Reddit reviews Japanese: The Spoken Language, Part 1

Not really. The closest you could get are the materials from Pimsleur or the Foreign Services textbooks, but the problem is that those are 100% intended to be used with experienced teachers and in-class drills rather than in isolation on their own.

The problem with avoiding the Japanese writing system is that pretty much all of the worthwhile materials will use the Japanese syllabary (hiragana/katakana) from a basic level and then everything at the intermediate/advanced level assumes that you know how to read Japanese.

That having been said, the Japanese: The Spoken Language series by Eleanor Harz Jorden was written for people in your shoes but is very, very dated (30 years old, IIRC) and is very business-oriented. There are three books in the series (which cover about three years of learning at the university level).

They are very grammar-focused and tend to be verbose (to say the least) in the explanations.

If you can find those, they're probably your best bet. The romaji sucks, though.

Edit:

Japanese: The Spoken Language 1

Japanese: The Spoken Language 2

Japanese: The Spoken Language 3

This book teaches you beginner-intermediate Japanese only using Romaji. Its basically been shit on by most academics I know of and the community sees it as an inefficient way of learning JP, but hey have it your way.

https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Spoken-Language-Part-1/dp/0300038348

Japanese, the spoken language.

http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-The-Spoken-Language-Part/dp/0300038348

https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Spoken-Language-Part-1/dp/0300038348/ref=pd_lpo_sbs_14_t_1?_encoding=UTF8&psc=1&refRID=46116G1V2311FB6QKHQH

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This book series, while short uses Romaji and diacritic marks to give you a feel for the intonation of words. Might be useful, depending. The audio drills help immensely, as well. /u/hattori31's recording suggestion is pretty solid as well - especially if you have comparable audio from native speakers on the same vocabulary.

this

is it this? http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-The-Spoken-Language-Part/dp/0300038348/ref=sr_1_2?ie=UTF8&qid=1371872142&sr=8-2&keywords=JSL

My college has us use Japanese: The Spoken Language.

It's... not that awesome. It doesn't use any kana, in fact learning the writing system is a separate book and lesson plan. My teacher (a Japanese grad student) isn't a big fan of it, she says it's very old. And it is. It refers to Russia as the Soviet Union. And it sucks shit at teaching particles.

I'm actually going to buy げんき for the summer so I don't forget Japanese in between terms.

At Cornell we used Japanese: The Spoken Language series by Eleanor Jorden and Mari Noda. This was also used by the very well-regarded Falcon intensive course.

For kanji lookups, once you get past the jyouyou, Andrew Nelson's Japanese-English Character Dictionary is essential.

For a dictionary, once you can make sense of it, you should start using a Japanese-Japanese dictionary -- that is, not wa-ei, that is, one aimed at Japanese people not foreigners. It doesn't matter which one. You should make it a practice to start using it before you are comfortable doing so. It will take you three times as long as using a wa-ei, but it will pay off in the long run.

I'm an international student who came to the US for college and grad school, so I've learned Japanese as a 3rd language through a 2nd language, English. (Btw, my mother language is not Chinese.) As for the level of skills, I passed the JLPT N2 in December 2015. This gave me confidence to seek a job in Japan. I did some interviews entirely in Japanese and got offers from two Japanese companies. I cannot say that I was able to say all that I would like to say, but getting offers proved that my proficiency was at a level where they decided to tolerate it.

I started learning Japanese in college in 2003. However, I have not been studying Japanese all the time in the 14-year span from then and now. I did:

• 3 years of Japanese in college,
  
• and another 3.5 years in grad school. (However, the courses I took were undergrad courses.)
  
  Outside class:
  
  
• I proactively had conversation with Japanese speakers. Both my college and grad school have communities of native Japanese speakers and students of Japanese who meet weekly to have lunch or dinner. I joined most of these meetings. I also had weekly conversations with a language exchange partner over Skype.
  
• I have been listening to radio shows from Japan while working.
  
• I have been trying to read novels (well, light novels, to be exact) and books.
  
  My Japanese improved the most when I took classes, and I found that I got a much better hang of the language when I'm forced to write long prose (essays, interview reports, presentation scripts, etc). Self studying other than reading books did not quite help probably because I'm bad at keeping a steady schedule. Reading books, on the other hand, has exposed me to new vocabularies and idioms.
  
  I'm fortunate that I took classes that required me to speak in almost every session. In my first four years of taking Japanese, I was supposed to practice in a language lab and remember "core conversations" before coming to class. Once in class, the teachers would do the live drills of those conversations with each of us individually. Thanks to this, I have no fear of speaking Japanese and making mistakes because I made so many mistakes before (and will continue to do so for a long long time).
  
  While a number of Japanese native speakers have said that my Japanese is "pera pera," I cannot that I can completely understand the language. The Japanese vocabulary is very large and I only know a sliver of it that I cannot get through reading a manga or a news article without a dictionary. There are many grammar patterns that I'm not familiar with, and I always struggle trying to communicate complicated and/or technical ideas. Of course, I will continue to learn, but I honestly don't know how many years it would take until my Japanese is as good as any other languages that I speak.
  
  Resources used:
  
  
• My undergrad courses were taught using Japanese: The Spoken Language up to Part 3. While the treatment of grammar and its cultural contexts is solid, the books themselves are extremely dry. I wouldn't recommend them for self studying.
  
• The first two Japanese courses I took in grad school used An Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese. I enjoyed the book as it contains good reading passages and optional cultural notes.
  
• The next two classes was taught with トピックによる日本語総合演習　テーマ探しから発表へ 上級用資料集. This one has reading passages based on real newspaper articles and introduces N2-level grammars and vocabularies.
  
• I prepared for the N2 exam using the 日本語総まとめ series of books. I worked through 4 of them (grammar, vocab, kanji, listening), and that was super effective.
  
• The last three courses I took did not use any textbook. Our teacher chose the materials and the class activities herself. These include interviewing Japanese we could find on campus, watching episodes of Closed-up Gendai, debating, giving formal presentations, and reading newspaper articles, short stories, and novels ("Hiro-kun" by Okuda Hideo and a part of "Potos Lime no Fune" by Tsumura Kikuko).