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Genki 1: An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese 1 | 
 enlarge | Authors: Eri Banno, Yutaka Ohno, Yoko Sakane, Chikako Shinagawa
Creator: Japan Times
Publisher: Varsitybooks.Com
Category: Book
List Price: $37.95
Buy Used: $20.00
You Save: $17.95 (47%)
New (15) Used (11) from $20.00
Rating:  37 reviews
Sales Rank: 69062
Media: Paperback
Pages: 368
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.5
Dimensions (in): 10.1 x 7.2 x 0.9
ISBN: 4789009637
Dewey Decimal Number: 495
EAN: 9784789009638
ASIN: 4789009637
Publication Date: May 1999
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
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Product Description
Genki outlines in 23 structured lessons all the fundamentals of the Japanese language. Abundantly illustrated and containing a wide variety of exercises, Genki is sure to bring vigor to your classroom! Though primarily meant for use in college-level classes, it is also a good guide for independent learners and is a nice resource book for teachers of Japanese. Genki's authors teach at Kansai Gaidai University, which hosts the largest number of North American students spending their junior year in Japan.
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| Customer Reviews: Read 32 more reviews...
 Mediocre for adults September 26, 2007
A. J. Sutter (Tokyo, Japan)
75 out of 80 found this review helpful
This book may be good for young students who anticipate homestays (and I'm skeptical even about that, for reasons below), but if you're an adult you may find this book excruciating. I recently moved to Japan, and finally determined to take some private lessons to get a more systematic grasp on the language than I have had hitherto. My school uses this text. I can't compare it with other college-style textbooks, which may mostly suffer from the same problems, but among the issues I have with it are:
@ The framing scenario is of foreign students living in homestays and interacting with their homestay families and with each other; there is also a lot of school-related vocabluary. This is largely irrelevant for an adult's experience. It is useless for business, BTW (though in my own case, I was looking more for daily life vocabulary and situations than business).
@ Even within this scenario, the book doesn't teach you how to really have conversation -- all classmates address each other with polite "-masu" form verbs. In real life, this would be distant or even rude with your pals. (Moreover, on the accompanying tapes female gaijin characters like "Mary" and "Sue" address their classmates and homestay parents in that saccharine, squeaky little-girl voice that is normally used by shop staff and female announcers on infomercials, not people talking to friends or family.)
@ In Japan, it is very rare for people to mirror back to you what you say, or for it to be appropriate for you to mirror back to them. This is especially true if your main interactions are with people in shops, where they will use a lot of "keigo" (honorific speech) or other specialized formulas. Simple example: A waitress will bring stuff to your table and ask "Yoroshii desu ka?" (Is that OK?), you don't answer back "Hai, yoroshii desu." Even saying goodbye is highly context dependent; e.g. when someone says "Sorry I'm being so rude as to leave before you," even if you can catch the Japanese phrase you will look like an idiot if you reply symmetrically (been there, done that). This book doesn't give you a clue about dealing with such situations, nor help you to unravel what Japanese people are saying to you when they respond to your questions or remarks. All dialogues and exercises are based on the mirroring principle (as well as indiscriminate use of "wa", the topic particle). So it's pretty useless for practical purposes -- unless you plan to use Japanese in class only.
@ While it's a plus that reading & writing practice are integrated into the text, the reading selections in early chapters are devoid of imagination. After several chapters of reading stuff like "Are you OK? I am fine. It's cold here in Japan. I took some pictures, studied Japanese and took a bath. My father is nice, but very busy," and so on, you just want to scream.
@ Although the publication date is 1999, at which time a dot-com boom was beginning even in Japan, this book is snail-mail all the way: you spend time learning about stamps and postcards, but there isn't anything about email, the Internet or texting. (Forget also about DVDs -- people watch videos.)
@ Japanese verb conjugation has a wonderful regularity, in that almost every verb has a set of stems that are based variously on -A-, -I-, -U-, -E- and -O- (e.g., negative, polite, dictionary, causative and "let's" forms, respectively). This tracks the order of Japanese vowels in the kana writing systems, so it's easy to remember. However, "Genki"'s presentation of verbs obliterates this useful pattern (see, e.g. conjugation chart @ 344 of Vol. I).
