Barron's Mastering Japanese
May. 13th, 2007 11:51 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
akujunkanProbably of greatest interest to ![[livejournal.com profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/external/lj-userinfo.gif)
sara_tanaquil, but posted here in case anyone else is interested: my user's guide to Barron's Mastering Japanese (I signed it out from la biblioteque last week).
So you've purchased Barron's Mastering Japanese. You'll want to start by thouroughly destroying the textbook. I recommend dousing it with gasoline and setting it ablaze. Or running it through an industrial paper shredder and then dousing and setting it ablaze. Anything to ensure its complete and irreversible destruction.
Why, you ask? Because the Barron's Mastering Japanese book is nothing other than the abominable Jorden text, which I (and most other JL majors I've met) utterly loathe, but which is also inexplicably beloved by Japanese language professors the world over. The Jorden textbooks are written in romaji--only, with nary a kana, let alone kanji, in sight...even though everyone under the sun acknowledges that romaji should be dispensed with as soon as possible in JSL study. Adding insult to injury, Jorden uses a modification of the SKS system, the most atrociously counterintuitive romanization method on earth--koobe? situreesimasu? itizi ni? daizyoobu? eego?--and junks it up even further with busy intonation and rhythmic markers. Despite what is so clearly state on the box, BMJ is not going to teach anyone how to "WRITE IT・READ IT." I don't even know how they can get away with claiming they will.
Textbook thouroughly destroyed yet? Good. Now it's time to start learning. Namely, what life was like in Japan 30+ years ago. The Jorden texts were written shortly after the occupation, and neither the textbook nor the audio CDs have been comprehensively revised since. Welcome to a world where the USSR is a pressing geopolitical concern, "China"=Taiwan and polite society pretends that the mainland doesn't exist, and there is still only one Korea. Fundamental aspects of modern Japanese society--cell phones, the Internet, ATMs, credit cards--obviously don't receive any mention at all. One hopes that the box's claim that it is "The same course used by the U.S. Government to train Diplomatic Personnel" is similarly outdated. I'd hoped that the inclusion of CDs meant that something would have been done, but alas, the CDs have simply been dubbed from the original cassettes and badly at that: the VWOOM VWOOM VWOOM of winding tape provides a constant, noisy accompaniment to the dialogues and exercises.
I've also got some quibbles with the language they choose to teach: over-use of the pronoun "anata" and weird emphasis on the noun/adjective-じゃありません construction, which I cannot recall having ever heard once during all my time in Japan.
That said, it probably isn't a bad investment providing you're familiar enough with the language to discard the text and just work with the CDs. Each unit (I've worked through five thus far) contains recordings of the "core conversations" (they call them "practice dialogues" here), which you'll go through three times: building up phrases, sentence by sentence at speed, and then finally for listening comprehension only. These are followed by eight to ten exercises of about ten "questions" each: substitution drills, grammar drills, conjugation drills, build-up drills, the whole nine yards. The drills are all to be completed at speed, which is good, because they challenge you to speak likewise. My only quibble here is that they're structured like this: [prompt] [pause for student's answer] [correct answer given] [next prompt]; I would have liked a second pause between the final two steps (as is given in Mastering Korean) for the student to correct mistakes and/or adjust phrasing and intonation.
So again, if you're willing to overlook the textual and chronological shortcomings, it probably is the best program around for gaining listening and speaking comprehension. And if nothing else, it's the equivalent of one year of university-level instruction in those areas.
That will be all.
sara_tanaquil, but posted here in case anyone else is interested: my user's guide to Barron's Mastering Japanese (I signed it out from la biblioteque last week).So you've purchased Barron's Mastering Japanese. You'll want to start by thouroughly destroying the textbook. I recommend dousing it with gasoline and setting it ablaze. Or running it through an industrial paper shredder and then dousing and setting it ablaze. Anything to ensure its complete and irreversible destruction.
Why, you ask? Because the Barron's Mastering Japanese book is nothing other than the abominable Jorden text, which I (and most other JL majors I've met) utterly loathe, but which is also inexplicably beloved by Japanese language professors the world over. The Jorden textbooks are written in romaji--only, with nary a kana, let alone kanji, in sight...even though everyone under the sun acknowledges that romaji should be dispensed with as soon as possible in JSL study. Adding insult to injury, Jorden uses a modification of the SKS system, the most atrociously counterintuitive romanization method on earth--koobe? situreesimasu? itizi ni? daizyoobu? eego?--and junks it up even further with busy intonation and rhythmic markers. Despite what is so clearly state on the box, BMJ is not going to teach anyone how to "WRITE IT・READ IT." I don't even know how they can get away with claiming they will.
Textbook thouroughly destroyed yet? Good. Now it's time to start learning. Namely, what life was like in Japan 30+ years ago. The Jorden texts were written shortly after the occupation, and neither the textbook nor the audio CDs have been comprehensively revised since. Welcome to a world where the USSR is a pressing geopolitical concern, "China"=Taiwan and polite society pretends that the mainland doesn't exist, and there is still only one Korea. Fundamental aspects of modern Japanese society--cell phones, the Internet, ATMs, credit cards--obviously don't receive any mention at all. One hopes that the box's claim that it is "The same course used by the U.S. Government to train Diplomatic Personnel" is similarly outdated. I'd hoped that the inclusion of CDs meant that something would have been done, but alas, the CDs have simply been dubbed from the original cassettes and badly at that: the VWOOM VWOOM VWOOM of winding tape provides a constant, noisy accompaniment to the dialogues and exercises.
I've also got some quibbles with the language they choose to teach: over-use of the pronoun "anata" and weird emphasis on the noun/adjective-じゃありません construction, which I cannot recall having ever heard once during all my time in Japan.
That said, it probably isn't a bad investment providing you're familiar enough with the language to discard the text and just work with the CDs. Each unit (I've worked through five thus far) contains recordings of the "core conversations" (they call them "practice dialogues" here), which you'll go through three times: building up phrases, sentence by sentence at speed, and then finally for listening comprehension only. These are followed by eight to ten exercises of about ten "questions" each: substitution drills, grammar drills, conjugation drills, build-up drills, the whole nine yards. The drills are all to be completed at speed, which is good, because they challenge you to speak likewise. My only quibble here is that they're structured like this: [prompt] [pause for student's answer] [correct answer given] [next prompt]; I would have liked a second pause between the final two steps (as is given in Mastering Korean) for the student to correct mistakes and/or adjust phrasing and intonation.
So again, if you're willing to overlook the textual and chronological shortcomings, it probably is the best program around for gaining listening and speaking comprehension. And if nothing else, it's the equivalent of one year of university-level instruction in those areas.
That will be all.