| ||||||||||||
 Trade In this Item for up to £1.10
Get an extra £5 when you trade in books worth £10 or more until June 30, 2012. Trade in Japanese for Busy People: Kana Version Bk. 1 (Japanese for Busy People Series) for an Amazon.co.uk gift card of up to £1.10, which you can then spend on millions of items across the site. Trade-in values may vary (terms apply). Find more products eligible for trade-in.
|
Frequently Bought Together
Product details
|
Product Description
Product Description
"Japanese for Busy People" is, as the title suggests, a concise course for 'busy' students who want to learn natural spoken Japanese as effectively as possible in a limited amount of time. This worldwide bestselling series was prepared by a working group of experienced Japanese language instructors who reviewed and tested the material in an authentic classroom environment. Now the series is being thoroughly revised to make learning Japanese easier than ever.
About the Author
The Association for Japanese Language Teaching (AJALT) is an educational institution established to meet the practical needs of people all over the world who wish to communicate effectively in Japanese. It was accredited by the Japanese Ministry of Education in 1977.
--This text refers to an alternate
Paperback
edition.
Inside This Book
(Learn More)
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Explore More
Concordance
Browse Sample PagesConcordance
Front Cover | Copyright | Table of Contents | Excerpt | Index | Back Cover
Tags Customers Associate with This Product(What's this?)Click on a tag to find related items, discussions, and people.
|
Sell a Digital Version of This Book in the Kindle Store
If you are a publisher or author and hold the digital rights to a book, you can sell a digital version of it in our Kindle Store.
Learn more
What Other Items Do Customers Buy After Viewing This Item?
Customer Reviews
Most Helpful Customer Reviews
30 of 32 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
I first came across this book as recommended by my Japanese teacher as she sometimes uses it as a compliment to the lessons I take weekly. Now, although this book does cover a lot of the important base points of the Japanese language (particles, useful vocabulary etc), I do find that it doesn't really put enough time into drilling these essential grammar points in.
For example, at the beginning of each chapter, you're given a quite nicely laid out page of points on how the proceeding chapter's main grammar points will be used and the formation of it's sentences. Sounds great but it's just one page! To me, that's just not enough. My teacher puts a great deal of (I think necessary) time each week into these points as they really are the building blocks of the language and to just skim over these key points in one page doesn't give the language the respect it demands.
Aside from this, I also find it's techniques of teaching vocabulary a little rushed as well. Now I know the title is "Japanese For BUSY PEOPLE" but there are some sections that need to have time taken over. Generally, this book just lists new vocabulary in a tiny bar at the bottom of the page each time it's used in one of the book's (I'll admit, very useful) target dialogues. Vocabulary is my weak point in Japanese and I find flash cards, repetition etc essential. Just listing words without even putting a picture next to them (in MOST cases) feels like they've written out the dialogues and then just casually mentioned the vocabulary. To me, this leaves me feeling left behind and so, the rest of the book can become slightly daunting. If I didn't have my Japanese lessons to back up the material, I think I would find this book very frustrating.
All in all, Japanese is a difficult language. That point coupled with the fact that there's so many Japanese books on Amazon that can be daunting to someone starting off has led me to be very critical of this, and any other language book. None-the-less, JFBP is, for me, the perfect compliment to a night class as it serves well as a summary and I can't stress enough how much this has helped me.
Just a quick warning though: This version is the "Kana" edition which means it's written in the language's two most basic character sets; Hiragana and Katakana. This means you'll have to be able to read these sets of characters before this book will make an ounce of sense so bear that in mind! There is a "romanized" version which writes the Japanese in it's English syllables but to really progress in Japanese, I recommend learning the Kana and then using this version. It may seem daunting but it's really quite easy especially if you use an amazing book called "Remembering the Kana: Hiragana and Katakana" by James Heisig.
The bottom line is that this really is a great book but it's lack of attention to grammar and the way it teaches vocabulary unfortunately warrants taking it down a star. Still essential though and probably the best book I can imagine when used alongside a properly tutored Japanese course.
