Tuesday, March 8, 2011

My 3rd Year Intermediate Japanese Textbook - Decent, But Not Great

An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese, by The Japan Times, is a moderately good intermediate Japanese textbook overall. It covers a lot of ground, but it's not always easy to use. But there are a few tricks that make it a lot easier to master the contents of the book.

On the good side, An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese is fairly good at explaining grammatical concepts. Most of the examples of Japanese grammar are clear and easy to follow. Usually, there are plenty of examples, which is important

The side notes are also pretty good. They aren't worth poring over for hours, but you'll pick up some things that are good to know about Japanese culture.

On the bad side, the book can sometimes be a bit slim on Japanese grammar examples (though it's usually pretty thorough). THE trick with this is to open up a Word document and write down the English translation of the grammar you're practicing and cook up a few more practice sentences of your own.

Also, there are way too many vocabularies and kanji in each chapter. Many of these are incredibly obscure. Now, I realize that the authors need to include these because the kanji and vocab are part of the reading passages, but that doesn't make the sheer amount of kanji and new words any less daunting.

The biggest single downfall of the book is that there is no place where it goes into more detail on kanji--no stroke order or enlarged pictures to show you how to rewrite them. All the examples occur in print that's too small to discern how to write the more complex kanji.

The trick with this book is to make flashcards for the kanji and vocab and to study over the reading passages with a friend. If you can swing that, the reading passages can be rewarding.

An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese served me fairly well through my 3rd year of college Japanese. As far as intermediate Japanese textbooks go, I'd give it 7/10. It can be a tough nut to crack, but if you just apply a couple tricks, most of the information will stick.




Philip Rozek offers more tips at the full article, http://www.how-to-learn-japanese.com/intermediate_japanese_textbook.html You can also try to guess the top 10 most butchered Japanese words in English, and more. Phil will also show you his full array of tips on how to learn Japanese.

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