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I can take or leave the CD, but the book provides a great, simple overview into grammar and vocabulary. A great starter book, which I can honestly recommend.
This is a quick and easy guide to learn romaji and the bare basics of kanji. Every step is well-explained, and memorization is made easy.
If you're really serious about learning the language inside and out, there are a wide range of books out there that helps you with that (ie books that are published by Kodansha). I've learned a lot from it and I've covered only half of the book.
It's really reader-friendly, explains things clearly, and not at all dragging because each chapter is bite-sized (about 10 pages on average). It features helpful side information on the Japanese custom (ie bowing without your hands clasped together) and some other insightful things that might help you retain the lessons more successfully.
In the beginning I wanted to speak Japanese as soon as I could, and this book gave me a jump start. This book is not overly literary (no impressive big words) but rather simple and straight to the point.
You also get to learn how to pronouce the words correctly despite the fact that each track on the CD has almost no pauses in between, so you have to be alert on pressing the pause button on your CD player. I especially like how this book is written, because it stands apart from the generic language aid books that sound so technical and systematic that will bore you to tears.
Unfortunately I decided to make Japanese my second language, so I had to stop further advances in this book and took people's advices not to cling on romaji (romanized Japanese),as it is heavily used in this book, and learn Kana and Kanji as soon as possible from other sources. However if you were like me before and wanted to be able to just speak Japanese as quickly as possible, then this book might just be the right choice for you.
This book does a wonderful job conveying Japanese through Romanji. It is beyond important to hear the Japanese, since many Japanese words written in Romanjii are pronounced quite different then they are spelled, IE, vowel sounds are dropped from the end of some words. Each track is divided into about 10 sepearate sentences/examples.
However, my problem is with the CD. Also, there is no long pause b/t the examples. The author has clearly worked very hard conveying his subject matter.
What that means is at each example in the text, you have no way of repeating the sentence unless you skip back to the very beginning of the track, or if you use a slider bar on a computer audio program to effectively guess where the sentence would start. The CD comes with a number of tracks. Each chapter has ONE TRACK.
This makes using the CD effectively difficult. An example would be the verb "desu", being pronounced as "Dess"
this book is great, i really appreciate that this book teaches japanese sentence structure so that once you know the vocabulary you can form your own sentences rather than having to rely on a series of phrases learned by rote. it really has been a useful and informative book.
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