John Sanders

It cannot teach you. If you learn anything by reading this, it is because of your own initiative. It begins by teaching things that are incidental, such as with nonsense about particulars in college (which are only there so that the authors can look good to their bosses and have their students say that they're majoring in this or that), and assumes that you can understand a great deal through looking at long dialogue pieces, which usually have slang, and which are placed before lessons on language (making all of the reading worthless because one did not understand what he was looking at), so that, if ever one were to embark on reading them, he would spend an hour on the first three sentences. Do not attempt to learn by listening to the recorded dialogue on the flash drive, which is spewed at such a speed that one does not come out of listening to it with a better sense of knowing Japanese, but of knowing how to "get one over" by listening to faint clues in that way that a toddler can fool a stupid teacher into thinking that he knows the history of Ancient Greece by anticipating answers, not knowing them. The authors are as despicable as the rest of society (and Fujimoto, by the way, even curses in class to seem "hip"), and they must think that one can learn things automatically, that by looking at large dialogue pieces in Japanese, one's mind will magically connect the squiggles and dashes into language. Thank Jesus Christ, Zeus Almighty, and Isis that I already knew Katakana and Hiragana. To add to the repulsiveness of the textbook, the Kanji practice boxes look as though they had been drawn in by a six-year old. In her college class, Fujimoto, who may have even written these disgusting Kanji examples, had babyish handwriting, in Japanese and English, and she said, "It's so messy 'cause I'm used to writing calligraphy." That reminds me of the boy who cannot remember anything, saying as an excuse, "I'm too smart to know about the Constitution!" If you are attempting to complete the workbook pages, be prepared to not have the workbook problems taught to you, either via the book or through the college classes that are associated with the book. Also, there are typos frequently, and mistakes of some kind or another pervade the entire textbook.