Yookoso! Continuing with Contemporary Japanese Media Edition prepack with Student CD-ROM,   ISBN:9780072938081

Customer Rating: 

This is the best book for intermediate Japanese. I didn't find the CD-ROM to be very helpful, however--it seems to be mostly a scheme to hike up the price.

Customer Rating: 

I used the Yookoso series while studying Japanese at university in the 90's. Since then, I have not encountered textbooks to equal these for the beginning student, or as a refresher course. I would recommend them for anyone interested in really learning Japanese, not just memorizing a few vocabulary words and grammar rules.
The audio portion is exceptional as well, for it provides a chance to listen to real Japanese and repeat phrases to improve fluency, but don't worry: the difficulty builds sequentially and goes well with the book. This series challenged me, gave valuable cultural insight, and very quickly weaned me from dependence on romanized character Japanese and First-grade writing.
This is the best textbook system for learning Japanese that I have ever found. Even while I conversed with a native speaker in my studies, the structure and natural dialogues in these books was a valuable resource to practise conversation and get things going naturally!

Well worth the money!

Customer Rating: 

This is the second volume of the Yookoso series. One of the main problems with the book is the author expects that will always have access to the first volume of the series. The book does provide some good grammar structures and some good examples of them in use. Alot of the book is written hiragana, katakana,and kanji with explanations in English. The listening exercises for the textbook are extremely hard to do. Also the book does not provide any of the meanings for the kanji you have to use the workbook to learn the kanji. One problem, there does not exist a good source in the textbook on particles.

This is not bad book to learn Japanese from if you are enrolled in a class. You will need some help with a native speaker or your instructor if you want to learn the finer points of the language.

The book is good in forcing you to know the kanji since a lot of the kanji from the first volume does not have any furigana. It good in helping to expand your abilities as a student in Japanese. This book will challenge you help you improve as a Japanese student.

I never really seen or used any other Japanese Textbooks at the College Level so difficult it is to make comparasions.

The CD-Rom that accompanies the textbook is next to useless. The CD-Rom will use vocabulary that is not in the textbook. It will use Kanji without the furigana that is not found in either of the workbooks. Only use the CD-Rom if want a challenge or a test of the material that is covered in the Chapter.