I wonder what the best Japanese learning materials are...
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Good evening, folks! Today I want to talk about studying Japanese and the most useful materials for learning Japanese.
Obviously, I haven't used all of the different materials in the world for studying Japanese,
but I have used some, and I'm familiar with others to some extent, so I'll tell you about what I think, and my experience.
One of the good things about studying Japanese is that there is such a wide range of good materials.
There's just a lot out there to choose from, so you can just go to the bookstore and look through a bunch of books
and see which ones appeal to you.
It comes down to learning style and taste, to some extent, but I'll just get into it.
The first series that I used was called "Japanese for Busy People."
The title is always kind of funny. I don't know why it's "for busy people," why not "for business people."
The content of this series is basically for business. It's for simple business situations,
like you go on a business trip to Tokyo and you talk to
Mr. Tanaka from Tokyo Electric, and that kind of thing.
The situations are kind of business. I found that aspect of it a little boring,
because I was never working in business in Japan;
I came here as a teacher, so it might not be completely relevant to you, in terms of content,
but it's a good series, and if you go through volumes I, II, and maybe III, you'll learn quite a bit.
It's quite well laid out.
It has a short conversation in each chapter, then it introduces some vocabulary and some grammar from that conversation
and gives you some exercises to practice it.
And it's quite good, useful, standard Japanese, and I think it's a good series.
There's another popular series called "Minna no Nihongo," or "Japanese for Everyone."
That one is quite good as well; I haven't used the whole thing, but I've looked through it,
and it looks quite good, and a lot of people swear by it, so that's another one to think about;
it's "Minna no Nihongo," or "Japanese for Everyone," as it's called.
Another series I used was one that's only published in Vancouver
It's published at a Japanese language school in Vancouver; I think it's called "Nakagawa" Language Centre,
and it's called "Ganbatte." That's the name of the series.
And that one was really good, it was really fun, it was really motivating.
I really liked that the best as a pure beginner's textbook.
There are five volumes -- number one is really simple -- but it goes up to five,
and if you finish up to volume five, that prepares you for level one of the Japanese Proficiency Test.
But all the conversations and the characters and stuff were quite cute and quite motivating.
It got me interested in learning Japanese more.
Let me double-check the name of that centre.
No, not "Nakagawa," sorry, it's Ninagawa Japanese Language Centre.
So it's hard to get those books -- I don't know if you can find the Ninagawa Ganbatte series -- but
if you can find it online -- I think you can order it through the website of ninagawa.com -- so
have a look. If you can get it, it's good for beginners, at least for lower levels.
So, those were the beginning textbooks.
At an intermediate level, I loved this book, this one: "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese,"
by Akira Miura and Naomi Hanaoka McGloin.
This one was awesome. This made me really love studying Japanese.
The way it was laid out, the conversations were fun and interesting; the stories and texts were interesting;
and it wan't focused on business. It was focused on college life,
and I wasn't a student, but I had been a student,
so I could relate to college life a little better than corporate life,
so the vocab and the topics and just the whole theme of this book was more interesting to me.
Some people don't seem to like it. I've read some of the reviews on Amazon,
and some people say they find it hard to follow.
It might depend on your learning style. I'm a very inductive learner,
I like to look at texts and conversations and kind of figure out what's going on,
and look at the pieces and "Aw, this piece must be the verb. This must be the whatever."
I like to figure things out, and that works well with this book, because
the beginning of each chapter will have two or three different conversations or texts,
so we can look at this one. It's got one conversation, then it's got another one, then it's got another one
and then after that, it's got a text, and after that it has the vocabulary, and after the vocabulary,
then it has -- that's the kanji -- then after that, it has the grammar points, and then it has grammar exercises.
So, the texts and the conversations are separate from all of the breakdown and the explanation and the exercises.
Those come after the texts. So, for me, that's fine. I like to look at the texts and the conversations
and then flip back to the explanations when I need it, and then I can figure out the other things on my own
to whatever extent I can. Then I can just flip back if I need an explanation.
Some people like to have the explanation right up front, in their face, from the beginning,
they're more deductive learners, they like to have it explained to them before they read the text,
or at the same time.
So, if you are like that, you might not like this book as much, but have a look at it.
I really liked it, and this was my favourite book ever.
So, another one at the intermediate level was this one, which I didn't like -- I didn't have as much fun with it --
but it was useful. It taught me a lot. It's this one, "Chuukyuu Kara Manabu Nihongo."
That means "Japanese from the Intermediate Level."
That's the meaning of this title, but this one is completely in Japanese.
This other one, "An Integrated Approach," the one I showed you before,
this has a lot of English in it, and it has translations and explanations.
This one is all in Japanese, so this one is a bit more intense
of an experience because you have to dive right in, it's all Japanese, no explanations. It doesn't
even have a title in English. When I looked this up on Amazon to check if it's available,
I had to type in the ISBN number, because when I typed in the Japanese, it didn't show up,
because it was amazon.com, in America, but if I looked up the ISBN, then this name, this title,
appeared in Roman characters in Amazon. It doesn't even have an English name. You have to look up --
maybe I'll put the ISBN on the screen, so you can look it up if you want
This one's good. It has great texts. The texts are interesting stories, and there's a lot of stories in this,
there are some explanations of proverbs and different expressions in Japanese.
I found it really useful to just go through the stories and highlight vocabulary I didn't know,
and then look at the vocabulary lists and the grammar exercises after the stories.
I found it hard to do all of the exercises without a classroom teacher.
I did this on my own at home. I've actually never taken a Japanese lesson in my life,
I did it all through self-study. I found it a bit hard to do this all at home, self-study style,
but I got through it, and it was a bit of hard work, but I learned a lot from it.
So this one is good, it's good material, just if you have a teacher, it would be easier for you,
because they can help you out with the exercises when the explanation in Japanese is not quite clear.
Alright, so that was intermediate level. At a more advanced level, I used this one,
"Chūkyū Kara Jōkyū e no Nihongo," so that's "Japanese from the Intermediate Level to the Advanced Level,"
that's what that title means, or as they say, "Progressing from Intermediate to Advanced."
That's the way they translated it. So this one was pretty good, it was kind of a bridge between intermediate
to advanced, I got about halfway through this book. And it was good, it was useful, I learned a lot from it,
but I started using authentic materials instead, I started just using newspapers and texts from magazines,
and just trying to work through those and learn vocabulary. But this is good, it's similar to the "Integrated
Approach to Intermediate Japanese" one. It has texts that are interesting, and then it breaks it down with
the vocab and the grammar exercises afterwards. I found it quite similar in format, and it was interesting to use,
but at that level, I just thought it's better to get into the authentic materials.
Okay, so those are the ones that I have used and I think are pretty good and I recommend.
I've used some others here and there, and I used some different ones for kanji, which I'll probably talk about
in a different video, because kanji is a different beast entirely and deserves its own attention, but
I recommend all those, especially this one, which was my favourite, "An Integrated Approach to Intermediate
Japanese," but if you're a beginner, then you could get "Minna no Nihongo" or you could get "Japanese for
Busy People," and work through it. One more note on "Japanese for Busy People," get the kana version.
Don't get the romanized version, there are two. "Romanized" means it has Roman characters in it.
I think it has the Japanese as well, but I don't recommend using the romanized version because you
might use the Roman letters as a crutch. It's good to get used to the kana letters right away from the beginning
just to dive right in. You can learn them really quickly if you dive in and make yourself do it.
So, make yourself do it, alright? Hope that's helpful. Have a nice night, guys! See ya.
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