David Fox
For example, at the beginning of each chapter, you're given a quite nicely laid out page of points on how the proceeding chapter's main grammar points will be used and the formation of it's sentences. Sounds great but it's just one page! To me, that's just not enough. My teacher puts a great deal of (I think necessary) time each week into these points as they really are the building blocks of the language and to just skim over these key points in one page doesn't give the language the respect it demands.
Aside from this, I also find it's techniques of teaching vocabulary a little rushed as well. Now I know the title is "Japanese For BUSY PEOPLE" but there are some sections that need to have time taken over. Generally, this book just lists new vocabulary in a tiny bar at the bottom of the page each time it's used in one of the book's (I'll admit, very useful) target dialogues. Vocabulary is my weak point in Japanese and I find flash cards, repetition etc essential. Just listing words without even putting a picture next to them (in MOST cases) feels like they've written out the dialogues and then just casually mentioned the vocabulary. To me, this leaves me feeling left behind and so, the rest of the book can become slightly daunting. If I didn't have my Japanese lessons to back up the material, I think I would find this book very frustrating.
All in all, Japanese is a difficult language. That point coupled with the fact that there's so many Japanese books on Amazon that can be daunting to someone starting off has led me to be very critical of this, and any other language book. None-the-less, JFBP is, for me, the perfect compliment to a night class as it serves well as a summary and I can't stress enough how much this has helped me.
Just a quick warning though: This version is the "Kana" edition which means it's written in the language's two most basic character sets; Hiragana and Katakana. This means you'll have to be able to read these sets of characters before this book will make an ounce of sense so bear that in mind! There is a "romanized" version which writes the Japanese in it's English syllables but to really progress in Japanese, I recommend learning the Kana and then using this version. It may seem daunting but it's really quite easy especially if you use an amazing book called "Remembering the Kana: Hiragana and Katakana" by James Heisig.
The bottom line is that this really is a great book but it's lack of attention to grammar and the way it teaches vocabulary unfortunately warrants taking it down a star. Still essential though and probably the best book I can imagine when used alongside a properly tutored Japanese course.
David Fox
5 of 5 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
If you want to learn a solid base of conversational Japanese and have a small taster of what a couple of kanji characters look like, then this book is for you! I'm absolutely delighted that a CD is now included in this version (it wasn't with the first one).
It still baffles me why some students would want to study some kanji characters but not all of them. This kana version gives enough characters to keep students happy, but not enough by any means to enable them to read real Japanese. In fact, when I go back to these books I start to get confused because in most places kanji characters are replaced by katakana. It is an excellent start for busy people though!
I would say that the Rosette Stone language software is FAR FAR better at teaching spoken Japanese. But sadly it costs nearly $500 through Amazon USA. Dig deep...
If you are series enough about Japanese to want to learn some kanji and are not a 'busy person' then why not try the college student version of this book? It's just as good as this one, but doesn't assume you are tooo busy to spend much time learning Japanese:
Japanese for College Students: Basic Vol 1
It still baffles me why some students would want to study some kanji characters but not all of them. This kana version gives enough characters to keep students happy, but not enough by any means to enable them to read real Japanese. In fact, when I go back to these books I start to get confused because in most places kanji characters are replaced by katakana. It is an excellent start for busy people though!
I would say that the Rosette Stone language software is FAR FAR better at teaching spoken Japanese. But sadly it costs nearly $500 through Amazon USA. Dig deep...
If you are series enough about Japanese to want to learn some kanji and are not a 'busy person' then why not try the college student version of this book? It's just as good as this one, but doesn't assume you are tooo busy to spend much time learning Japanese:
Japanese for College Students: Basic Vol 1
2 of 2 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback
This series has two versions: the Romanized and the Kana. I choose the Kana, thinking it would give me the most out of this series as opposed to the Romanized version.
