Japanese reading & writing guide - Beginner through advanced course

First let me say I love the Living Language series. I am huge language enthusiast and I have used many of Living Language's products (Living Language Arabic, Ultimate Arabic, Ultimate French, both versions of Living Languages for Hindi, Spoken World Farsi) and although I love them they are not always good. I go this one for Christmas and I can't put it down! I have finished the first part of Genki last year (which is another awesome textbook for Japanese) but although I finished it I still felt like I wasn't grasping Japanese at all. I could barely make a sentence, my vocabulary was poor even with the flashcards I made with Genki. I didn't understand the grammar points and I would reread them and just constantly feel lost. I'm not trying to put Genki down, it's a great series and crucial to learn Japanese but I am just so glad I got this book! It comes with four coursebooks, Essential, Intermediate, Advanced and a separate script book! The script book teaches and has exercises for Hiragana, Katakana and Kanji! I honestly wish I had this in my Japanese class when I was trying frantically to remember the Hiragana and Katakana. Each coursebook has interactive exercises and audio! Even some of the grammar points have audio! There are also free flashcard to use on their website, which I have been using and they have audio! You have the option to write romaji or Kana for the exercises. By the advanced book it uses Kanji with furigana. The essential book starts very simple, it starts with essential vocabulary like greetings and saying your name etc.It then moves on too things like family, hobbies, ordering at restaurants and being at school/work. The intermediate book focuses much more on grammar. It focuses on things like the particles,adjectives,conditional tenses and more.The advanced book continues on the grammar aspect. This is all a beginners course, although the books are marked essential, intermediate and advanced they are all still at a beginner level. I think if you finish the book you will be at a lower intermediate level.However it gives you a great head start! Each coursebook has review quizzes! Another great thing about this book is that it has easy to read font. My eyes don't strain trying to read the print. I've only had this course for a couple weeks but I already feel my Japanese getting better, even my poor hiragana hand writing is looking better! I think this book would be great used in conjunction with Genki, Rosetta Stone or if you are taking Japanese in school. I'm enjoying this book so much, I hope living language starts releasing more lesser known languages in this format because it is great! Japanese is such a fun language to learn.

This is a great tool for learning Japanese. I enjoy that they take the time to explain things to you rather than just put something in front of you to memorize. The only issue I have with this book is that they use 'e' to represent 'i' (Ex: Sensee rather than Sensei) but once you get past that it's a wonderful study. I highly recommend this to anyone who wants to sit down and learn a new language!

This language product contains 3 coursebooks and 9 accompanying audio cds as well as a writing exercise book, so it definitely considered quite cheap compared to other language products.

The books are a pleasure to read as the text is not in huge chunks, but rather in appropriately spaced-apart sentences and words. The use of coloured text helps make a clear distinction between english and japanese, and helps reduce visual boredom.

However, obviously don't expect to be as fluent as a native Japanese speaker with just the use of this course, though u will still probably be able to communicate in Japanese for casual conversation and basic stuff like ordering food at a restaurant.

These coursebooks are also better than some other ones in terms of heping u to read Japanese. In addition to standard romaji, all Japanese texts are also written in actual hiragana, katakana and kanji, which may be missing in other coursebooks. This provides great exposure to Japanese text, which will help improve our reading skills.

To sum up, this is a great value purchase.

These are very excellent books, I also have the Korean and Chinese ones, but one issue I have with them is when I gets slightly confused on the characters, my brain automatically goes to the romanji, which I think should only happen when you completely don’t understand the kanji or kana. This could just be me, but I think one way of solving this is by maybe putting the romanji in the answers box instead of right underneath the characters. But otherwise really good books

As a student of the Japanese language (4 years), I've studied at university level and abroad. Japanese isn't like any other language out there. And I don't mean to discourage anybody from learning, but as a fluent speaker and a continuing learner of kanji, I can assure you that this isn't the ultimate guide to mastering Japanese. Want to be fluent in Japanese?

*Purchase a Japanese grammar book
*Purchase a kanji book (tuttle publishing)
*Instead of learning the furigana for verbs, adjectives, and nouns, learn the kanji instead.
*Listen to Japanese music and watch Japanese tv.
*DOWNLOAD a language app and make friends with Japanese people. A great app is HelloTalk.
*STUDY for 2 hours a day
*test yourself using Quizlet (making index cards)

Japanese is a language that you gotta drill into your skull. If not, you will never learn. Trust me. I would know.

頑張っています！

I finally received the opportunity to discover how this Living Language course compares with its earlier editions and for the most part, the content was a dubious remake of the 2008 Edition.

For those completely unaware of the Living Language courses, they are language set of at least a course book and audio that teaches by reconciling a word list to sentence structure, which leads to conversations. This 2012 edition takes to another level, where the course book is more of a workbook and the user is encouraged to write their answers in it in addition of trying to have them write it in the native Japanese script. As a language course, it is a very involved self-study set that covers the essentials of conversational Japanese with enough detail that by the end of passing the final quiz, you will no doubt have the correct balance of confidence and knowledge to continue your acquisition of the Japanese language.

For those, like myself, curious about the evolution of the Living Language set, here is what you need to know: the author the 2008 edition, Kumiko Ikeda-Tsuji, is now credited as the co-author of this workbook series and it borrows heavily from her earlier course book - in fact, apart from the explanations of reading and writing hiragana/katakana, almost all the instructional content is copied verbatim from the 2008 edition and expanded with additional quizzes, comprehension exercises, and the bilingual reading feature. The decision to recycle material could go either way: while I wrote a positive review for the 2008 Living Language Japanese, it is disappointing that this edition was not an improvement - sure there are more exercises and audio to reinforce what you are taught but the "-eba" (better, the "nakereba narimasen" construction) mention in the lesson about expressing obligation is still there as if to be elaborated in the future.

In general, it is very good buy for the perfect beginner but "buyer beware" to those that are coming from other language courses, attracted by the "intermediate" and "advanced" designation on the spine of the books as they seem to been placed there arbitrarily. The language instruction is spread across 600+ pages but the verbatim content was a little over 300+ pages in the earlier edition which should give you some idea how it was padded out. In regards to reading Japanese, the store offers other books that teach the kana and kanji much better than this book and may best for those who like to tackle their problems one at a time like getting comfortable with conversational element THEN moving on the script. For more information about books that teach kana, check out my reviews for native Japanese childrens books or my critical review of Kana de Manga or check out my profile page for my guide to "learn Japanese as cheaply as you can".

Japanese complete edition compared to Ultimate Japanese Beginner-Intermediate:
Simpler
Brighter
Space to write answers
Seemly less explanation

What's in there:
English in the audio (I don't use it since chapter 1 so can't speak for the rest of the CDs).
Japanese character chart in the chapters (in the 1st book)
Romaji(I went through the books and black crayon them.)
Kanji with furigana starting in the second book ( from a glance)
Small quizzes the gets bigger starting in second book(from a glance)
Some other helpful charts
free online review/games on the site in romaji(not helpful to me ,personality)

Update
I stop using this course after completing the first book; Yes, I've jump abroad the Genki train.

after michel thomas this is not very good.instead of teaching one written language at a time,they start all 3.i would rather learn hiragana first then kanji.michel thomas teaches grammar no written only spoken but is better organized.this is ok but to me it is like learning formal french and street slang at the same time