I started out believing that it was of primary importance to learn the script simultaneously with the other aspects of the language. Unfortunately, it took two years of slow, stumbling sounding out of syllables to be able to read at any reasonable speed. (Wa...ta...shi...wa...su...shi...o...ta...be...ma...su...) Even though I spent far more time than is reasonable (or was expected) studying the material, I never felt as though I mastered any of it. By the time I had taken 4 semesters, everybody else had become discouraged and quit Japanese entirely. Worst of all, I had no listening comprehension and could not produce anything remotely resembling speech. The exercises in the books are full of unexplained irregularities, so when you do them, you get them wrong and can't figure out why. (They fixed that in the second edition by taking the answers out of the back of the book, so we couldn't check our work.) The workbook, on the other hand, seems to be written by someone who is unconcerned that they material they are using hasn't been presented to the student.

A book must be judged on its result, and this book didn't result in any of over 100 students learning to speak Japanese, or continuing its study. As a linguistics grad student, I am now convinced that to learn a spoken language, you must be exposed to speech, and how much you learn is directly related to that exposure. The more you attempt to intellectualize the task, the more you distract from the natural acquisition of language.

If you think the way to learning a language is paved with endless multidimensional tables of grammatical rules, long lists of vocabulary without context, and myriad bookwork exercises, this is the book for you.