Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese Media Edition prepack with Student CD-ROM,   ISBN:9780072938098

Customer Rating: 

I ordered this book for a friend of mine she finds it invaluable for her Japanese language studies. She had this book before but her vehicle was broken into and that was one of the items she lost. The fact that she wanted me to buy her a replacement speaks to the value she places on the book.

Customer Rating: 

Yookoso is a good book for learning hiragana, katakana, basic kanji, syntax and sentance structure for the Japanese language. There are plenty of diagrams and fun exercises, verb conjugation is introduced, a helpful audio CD is included, and the chapters progress at a challenging but not overly difficult speed. I highly recommend.

Customer Rating: 

I used this textbook in my introductory Japanese class in college, and it not only helped me get a good handle on the language, but it has nice little sections on Japanese language and culture. This helped put many of the language topics into context. Also, when I compare this textbook to some other introductory Japanese texts, I like the approach of teaching grammar, writing, reading, and listening all at the same time. Many other books skip the written language all together, and present everything in Romanji (Japanese words written phonetically in the Roman alphabet). This book slowly introduces the reader to the Japanese writing system, which is an integral part of learning Japanese. If you just want to learn some phrases to get yourself from the airport to the hotel on your next business trip, then you can probably get away with using a simpler book. But this textbook will allow you to truly get a bird's eye view of the language, to better gauge if you want to study further. Also, by the end you should be able to hold simple conversations and maybe write a letter. Lastly, I'd definitely recommend using the audio portions too. You'd be doing yourself a disservice by not knowing the correct pronunciation of words, and you wouldn't want to develop bad listening and speaking habits. So overall, I'd highly recommend it. Just remember that learning any language takes patience.

Customer Rating: 

The good news about this particular edition is that the book is exactly identical to the non-"Media Pack" edition. The only difference between the two is that this "Media Pack" contains a CD with a program they claim will help you learn Japanese. This means that you can buy the cheaper non-media edition unless your teacher requires you to use the software. I found the software unuseful, but others in my class reported that the rote drills it offers helped them memorize words.

If you haven't studied a foreign language before, this book is going to make your life a little difficult. It assumes you know all about grammar terms (particle, tense vs inflection, direct vs indirect objects, etc.), and it also assumes that putting those terms in a chart will help you understand the structure of Japanese grammar. The problem is not that it uses the grammar terms- the problem lies in the lack of explanations of the grammar terms.

Sometimes the charts do help, which is why the book gets as high as a 3 from me. More often, though, they're unnecessary and even confusing becuase the pages are so poorly laid out. The labels of charts are sometimes on a different page, or the explanation is, or there are several charts or examples in a row with minimal explanations interposed, or the chart spans two pages when it easily could have fit on one. All of this often makes it quite difficult to tell what the charts are actually charting. The problem with the pages extends to the other content as well- there will be highlighted boxes (which explain a tangential point in depth) right in the middle of an activity or core grammar explanation.

This series puts an unusually heavy emphasis on reading and writing Japanese, so expect a higher complement of kanji to memorize than you might get with another beginning book (~175 in the workbook, but you'll probably pick up ~200). When you look back on the book and realize that you actually know that many kanji, it's quite a feeling of accomplishment. On the other hand, the kanji usage is somewhat irregular- "suki" (adj: liked) is always written in kanji after Chapter 1, but "kirai" (adj: disliked) is written in hiragana throughout the book, despite the fact that it has a kanji in regular usage. Sometimes "tomodachi" (n: friend) is written with its initial kanji and then in hiragana, sometimes all in hiragana, sometimes with both kanji. This makes it difficult to learn proper usages; though Japanese will understand what you write if you write the way you see it here, you may not be able to read native texts.

I strongly recommend buying a seperate Japanese dictionary- not only because of those irregular usages, but also becuase not all Japanese words used activities and in the workbook are listed in the glossary in the textbook.