Customer Reviews:
Great for learning JFBPese
If you want to learn how to read Japanese-for-Busy-People-ese, this book is excellent. You will get lots of practice trying to figure out where one word ends and another begins in sentences.

(I can't include samples, because Amazon doesn't support unicode in comments). Whole paragraphs will have no more than a half dozen kanji and no spaces between any of the hirigana.

Not only is this incredibly hard to read, it gives you no practice reading Japanese that you will actually encounter in books, magazines, or websites. This book includes bizarre mash-ups like asaban and shinbun written half in kanji half in hiragana.

Each chapter introduces about 200 new vocabulary words, most of which are infrequent and unimportant. Even worse, they aren't repeated with any kind of frequency once introduced.

Vocabulary words are, of course, mostly in hiragana, so unless you bother to convert to kanji for yourself, you might never realize the connection between kion and onsen for example. The dictionary in the back of the book does have kanji, but it is tedious to have to leaf back and forth to look up proper writing.

The dialogues only come at full speed, which is insanely fast for people who are still trying to develop an ear for spoken Japanese.. I've had to use audio software to reduce the speed of some passages in order to even have a chance of making out what was being said. It would be nice if slowed down readings were provided along with at-speed ones. Transcripts are provided but again, the overuse of hiragana means time spent reading the transcripts won't significantly improve your ability to read Japanese.

The grammar rules are well organized but because the grammar examples are written in hiragana and often include newly introduced and obscure or idiomatic vocabulary, they don't make a very good reference.

Nihongo wo benkyou shimasho !
The book we needed !
A very good complement to Japanese for busy people I & II.
What I like ? It is very close to real life.
It's a pleasure to study. In French, I dare say : "c'est mon livre de chevet" !

one of the best textbooks available
We're using Genki II in our 4th semester class but I do have this at home as a reference and totally happy with it. The CD conversations are faster paced and more relevant to adult life than Genki. So these CDS prepare you better for JLPT listening comprehension than Genki. I would use this in conjuction with the "Teach Yourself" series for maximum effect.

Excellent relevant up-to-date lessons with CD
CD that came with this book and a different CD for the work book are both well made. Some language CD can drone-on-and-on. This is fun to listen to. The speaking speed seems to be normal conversation speed (not slowed-down for beginners), for this is Book 3 in the series. I play the CD's in the car, over and over, if I did not get what they are saying the 1st time I let the CD continue, I will get more of it next time, eventually, I understood all that was said.
The workbook that goes with this text is excellent as well, better get the set.
Exceelent as text in a classroom or for people doing self-studies. Efficient, effective and enjoyable.
The topics are not that interesting to kids. So for the teen-age and younger students, the Japanese for Young people series are better suited.

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