Which textbook did you use to learn Japanese?

[Xenops]

My concern with Genki is that there is no answer sheet for the exercises: you have to buy a teacher's guide, which is written completely in Japanese, and uses kanji. You have to have some knowledge of Kanji to decipher the text.

There is Japanese for Everyone, which does have exercise answers at the back of the book (https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Everyone-Functional-Approach-Communication/dp/4889962344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485055577&sr=8-1&keywords=japanese+for+everyone You can find the audio files by searching on Youtube. However, you would have to learn hiragana and katakana separately.

[galaxyrocker]

My concern with Genki is that there is no answer sheet for the exercises: you have to buy a teacher's guide, which is written completely in Japanese, and uses kanji. You have to have some knowledge of Kanji to decipher the text.

There is Japanese for Everyone, which does have exercise answers at the back of the book (https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Everyone-Functional-Approach-Communication/dp/4889962344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485055577&sr=8-1&keywords=japanese+for+everyone You can find the audio files by searching on Youtube. However, you would have to learn hiragana and katakana separately.

I have a copy of the answers of Genki. You don't really need to know the kanji at all in order to check your answers. Now, I'm not sure if it offers explanations of why the answers are what they are (only through 2 chapters), but it's easily enough to match up the solutions with the exercises (both in book and workbook) that they go to.

[aokoye]

My concern with Genki is that there is no answer sheet for the exercises: you have to buy a teacher's guide, which is written completely in Japanese, and uses kanji. You have to have some knowledge of Kanji to decipher the text.

There is Japanese for Everyone, which does have exercise answers at the back of the book (https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Everyone-Functional-Approach-Communication/dp/4889962344/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1485055577&sr=8-1&keywords=japanese+for+everyone You can find the audio files by searching on Youtube. However, you would have to learn hiragana and katakana separately.

I never found the kanji and complete use of Japanese in the answer key an issue with the first edition of the book. That said I just took a look at a preview of the answer key for the second edition and it looks like there's furigana which would make things easier for people who have trouble with there being so much kanji in the answer key.

I liked Japanese for Everyone but it does move significantly faster than anything else mentioned in this thread (other than maybe Minna No Nihongo, maybe). That could be good or bad depending on the person. I was never able to get very far into it because I tried to push myself too hard (never a good idea for me). Outside of the audio issues that you mentioned it is impossible to find new copies of the workbook and kanji book though if you're ok with buying used books (and I am) that isn't really an issue.

There's a useful comparison of the contents of various Japanese books on the Koohii wiki.

[Mista]

I used Japanese from Zero, and made it almost to the end of book one before I took a break from Japanese. I enjoyed using it for the most part, and learned a lot from it, but two big things come to mind that I didn't like:

1) I used a very addictive app to learn hiragana quite fast. Japanese from Zero goes quite slowly with the hiragana, you are almost at the end of the book before you're through them all, and in the meanwhile you get to read words with a mixture of hiragana and latin letters. I did NOT enjoy that, but it gave me a lot of writing exercise, as I felt I had to write out everything in the book properly using hiragana only, so I could read it in a decent way.

2) Towards the end of the book, you learn so many ways to count to ten that you lose all inspiration to learn the language, at least I did. I made it almost to the end, and then I needed a break from Japanese. I wish I had just put book one aside when I got tired of it and started on book two instead. Then I could have learned some verbs instead, and left the counting for later.