What is your opinion on different Japanese textbooks.

[SceptileMaster]

Currently I am using Genki: An intergrated course in elementary Japanese. I am currently at chapter 6 and I am worried about some things that it is teaching me.

Even though the book is written by native speakers (two of which are professors at Kansai Gaidai) there seems to be apparently some mistakes in it.

Some pointed out to my Nagoyankee on this forum such as the misuse of 時 where it should have been ころ. As well as other things such as the apparently strangeness of saying じゃありません instead of ではありません.

Also in a review I read someone says that his wife who was a native speaker pointed out some problems when the book get's to the informal parts, apparently teaching some things which are too informal (to the point where they could be rude) as well as some things that native speakers would never say.

However of course that review is second hand information and a lot of people rave about how good the textbook is and I certainly think that it is easy to use. What is everyone's opinion on this book.

I was thinking of possibly switching to みんあの日本語(minna no nihongo/Everyone's Japanese) since it seems to have a very good reputation as a university textbook and there are setence structure practise books available to go with it. I am willing to splash out the cash to buy the book, it's translation and grammatical notes as well as the extras such as the kanji and sentence workbooks if people think it is definetely worth going for. What's is your opinion on this textbook?

Thanks for any help. I just want to be sure I'm learning things correctly.

[KyleGoetz]

This question has been asked in a brand new thread in the past 2-3 weeks.

[yuriyuri]

I tried using this book for my self-study but didn't get in as far as you are now, but since your asking for opinions I will give mine.

I thought it was too expensive for what it was, it wasn't engaging at all, there were mistakes in it, it used romaji in the first chapter, for me it felt as though they were holding back on the kanji and the sentences in general didn't sound like something Japanese people would say.

On the last point about unnatural sentences, I think your bound to get them in all textbooks made for English speaking learners of Japanese, just because they end up trying to force English ways of speaking into Japanese a lot of the time for some reason, so I'm not sure how difficult it would be to get away from that.

I've heard good things about みんなの日本語 but I have never used it myself.
Then again the whole reason I bought Genki was because I heard good things about it.
The best thing I did was give the textbook away to some other guy who wanted to try learning Japanese.
I then bought the small book "All about particles" by Naoko chino, and just read Japanese blogs, news sites, mangas etc.
It was more fun, and I could look up grammar when I wanted to very easily.

Basically after readng through a few chapters of Genki it put me off textbooks all together, so I am biased towards using things like Tae Kims grammar site for example.
Of course some of his example sentences are also incorrect or unnatural but at least I didn't have to fight my way through a chapter on how to tell the time just to learn one use of the は particle lol.

Anyway.
In short, I don't think Genki is all that great of a textbook.
Unfortunatly I can't give opinions on any others.
If you feel you absolutely must have a text book then from what I read of Genki when I tried it I would have to say, try a different textbook and see what happens.

[Megabyte117]

Well, I've already dished out money on the Genki textbook. Is it bad enough that I should consider purchasing a different one?

[MMM]

No book is going to be all things to all people, but I would stick with one rather than jump around, as that will 1) confuse you and 2) put holes in your learning.