Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
Summary:
Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese is the first volume of a two-volume series for beginning Japanese courses. Based on modern principles of second-language acquisition, it was the first beginning Japanese text to integrate the teaching of all four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) and offer a full complement of ancillary materials. In this text, grammar is treated as a tool for developing the ability to communicate in Japanese, rather than as a focal point. The rich illustration program--including photographs, line drawings, and realia--provides an attractive context for language learning.
Customer Reviews:
Average Customer Rating:
Comprehensive and Well Written Textbook
Customer Rating:
This textbook was very easy to understand and quickly moves you from topic to topic as well as quickly saturating you in the writing. The accompaning workbook is also great (Apparently you have to buy them separate here, I bought mine together at a bookstore). The culture notes are insightful and funny. The activites can be fun (although some are just a little lame) and quickly get you used to speaking and hearing the language.
Overall Yookoso is a great introduction to a beautiful language.
After 3 editions, a student would hope for more
Customer Rating:
Over the past three months, I've taken two summer classes using this textbook. To learn two semesters-worth of a language in such a short time-frame, it is essential to have a good textbook. Unfortunately, I feel cheated.
To begin on a very superficial level, the book is just plain ugly. There are two colors of ink used throughout the entire book: dark olive green and black. Because of the lack of colors, excessive stereotyping seems to have been used to strive for a more politically correct set of example students. For example, the token African-American learner--or as the book calls him, Henry Curtis--is always drawn with lips at least as large as 1/4 of his face. No other example student is drawn this way.
During my summer classes, I would often find myself lost on the exercises. I would repeatedly read the grammar notes (which are nothing more than outlines with little detail), before accepting defeat and asking for help from our teacher. Imagine my surprise to find out that I was one of the better students in the class! Few students understood the book by itself, and it seemed as though nothing was learned unless the teacher explained it separately from the book. In my experience, books should supplement a teacher in the opposite way: provide a student reference in the cases that the teacher is not available.
Having had students in the class with previous editions of the book was also quite interesting. I can almost list the changes in their entirety: both kanji and hiragana on vocabulary lists (as opposed to one or the other in previous editions), and roughly 1 to 2 new exercises for each chapter. All the existing exercises were worded the same, and included the same "misprints."
It is a bit of a misnomer when I say "vocabulary lists." There is no consistent way of finding vocabulary throughout the chapters. The end-of-chapter lists often leave out words introduced in mid-chapter lists.
All-in-all, I'm very dissatisfied with this text. I learned a lot from these past two classes, but I feel as though I may have learned just as much if we used no textbook at all.
What an awful text...
Customer Rating:
This is crap I don't know how this would help the beginner student and the grammar and vocabulary it covers are ridiculously simple and simplified, once a certain level of Japanese knowledge has been reached this book becomes useless. The "Integrated Approach to Japanese" by the Japan Times that is a much better text for beginning-intermediate to beginner-advanced level students. THAT text is arranged in a useful way to refer to even after the student increases familiarity with the language.
I prefer the Genki series
Customer Rating:
I took Japanese 1 using the Genki series, which I found to be much more comprehensive and easy to study from, with quick references to the lesson content in each chapter introduction, and the kanji learned in the corresponding sections in the back pages.
I'm now in Japanese 2, and we're using Yookoso. Yookoso isn't nearly as nicely laid out, and does not work well for studying from. The workbook is actually necessary in order to get a good study session out of the series.
1 Star for Shipping
Customer Rating:
I ordered the book on August 18, 2007 and it arrived September 7, 2007. It was a nicely written book, but since it took so long to arrive I had to procure it from somewhere else and am now faced with a return and additional shipping hassles.
Don't purchase textbooks here if you need them in a timely manner.
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