[Nyororin]

In my personal experience with books - they start out with the most polite forms, and then slowly teach the more common usages... When, quite honestly, I feel that Japanese should be learned in the same pattern a Japanese child would learn it - via frequency. You aren`t going to hear those ultra polite sentences on a daily basis. In fact, hardly ever. "Dictionary" forms (the normal 食べる vs 食べます) seem to cause trouble for everyone because no book I have seen so far introduces them first.

My specialty is actually language acquisition, and it makes absolutely no sense to me that any course would try to make a student learn in such an unnatural pattern. A child`s first words are not going to be polite forms. In the same pattern of thought, it`s worthless to attempt to learn to write before you are capable of understanding what you are writing. Until then, any of the foreign language you are studying should be encountered only through speech. Written stuff is not even really necessary.