteki (2010 March 01, 8:53 am)

Added links to the first page for Amazon.co.jp, but I don't recommend buying from them. Also, if people have more recommendations for actual practice or drill books, now would be a good time to add them to this thread to get it back on track.

Asriel wrote:

the problem is that they have you fill stuff and then they explain the grammar, so its a blind guess followed by them laughing at you for being wrong.

Yeah, that blind-guessing can work in certain situations, but it's a pretty seldom that it'll work.

This is sweet. I'm going to buy a load of prep books+j-books pretty soon.

I recently bought Kanzen Master 2 & 3 Grammar and so far I'm very happy with 3 kyu. It only uses JLPT3 vocabulary for examples&questions which is very convenient since I can practice words I learned a while ago and learn new grammar. Book layout is simple and efficient, grammar explanations are a bit sparse but they serve their purpose.
My only problem with this book is that it uses furigana in every kanji so I can't use it as kanji reading practice and it doesn't use much kanji (everything is from JLPT3) and that makes deciphering some words a bit harder for me than it could be.

Overall I really recommend it for everyone preparing for JLPT3 and up.

I can't say anything about 2 kyu since its beyond my level.

As for Amazon, after getting overwhelmed/lost/irritated by it in almost every possible aspect (and I'm an IT guy, don't know how normal people can handle that!!) I turned to Roellin Books and so far I'm very happy. Following Tobberoths advice I've just ordered "A dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar" & "A Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar" from them and as soon as they arrive I'll give some feedback about them from my (meaning novice) perspective.

Regarding JSL...

Ohio State University uses the JSL course materials and it appears that they have put the audio portions on the web.  So if you already have the books and you want to give it a go, this may work for you.

http://languagelab.it.ohio-state.edu/index.php?id=1672