ISBN0618131051

It goes without saying that Japanese is among the most intricate and diffucult languages to learn and master. Nakama 1 however seems to make the language much more manageable. The textbook is wonderfully clear and descriptive. Kanji are presented well with stroke orders, meanings, and their use is illustrated within conversational passages. There is a wealth of vocabulary and the presentaiton of the grammatical points, numerous as they are, is amazingly clear. This textbook is great for a course and for one learning on their own. I initially had reservations about the book simply because the Japanese langauge course I'm taking covered 2 chapters of this book every week. Point being that there is ALOT of manageable material in each of the 12 chapters. Combine this book with the workbook and the tape and you'll come out of it having very strong inroads into the Japanese language. All in all, a great book.

I bought this book in order to review first year Japanese after having been tortured by the Jorden series (volumes I and II of Jorden's Solipsistic Language), and I am happy to be able to affirm that, yes, in fact, as we all suspected, romanji are completely dispensable and even distracting. This book gives all examples in real Japanese, not some pseudolinguist/ cultleader's private language.

I think that NAKAMA provides fine explanations and lots of good examples. It also begins early on to show the kanji for vocabulary (written in hiragana), which makes this a good book for both learning and review. There are questions here and there, for example, why do the authors claim that Japanese has two tenses, "present and past", and then go on to explain that the present tense is also used for the future? I myself find the perfect/imperfect (completed/incompleted) distinction most intuitive. Anyway, these are minor issues which are naturally open to debate.

However, there are a few formatting problems (who in the world does the proofreading for this publisher? does he/she still have a job?), and the book is WAY too expensive, as a result of the reigning textbook tyranny from which college students sadly have no means of escape. (oui, huis clos!) What bumped my review up to 4 stars, I must admit, was the high frequency of pictures in chapter 3 containing that truly indispensable creature: kirei na neko (sorry for the redundancy). Hai!

I have been using this book for a few months now, and I am satisfied with it. Its not like I had a choice of what book to pick, but as far as textbooks go, this one actually delivers. It keeps a steady pace while reintroducing previous lessons in new ones, to keep them fresh in your mind. For example it follows the story of an American exchange student in Japan. It starts out with basic introductions and then gradually goes into more in depth conversation and questions and statements.
This book does not make you dependant on romaji, and starts to introduce kanji in the 3rd chapter. However it does not explain kanji (radicals, etc.) strangely enough. But it is good to get used to seeing them and recognizing them early on, because that will be your toughest battle with this language. A good supplement book is "Lets Learn Kanji" to get into the kanji groove. The audio that comes with this book could have been waaayy better, its very short and not too in depth on pronunciation, but its a nice addition. I'm doing alot better than I thought, since it seems the concensus is that Japanese is this enshrouded impossible to understand language. Its not. Dont believe the myths. I'm not saying its simple, but its not as difficult as you may think. If you just want to learn to understand anime or manga, I dont think thats the best motivation. Unless you have incredible patience, you wont be able to really understand the anime for at least a year or two, and even then, anime uses alot of colloquial slang and rude or impolite forms of speech and youre not going to learn that in class. As far as manga, you'd need real determination for all that wonderful Kanji!!!
Anyway, if you have a good teacher, you should succeed with this book. As far as buying it new, dont. You can get it way cheaper used either on ebay or on amazon market place. I got mine for $46 on here, and was in new condition. Its still a rip, but hey.
Some good supplementary resources I have found so far; Pimsleur audio series, "Japanese: The Manga Way", Random House Japanese-English English-Japanese Dictionary, "Jazz up your Japanese with Onomatopoeia", "Basic Connections:Making your Japanese Flow". Declans Japanese Language series software. Also, if you have access to Japanese movies, anime, or TV (subtitles off!) watch it as much as possible. You'll be suprised at each time you watch it, you'll start recognizing and understanding more and more!

Probably the main reason we use this textbook in my class is that one of the co-authors is a high-up in the Japanese language department at my university. It's not a bad text, but it's really not that great either. On the upside, the book gets into things like Hiragana right away (and Katakana a little later on), so you can quickly ditch romaji, but the Kanji lessons don't start until somewhat later. The recorded materials for Nakama are somewhat lacking in quality, but they're managable. Mostly I guess it's just a textbook, not particularly interesting. It covers new grammar patterns and such pretty quickly, and the explanations aren't always completely clear. There are a number of very useful tables of counters and verb endings and such in the back, though. Overall, it's an okay textbook, but from the things I hear, something like Genki would probably be a better choice.