Genki textbook

[XOXkAWAIiXOX]

Does anyone know if Genki is really good or not? I want to know before I buy it.

[alanX]

Throughout this forum I've heard almost nothing but good about Genki. Here's a website to give you a little taste of what's inside.

Usagi-Chan's Genki Resources

[Lucas89]

If you like to use textbooks then it's definatly one of the best ones out there in my opinion.

They start teaching you a little bit about the writing systems, and move into basic grammar and sentence structure.
The 1st and maybe the 2nd chapter are in romaji unfortunatly but after that it's all kana and kanji(with furigana readings) so you will be forced to learn atleast kana (which is most definatly a good thing)

At the end of each chapter they give you a vocab list of all the vocab used in the chapter you just completed and any vocab that might be used in the next chapter along with any other useful words they might decide to put in.

Kanji don't appear too much at the start for some reason, so if they think your smart enough to handle a kanji they will put it in with the furigana reading above it (No idea why textbooks always start out with hardly any kanji, seems pointless not to, to me)

The exercises are definatly for a classroom setting, meaning they will normally ask you to converse with a partner using the structures and vocab you learned in the chapter, but there is no reason why you can't adapt this for self-study.

Grammar and vocab is used throughout the book so that you don't forget what you learned in the last lesson, and they have all of those really bad drawings that you always get in textbooks to help you understand what sentences mean etc.

Should you wish to use other sources for learning grammar/vocab etc alongside it there is nothing stopping you from doing that either.
When i read the first few chapters the grammar explanations always confused me so i used this website: Tae Kim's Japanese guide to Japanese grammar
to look up grammar explanations.

After a while i just stopped using Genki all together because textbooks don't hold my attention for very long, and just used the site i linked above and a book called "All about particles" by Naoko Chino.

But overall, yes, it is a good well structured textbook with plenty of exercises.

[XOXkAWAIiXOX]

Thank you both so much! ^-^ I'll look into it.