Marugoto: Katsudo Japanese language and culture Elementary 1

by The Japan Foundation (Editor)

Coursebook for communicative language activities

184 pages, Paperback

Published June 20, 2014

About the author

The Japan Foundation is an institution dedicated to carrying out comprehensive international cultural exchange programs throughout the world.

The Japan Foundation was established in October 1972 as a special legal entity supervised by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. In October 2003, it was reorganized as an independent administrative institution.

The Japan Foundation has a global network consisting of its Tokyo headquarters, the Kyoto office, two Japanese-language institutes (the Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Urawa; and the Japan Foundation Japanese-Language Institute, Kansai) and 24 overseas offices in 23 countries, including two Asia Center liaison offices.

Reviews

[Carly · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book (series) is clearly for students, who are studying Japanese in a classroom environment or with a skilled tutor. If you have a basic knowledge of Japanese, you will be able to work with this book, too, but I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it. There are far better books for students, who are self studying the Japanese language.

This book, like all the others in this series, has a lot of high quality pictures and illustrations. I especially like the pictures of cultural stuff (eg. food, festivals).

The grammar explanations are again very short. A reason for this might be, that the books for the A1 and A2 levels are divided into two books (rikai and katsudo). And, as I said before, this book series is aimed at students, who study in a classroom.

As I wrote in my other review as well: I would strongly advice you to check out the Marugoto e-learning website, if you work with this books. There you can not only find the audio files, vocabulary and kanji lists, but also online exercises.

[Till Raether · Rating 3 out of 5]

I've been taking Japanese lessons for a little over three years now, online, once a week, via the Volkshochschule here in Hamburg. The entire course system of the Volkshochschule is based on the Marugoto books and the Marugoto method, this (and the Rikai companion volume) are the third and the fourth Marugoto books I've worked with. So inadvertently, I've grown fond of the books, their optics, their characters, their gentle focus on people drinking alcohol under cherry trees.

But. I feel that it's impractical and unnecessarily complicated how deeply and for how long the books are focused on the imasu-forms. More colloquial Japanese grammar is only and for the first time introduced towards the end of these A2 books. Which means that for hundreds of pages and months and months, a Marugoto learner only comes in contact with a form of Japanese grammar that they will hardly ever hear in a Japanese film, in Japanese TV shows, or encounter when trying to talk to Japanese people.

I understand that the imasu-form is taught to beginners because it makes it easier to identify the part of the verbs from which the te-form etc. derive, but I mean come on, the books don't even use the dictionary form of verbs until the end of A2, so EVERY VOCABULARY APP is useless to you, except for the clunky and counterintuitive Marugoto no kotoba website.