Genki Textbooks good for beginner?

Hey,

I am about to start university next year for 4 - 5 years and I am going to be learning japanese alongside my course in IT to open up some job possibilities in the future.

I was just looking around for textbooks and was wondering if working through the Genki series would be good for a beginner who is self teaching.

Do you have any other recommendations which i might be able to get at in the UK?

Arigato Gozaimas!! ^_^

I posted how much I love this series somewhere else...but anyways! I LOVE Elementary Japanese by Yoko Hasegawa and various others. There are two volumes and a teacher's guide. They run about $60 each. But it is worth it! :D Each lesson is supposed to be a weekly lesson, but I have been covering two or three a week. They start with basic greetings and hiragana in the first lesson. After the first lesson, everything but the actually English is written in Japanese. Second lesson is introductions and katakana. By the third lesson you are learning kanji. The two books combined teach you around three hundred kanji, not a great amount but still pretty nifty. You don't really need the teacher's guide, but it is useful if you want the anwsers to the written reviews. Both lesson books also come with two disks compatable with MACs and PCs with the dialog and listening exercises on it.
I hope this helps!

While I have actually taken a look through the "Elementary Japanese" book by Yoko Hasegawa, I found that it was not nearly as user-friendly as Genki is. After having used Genki for a while, I have covered over half of the Genki I textbook, and have found it to be very helpful.
One of the best aspects of the book is that it forces you to learn the Hiragana and Katakata writing systems very early on, which is a must when learning Japanese. From lessons 3 and on, it provides means to teach altogether about 300 kanji to its user.
The grammar sections and exercises in the book are very clear, and essentially the entire book is extremely user-friendly. (When I say user-friendly, I mean that it is excellent for both classroom settings AND self-study particularly.) Not only does it provide the means to learn all of the Hiragana and Katakana (unlike the aforementioned textbook by Yoko Hasegawa) but it also provides necessary means to learn about 300 kanji. There are 26 lessons in altogether in the Genki series (12 in the 1st book, and the rest in the 2nd), and there are roundly 50 vocabulary in each lesson. It also costs less than the Yoko Hasegawa's Elementary Japanese series. Essentially the Genki series is one of the very best ones out on the market.

If you need some other user reviews , type in "genki elementary japanese review" in Google, and click on the link that takes you to Amazon. ^_^

(delete the spaces in the link)

Thank you so much guys.

I will look into getting Genki soon then. I recently purchased "an introduction to elementary Japanese" as it was raved about by quite a few people and was a lot cheaper than the Genki set.

Though introduction into elementary Japanese will help me a great deal with the kanji and writing side of things, Genki will be good as a side for the speaking and everything else so i will look into getting both at some point ^_^

Definetely going to check out that elementary japanese at some point as well.

with all three books hopefully i will become pretty good pretty quick XD!!

Thank you so much again for your help :)

Best thing is too start by learning Romanji japanese ,it is based on american english,i been studying studying Romanji Japanese for 2 month,you will have too learn the Japanese verbs first ,then you will have too learn japanese sentence structure ,they have a lots of free courses online ,the courses are really based on japanese culture,such as eating and drinking and greeting people,i am developing my own course ,you will need an japanese english dictionary , i was thinking about teaching Romanji Japanese,if thier is interest for free here,maybe by postiing some lesson here,if thier is some interest

Genki is one of the best Japanese books I've used so far, and..I own about 25 books on Japanese. However I'm intermediate and I think the book is great because most of the text is in kanji/hiragana. I don't think it'd be too good for a beginner because it starts off a level of one already having a good base knowledge.

Only way you will learn japanese is pay someone too teach you or someone teach you for free,these are your only option,all these phrasebook are wonderful, but they will not do the job,you talking about billion of combination of phrases,so I bought a japanese/ english dictionary and went through the whole japanese section and took notes, japanese can be learned,but you will have to be up too the challenge

I've taken two semesters of Japanese at my college and my class uses Genki. It's quite possibly the best although it still has many flaws... (Order of lessons for example)

I've completed both Genki I and II. I feel that I have a good grasp for the basics sentence structure and grammatical patterns. Can anyone recommend a good intermediate-advanced Japanese textbook that would be a good follow up to the genki books? Thanks in advance