Youkoso text book
 

Taking Japanese in college during the Winter minimester. And, I already purchased my book so that I wouldn't have to worry about that. Anyway...

Point is... Has anyone heard of the textbook Yookoso? And if so, is it any good?

Thank you.

You should know by now not to title threads "Hey".

I taught Youkoso for several years, and I think it is an alright book. I have seen worse.

I used Yookoso for four semesters and turned out fine. I and my fellow classmates from my Stateside university tested higher when we went abroad than the students from schools that were using Minna, Genki, and such, for what it's worth. However, I credit that more with our superior teachers than superior textbooks.

It was good in the beginning but as we moved on it was getting pretty difficult. Explanations were on Japanese conversation were very short and confusing sometimes. Your going to hate informal Japanese hehe

Yea, my bad on that, MMM. I guess I was a little tired when I posted this thread.

And, I read through on the first few chapters, and I then stumbled upon hirigana. And, I'm not gonna lie. I almost short circuited from that. I've never been taught hirigana, or kanji for that matter. All I, regretfully, know is romaji. Which isn't exactly bragging rights.

I hope I'll have enough basic knowledge for my four week trip over to Japan in a few years. :\

Thanks for the replies, everyone.

You can learn hiragana in a day if you actually sit down for a few hours and practice. The same goes for katakana.

If a book teaches Japanese using romaji, it is a 100% shit* book. There are no ifs, ands, or buts about it.

*Pardon my French.

I really can't agree with you there. In college, I was taught using Professor Jordan and Mari Noda's "Japanese: The Spoken Language" which was written entirely using romaji... of course we learned our written Japanese from the same authors' "Japanese: The Written Language". And students from our school were known to speak Japanese much better than those who used books like Genki. I will admit that I'm not very good at writing because of it, but I have to say that it taught us grammer well and it was only because our classes weren't focused on writing that I ended up not being good at writing.

In any case, I just don't think blanket statements like that are accurate. I'll just assume you were talking about the phrase books that don't teach you much of anything... >.>

I have to agree there. I used the same books to learn Japanese the first two years of study.

What is Romaji? It seems like I should know this..

romaji is Japanese written out using the 26 alphabetical letters instead of Japanese characters. For Example: "konnichiwa"

By the way, in your sig, you've used the actual "wa" character in "konnichiwa" when it should really be the character for "ha". Same goes for the "wa" after "watashi". So really it's "konnichiha watashi ha..."

Edit: I just want to clarify to ThaDuke that you have it phonetically correct. It's just that some of those "wa"s should be the particle "wa" (which is the same as the character for "ha").

I guess I should rephrase: be extremely wary of a course that uses solely romaji for more than a couple weeks. After that, you're preventing yourself from attaining a better grasp of the written language by still relying on romaji.

I can equally provide anecdotes that students at my school, where romaji was stricken from the classroom after the first week, frequently tested much higher than students at other schools when we went abroad. And we tested into higher level classes largely because our grasp of the written language was so much greater as to be equivalent many of the Chinese who had gone to study in Japan as well.

Of the thirty students while I was there, only four tested into level five (out of six, where level six was reserved for completely fluent students), and two of those four were from my university. That was, incidentally, 100% of the students from my university.

In any case, my point is that it's a waste of time to use romaji once you can write/read kana, and a book that forces you to keep using romaji is retarding your progress. I hope we can at least agree on that much.

Yes, I shouldn't have made such a blanket statement.

And, for the benefit of ThaDuke, romaji is Roman characters (A-Z).

Thanks, guys. I knew I had known of that from somewhere.

It seems to me that it would greatly benefit you not relying on romaji when trying to learn Japanese. Sure it's a good way to start, but if you want to advance yourself you should learn hiragana. This way you are learning two things at once.

Well said.

I'm sure it's just for the first week, really. Like a young boy, or girl, starting a new grade and for the first week, easy stuff.

Yookoso is primarily hirigana and katakana, so there are no worries about there being none of that.

But, if anyone could give me tips on learning hirigana, that'd be great.

Your sig is actually good evidence that moving away from romaji is a good frigging idea. It's highly likely you have typed こんにちワ etc. because you spent way too much time reading it as "wa" in romaji.