Postby Xelian » Sun May 28, 2017 11:13 pm
ALMOST forgot about May's challenge... I'm glad I caught it on time!
So I've been going through Tobira this entire year in my 300 level Japanese class. As a result, I've read/worked through up to chapter 9, so I'm going to do a review on chapters 1-9, and the "Power Up Your Grammar"/"Power Up Your Kanji" workbooks.
The Tobira textbook is quite useful for an intermediate to advanced Japanese learner in many ways. My favorite features are that each reading has a vocabulary list, and from this vocabulary list they pick some kanji compounds/ any words with kanji in them and put those in a list as well. If you memorize all of these words and learn the kanji, you have a substantial amount of knowledge from that alone after each chapter. The chapter readings themselves are often very interesting and will teach you about Japanese culture and mannerisms in detail. My favorite chapters so far have been Chapter 1, Japan's Geography, Chapter 3, Japan's Technology, and Chapter 6, Japanese Life and Religion. I also enjoyed some of the additional readings in each chapter, such as in Chapter 8, there was a fun story about the Japanese play "Kusabira" and I loved that, haha. There are also grammar points at the end of each chapter, which I find useful, but not entirely understandable.
That brings me to my least favorite features. I would say that the grammar points are a bit lacking, in the sense that sometimes it's hard to understand them. I think a translation of the example questions would be useful. I actually can say that I hate the way that the "Power Up Your Grammar" workbook is structured. I think that going through the exercises in that book were a waste of my time, as I couldn't grasp that method of teaching. It is almost like you have to come up with stories on the spot, which also satisfy the requirements of the question. I resorted to just writing examples with the grammar points and had a lang-8 user check them for me so that I actually could learn them...
Another nearly useless feature was the fake conversations between two people. Yes, they had interesting vocabularies included, but they just made me cringe, especially because we had to recreate them but with our own, original situation, which also had to be logically correct, in class. That was my least favorite part of the book I think, but also just my least favorite part of my class, so maybe one would enjoy it if not forced into recreating it. But for anyone outside of a classroom environment, I feel it would be challenging to use this portion of the book for more than just vocabulary and learning about casual speech.
I did enjoy the "Power Up Your Kanji" workbook, but the thing is that you can look up kanji on Jisho and practice it in a kanji renshuu and get the same results. It would be great for someone without internet connection I guess, because all of the stroke orders and related words are right there in the book. The exercises in it are actually really cool and fun, so I'd still recommend it for someone who doesn't really have enthusiasm about kanji. For people like me, it was slightly trivial, because I love to practice kanji and don't need anything besides Jisho for extra support.
However, I have learned an incredible amount just in these 9 chapters, and would definitely recommend it, just not the extra grammar workbook, that was totally useless for me. Happy learning!
5 x
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