Why I Decided to Finally Try a Textbook Again
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My Background
So first, let’s go over my background as a Japanese learner. I first started around middle school with a DS game called My Japanese Coach. An unorthodox method, but it was engaging and easy for me to do in the car. It was basically a digital textbook with minigames for practicing vocabulary, kanji, and grammar. However, it was quite weak in terms of grammar, and I really only learned basic Japanese and a smattering of words and kanji. I supposedly got to around “5th grade” level (if I remember correctly) over the course of middle school through high school.
In 2013 (after my junior/3rd year of high school), I had the opportunity to attend Harvard Summer School and took Japanese 1 in an intensive 8-week course under two native Japanese professors. There were only 8 students, including me, so it was intimate and fun. However, I did not diligently continue my studies afterwards and didn’t progress beyond a late beginner. We completed or almost completed volume 1 of Nakama.
I wouldn’t say that class was a waste, though. It taught me grammar much better than the DS game, and stuff like verb and adjective conjugations became second nature, even if I didn’t remember all the grammar points. So when I started relearning Japanese, I could conjugate fairly easily.
I still couldn’t read manga or understand anime, though, and it was about a year and a half ago that someone brought to my attention that I needed to expand my vocabulary to consume any sort of media comfortably. So that’s when I started studying Japanese again, and I started with the Core 2k/6k Anki deck.
How I’ve Been Trying to Learn
When I started studying Japanese again in 2019, I started with the vocabulary deck mentioned above (it’s linked in my Resources page, look for itazuraneko) and Tae Kim’s Guide to Grammar, as suggested by a friend. However, I didn’t get through much of Tae Kim until my first trip to Japan in October 2019, which is when I binge studied the week before the trip and read as much of Tae Kim as I could on the plane ride to Japan. I even continued to do my Anki nightly at my hotel, lol. I didn’t learn how to use the grammar, but that’s when I realized even doing that was helpful for recognizing grammar in the wild.
After the trip, I looked for Japanese study groups at my work and found one to join. There, I learned about more great resources such as All About Particles and the Kodansha Kanji Learner’s Course (aka KLC). Since the quarantine started in about March, I started to study the KLC more diligently a month or so after, and that has helped me a lot in reading. I even enjoy learning more kanji because it feels great to be able to recognize more kanji without looking them up every other word.
Since I joined the study group, I’ve also been trying to make more efforts to write/speak (although it’s a little inconsistent), so I’ve used things like Langcorrect and HelloTalk. I have trouble keeping up with it, though. I do have a phone call with a friend in Japan from HelloTalk once a week. However, I’ve noticed after a few months, my grammar doesn’t feel like it’s improving much. And that brings us to the near present, when I realized I need to study grammar in a more structured manner. Yes, I was watching stuff like Japanese Ammo with Misa (great channel by the way!!), but the issue is that I was watching stuff at random. Both the timing and content were not structured. It was hard to sit down for an hour+ and take notes with a busy work life. (Not that I’ve been able to study my textbook with any regularity yet…)
Why It’s Not Working for Me
As I said prior, my studying for grammar was not structured at all. I felt lost in a desert. I’d spend more time figuring out which Misa video to watch next , and by the time I chose one, I felt like I could have finished a video already. I started to wonder why I hadn’t tried looking for a textbook yet. As I was researching reddit for feedback on various intermediate textbooks, I saw a comment that struck me. The person said something like, now that I’m not a college student, I no longer have an aversion to textbooks. And I thought, ah, that must be me. Since the KLC textbook has been working really well for me, I wanted to see if a grammar textbook would work just as well.
The problem was that, I don’t really know what level I’m at. I’ve never taken the JLPT, the last time I had formal education in Japanese was 7 years ago, but I’m definitely not a beginner. I actually bought some textbooks in my senior year of college to reboot my Japanese study (Japanese from Zero! 2). I bought the second one to get a feel of where I was at, since I knew I didn’t need the first one. I flipped through it, and it just felt too easy. I realized later that JFZ! was a bad intermediate choice because I wasn’t learning from zero.
I found a reddit post of someone asking r/LearnJapanese for textbook suggestions and they had a similar background to mine: learned beginner Japanese X years ago and want to start again but is definitely not a beginner. And that’s where I saw Tobira mentioned, so I looked into it more.
Why I Decided on Tobira for now
I discovered that Tobira focuses a lot on reading practice without spoonfeeding you all the furigana. And that’s just what I need; I need more immersion; I need to be weaned from furigana. That’s my biggest weakness after grammar, I think. It has online supplementary materials and Anki decks, and a grammar exercise companion book. That was another weakness of mine; I’d tell myself I’d practice grammar constructs on my own, but never got around to it. I feel that if I have a structured book and concrete worksheets, the burden of thinking of my own exercises is lifted. It will also give me a concrete progress indicator.
I did waffle a bit because one of the downsides people mention is that it’s meant for classroom use and is not 100% ideal for a self-learner. But it has online materials to help mitigate that. And I figured that the best way to find out if it’s good for me is to just try it. Thinking about it too hard is just a waste of time, and no amount of comments will help me decide because everyone is different anyways.
Additionally, I did read about Sou Matome, Shin Kanzen Master, Minna no Nihongo, Integrated Approach to Intermediate Japanese (IAIJ), and Quartet but Tobira seems best for my background after reading some recommendations on reddit for people jumping back into learning. Sou Matome and Kanzen sound like they're more like test prep for the JLPT, and may be better as post-Tobira material. Quartet is new and only has one book. MNN sounds like it's best if you go through the whole series and is like a Japanese version of Genki, so it may not be good for an intermediate learner.
I also heard about bunpro, which is some guided online resource? It is also a subscription service similar to WaniKani, which I don’t like. I prefer to go with a paper textbook because online resources I access in the browser are hard for me to sit down and remember to do.
It's not a book reminding me of its presence because it's on my desk
I'll get distracted by the browser and look at totally unrelated things
For example, I signed up for Japanese Pod 101 and then proceeded to NEVER touch it. It probably didn't help that it felt like I was jumping into something randomly.
So anyways, if you read through my long ramble, I am impressed. If you’re also looking for textbook recommendations, then I hope my research gave you insight on the different resources available and the slight differences between them. r/LearnJapanese on reddit has a wiki of textbooks organized by level, so check that out if you’re interested. (I can’t find the exact page I saw before though…)
Since I’ve only done a little bit of chapter 1 (and mostly progressed on daily Anki for the textbook rather than the book itself), I don’t have a lot of helpful feedback yet, but I do like the reading material so far. I learn facts about Japan in an interesting manner and I like that it doesn’t include all furigana. If I think of anything interesting to say as I work through it more, I’ll write a post about it.
Link to official Tobira site: https://tobiraweb.9640.jp/
