This CD is a comprehensive multimedia workbook. It is designed for you to have the opportunity to practise all skills at beginner's level Japanese even if you can't easily meet with a native Japanese speaker. It is not intended to be a textbook, and you will probably wish to consult a grammar book, textbook or, if you have one, your teacher as the lessons go by. You will also need to learn the kana (hiragana and katakana) before beginning.
The lessons are divided between two parts. In the part 1, the focus is on building up grammar, expressions and sentence structures. It is designed to allow you to start using the language and to stimulate your creativity in constructing sentences of your own. In the second part, actual expressions are introduced as they are used in Japanese conversation. These often differ from one's expectations based on other languages, and this part of the lesson is designed to help you speak Japanese in a natural and fluent way.
1) Lessons
Part 1: Grammar Foundations
In the introduction to every lesson there will be Japanese words listed with explanations in English. For example:
ใงใใ
leave, will leave (emerge): vowel base (group 1) verb, nonpast (dictionary form)
The Japanese words are followed by the authentic English translation and sometimes a literal translation is given in brackets. After the colon, the standard Japanese linguistic terminology is given for the grammar function of the word. Explanations, and the more familiar terminology which is usually used in Japanese learning are given in brackets. Note that some of the Japanese sentences are written with spaces between the words for easy reading by learners. Real Japanese sentences do not contain spaces except to indicate a new paragraph.
Part 2: Conversation
This part has two sections. In the first section, the lessons contain relatively short expressions, and in the second section, lessons give dialogues. You can practise fixed expressions, for example general greetings and small filler words in the former section, and authentic conversation full of commonly used phrases in the latter. Both sections come with video clips, and in the dialogues you can see how people interact and speak naturally in Japanese. English translations are given for the expressions and dialogues, and sometimes literal or supplementary translation, or explanation is added in parentheses.
2) Grammar
You can use this index to find the lesson which deals with certain grammar or sentence structures.
3) Vocabulary
Vocabulary for the lessons is listed according to word class (nouns, adjectives, verbs etc.) and categories (occupation, country, food, etc.)