This is what it comes down to: assignments are given in English, examples in Hiragana, questions in Hiragana. And like every beginner, I couldn't read Hiragana. Therefore I was forced to compare pictures, scribbling down the words phonetically, which took ages. Getting sick of this rather time consuming method, I just decided to start by learning Hiragana. And then it went a lot quicker!
However, the exercises are repetitive. Giving an example question and example answer, and asking you to incorporate the two given words, which just means you copy the example sentence and replace a word or two.
Still it's a good method of learning things even though it takes ages to actually learn something useful. I used it alongside weekly Japanese classes and our tutor highly recommended it.
One piece of useful advice: if you're going to buy this book, learn the Hiragana first, so that you can get the most out of the Japanese. If you don't want to spend time learning the characters, but would rather learn words and sentences, I'd recommend the Romanized version, which gives you the words and exercises in romanized Japanese.
This is what it comes down to: assignments are given in English, examples in Hiragana, questions in Hiragana. And like every beginner, I couldn't read Hiragana. Therefore I was forced to compare pictures, scribbling down the words phonetically, which took ages. Getting sick of this rather time consuming method, I just decided to start by learning Hiragana. And then it went a lot quicker!
However, the exercises are repetitive. Giving an example question and example answer, and asking you to incorporate the two given words, which just means you copy the example sentence and replace a word or two.
Still it's a good method of learning things even though it takes ages to actually learn something useful. I used it alongside weekly Japanese classes and our tutor highly recommended it.
One piece of useful advice: if you're going to buy this book, learn the Hiragana first, so that you can get the most out of the Japanese. If you don't want to spend time learning the characters, but would rather learn words and sentences, I'd recommend the Romanized version, which gives you the words and exercises in romanized Japanese.
Would you like to see more reviews about this item?
Were these reviews helpful?
Let us know
Most Recent Customer Reviews
Great book, repetition learning works well.
I bought this book actually in Japan as it was recommended to me by a friend of mine studying Japanese in Japan at the time, he recommended I went straight for the kana version... Read more
Published 6 months ago by Mrs. L. Eccleston
Good for grown ups.
This is a very good book. It is well-designed and illustrated, and the aesthetics of the book inspire me to study it. Read more
Published 6 months ago by A. Lee
Good for people that want an easy start with the language
The fact that this book is used by my Japanese language teacher is what made me buy it. I had not become good at kana yet, so it was too hard to read this book at first. Read more
Published 7 months ago by nihongonogakusei
It's important to assimilate the kana as quickly as possible...
I previously used the Romanised version, this allowed me to use the Romaji as a crutch instead of becoming confident with kana. Read more
Published 9 months ago by Emphyrio
Good book
I took up Japanese as a module to learn alongside my course and this was the book that we used for two years. Read more
Published 17 months ago by ntman
great Japanese learning tool
used this book as part of a Japanese course but was also a useful self-study tool as well
Published 20 months ago by J. Glover
Excellent series of books
Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for an English speaker to learn, but this series of books makes it accessible. Read more
Published on 6 Oct 2009 by NChick
Kana-only makes it tough going at first
We're using this textbook in evening classes. They hadn't used it before and gave us the option of buying the Kana version or the Romaji version. Read more
Published on 18 Feb 2009 by C. Hand
better than ever
This 3rd Edition is better than ever. I must admit I was never a big fan of the 1st edition. Simply because it was too businessman orientated and boring. Read more
Published on 29 Oct 2008 by S. Alvarado Collantes
Ok but only ok
This is the book recommended by most teachers. I used it before I went to live in Japan. However the way it is set out and the language taught is too formal and rigid. Read more
Published on 31 May 2008 by Br Cottrell
Listmania!
Look for similar items by category
- Books > Languages > By Language > Japanese > Dictionaries
- Books > Languages > By Language > Japanese > Learning Materials
- Books > Reference > Language
Look for similar items by subject
Feedback
- Would you like to update product info or give feedback on images?
- I am the Author, and I want to comment on my book.
- I am the Publisher, and I want to comment on this book.
|