@ The book lacks any review chapters, appendices, exercises or quizzes to help you consolidate what you've learned in a chunk of preceding chapters. Schools don't necessarily take the initiative to review the material every now and then, so you may need to request special quizzes to force yourself to review stuff you studied weeks earlier. My teachers were amenable when asked, though my lessons are one-on-one, and this might be more difficult to do if the book is used in a class situation (you might ask about that before you sign up). If you're using the book to study on your own, you're on your own with this too.
Like most students of Japanese, I've stocked up on a shelfload of other books of varying usefulness. (Two of the best, Rita Lampkin's "Japanese: Verbs and Essentials of Grammar" and Jay Rubin's "Making Sense of Japanese", unfortunately are exclusively in Roman characters, or nearly so.) You will definitely need to to the same (or at least half a shelfload) if you use this book. But not getting bored by the boook will be a bigger challenge if you're older than 22. One possible tip might be to look for a book that has at least one gaijin co-author. This one is written entirely by Japanese authors; it could have benefitted from the perspective of a formerly-puzzled foreigner.
The first Japanese book you should buy April 20, 2004
Lady Murasaki (Washington, USA)
55 out of 58 found this review helpful
My Japanese teacher used this book in our classes and it was an excellent choice. It can easily be used for self-study, especially if used with the CDs. Each lesson starts out with a dialog and is followed by a vocabulary list, grammar explanations, and vocabulary/grammar practice. The grammar is explained very clearly and the practice exercises are very useful for remembering what is being taught. One drawback: no answers are given. The vocabulary lists are not always comprehensive but they give lots of useful vocabulary. Several topics are covered including shopping, talking about family, travel, daily routines, and health. The book also includes lessons on Katakana, Hiragana, and Kanji. I took the Japanese Language Proficiency Test (Level 4) after 5 months studying with this book and passed. The Kanji included was very useful as were the grammar points and vocabulary. If you can, I recommend getting the CDs and the workbook. The CDs are excellent. You can practice pronunciation with the dialogs and vocabulary lists and the CDs also include listening exercises for the text and workbook. The workbook covers more grammar and vocabulary as well as Kanji, Katakana, and Hiragana practice. This is the best Japanese textbook I've encountered. It is well organized and relevant. I give it 5 stars without hesitation!
An excellent book for beginning students! March 27, 2000
Dan Norton (Madison, WI United States)
29 out of 31 found this review helpful
I am currently in a college course which uses this as our sole text book, and it is extremely useful. With lessons in class paired with the book's chapters, new concepts are picked up comfortably, and are then used throughout the rest of the chapters, providing a cumulative effect that really lets you feel like you are making progress. Also included are kanji in the back of the book for each chapter, allowing you to fill out your reading/writing skills as you see fit. All in all, a wonderful text!
Best Japanese textbook i've seen so far January 3, 2005
Ho Tak Chan (Vancouver, BC Canada)
20 out of 22 found this review helpful
For those of you who didn't have the chance to browse from a selection of Japanese language book, let me recommend this textbook to you.
There is a total of 24 lessons in Genki I & II. Genki I consist of 12 lessons.
Here's the sequence to which the lessons are structured
1. Dialogue
2. English translated dialogue
3. Vocabulary
4. Grammar
5. Practice
What I've found best about this textbook compared to other japanese textbook is in the organization. I sometimes stare at "Japanese for Busy People II" and get overwhelmed by the difficulty and the globs of unspaced words. It in turn become very discouraging to continue reading because it is not the vocabulary or the grammar that you'd be focusing on, it's finding what's important in that glob of paragraph that takes away your concentration.
Grammar:
(average of 6 grammar per lesson)
In "An Integrated Course in Elementary Japanese", important grammars are bolded, spaced, and highlighted. The explaination in how to use the grammar are precise and neatly spaced along with an example or two to illustrate how to use it.
