Selected Product:
| Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese Media Edition prepack with Student CD-ROM
Hardcover
Edition: 2
Author: Yasu-Hiko Tohsaku
Publisher: McGraw-Hill Humanities/Social Sciences/Languages
Release Date: 2003-12-31
ISBN-10: 0072938099
ISBN-13: 9780072938098
List Price: $104.06
Average Customer Rating:
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Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary
ISBN-10: 0679780017
ISBN-13: 9780679780014
List Price:$12.95
Workbook/Lab Manual to accompany Yookoso!: Continuing with Contemporary Japanese
ISBN-10: 0072493399
ISBN-13: 9780072493399
List Price:$47.47
Workbook/Lab Manual to accompany Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese
ISBN-10: 0070723397
ISBN-13: 9780070723399
List Price:$47.47
Listening Comprehension Audio CD (Component) to accompany Yookoso! An Invitation to Contemporary Japanese
ISBN-10: 0072353481
ISBN-13: 9780072353488
List Price:$18.75
Yookoso! Continuing with Contemporary Japanese Media Edition prepack with Student CD-ROM
ISBN-10: 0072938080
ISBN-13: 9780072938081
List Price:$107.19
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Summaries and Customer Reviews are supplied by Amazon.com
This is the first volume of a two-volume series for beginning Japanese courses. Based on modern principles of second-language teaching and acquisition, Yookoso! was the first beginning Japanese text to integrate the teaching of all four language skills (listening, speaking, reading, writing) and to offer a full complement of ancillary materials. In this series, grammar is treated as a tool for developing the ability to communicate in Japanese, rather than as the focal point of the text, and the rich illustration program (including photographs & line drawings) provides an attractive context for language learning.
A great introductory textbook
| 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. |
Good way to start
| 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. |
Written for grammar masters
| 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. |
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