Vocabulary:
(Average of 50 words per lesson)
The vocabularies they teach in this textbook are basically the same as the ones in other textbooks. Useful in everyday conversation. But again I must stress that this textbook organized very efficiently.
1. Noun
2. i-adjective
3. na-adjective
4. u-verb
5. ru-verb
6. adverbs
For a beginner, you might not know the reason to distinguish between i-adj and na-adj. But it becomes very useful when you start studying grammar. Some textbooks out there also distinguishes the types of verb and adjectives, but some doesn't.
Practices:
(6-7 pages per lesson)
The practices in this textbook uses both pictures and words to test your recall ability. From the looks of the practices in all the japanese textbooks, they are not designed to be a self-study course. There is no accompanying answer-key along with the practices. I agree that the practice is designed so that you can figure it out by rereading the lesson, but personally, it bothers me because you cannot be sure at that moment whether your answer is correct or incorrect. In a way, it prevents me from putting it into my long term memory because my answers might be wrong. I'm sure my opinion can be argued.
Lastly, there is also a Genki Workbook (sold separately). Each lesson has around 8 pages of extra sheets to practice. Again, it has no answer key. The last page in every lesson is a listening assignment. Which means unless you have the CD (not provided within workbook), you cannot do that assignment. But it's still good if you want the extra 7 pages/lesson of practice in writing.
A little story to end this review
A boy went into a language bookstore and asks the store owner which japanese textbook is the best. The store owner replied: "Genki" - The End
I know, it's an awesome story.
Amazing! Go Genki!! December 7, 2005
Faye Green
15 out of 15 found this review helpful
I had been self-studying Japanese over numerous websites for 'bout 7 months when I decided to actually get a textbook. After searching around, reading reviews, asking people what they think I decided on Genki I. What a fantastic choice!! I learned more in 2 weeks in this book than I learned 7 months on a computer. Here I go, in depth (summary at end ^_~):
A) It starts out with an overview of the book, explanation of alphabets, so-on-and-so-forth, ect. Not much here but an introduction, soooo....
B) Dialogue - The beginning of the lesson has a dialogue that goes with a certain lesson theme (e.g. New Friends covers greetings, simple questions, numerous phrases and vocab, ect.). This is written in kana (after lesson 3, kanji w/ furigana), romanji, (if any) katakana w/ furigana, and an English translation. You won't understand what's being said 'till the next few pages, so now onto that.
C) Vocabulary - A loooong list of vocab resides here. Although it may be sorta "random", it is useful and good stuff to know. Words and terms used in the dialogue are marked with an asterisk "*". This page is written in kana, kanji w/ furigana, (if any) katakana w/ furigana, romanji, and English. Ok! Here we go:
D) Grammar - easy-to-understand grammar explanations rest here, after vocab. This provides the info needed to actually USE the vocab. After reading this, you should probably get a lot more of the dialogue. But not quite....
E) Um, Other? - These pages contain numerous class activities (not very useful to self-studiers, but can have some good practice exercises if you play both parts XD), other grammar/useful notes explanations, some more vocab perhaps, more dialogues, ect. In later lessons, this contains the kanji explanations as well. Basically, it's a planned lesson part that puts all you have learned in the previous pages to the test. It really builds on what you need to know, and forces you to read back, building stronger understanding and memorization ^^
Summary: Clear, neat, and fun planned lessons, put together in a learning-effective format. Great for all ages (it IS intended for college classroom use, but I am a 13 self-studier, and I find it great!!) as well! You will learn so much, and be reading, speaking, writing, and UNDERSTANDING real Japanese by the end of the book!
Other notes: Be sure to get the CDs (especially if you're learning on your own) and the workbook. The workbook reinforces grammar and such, and the CD helps you listen, speak, and understand spoken Japanese better (REALLY helpful! It's extremely helpful at learning and understanding the accent!!!!).
Thanks for listening to my rambling! Hope it has given enough detail and everything you want to know before you decide on a good book!! (ALSO: do NOT get the Japanese For Busy People series; no matter how popular, it is terrible!!!!! Genki is a waaaay better investment!)
-Sachi
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