Contemporary Japanese

This Japanese language book contains 61 short lessons grouped into 14 chapters—each of which presents a wide variety of activities and exercises and yet is designed to be covered in a single session.

This "daily multivitamin" approach to language learning makes it easy to track your progress and to review later! An audio CD comes free with the book, providing native speaker recordings giving correct pronunciations for the dialogs and vocabulary in each lesson.

Contemporary Japanese is a textbook series for beginning students of Japanese at the college or high school level. It is intended for classroom use as well as self study. Each lesson in the book is very short and has a single, clearly-defined objective. All lessons make use of the "active discovery" approach which encourages rapid learning through "guess and try" problem-solving and participation as opposed to rote memorization. This highly effective method uses real-life conversations that make learning fun by involving you in a conversation with your peers. It also removes the fear of saying something wrong!

Key Features of This Japanese language textbook include:

• Basic sounds, words, phrases and kana
• Describing the property of people and things
• Identifying things and people
• Requesting
• Description
• Expressing what you have
• Using numbers and katakana
• Talking about the past
• Coming and going
• Relating states and events
• Describing daily-life activities
• Talking about the present
• Location of people and things
• Expressing the characteristics of people and things

Available separately is Contemporary Japanese Workbook Volume 1. This accompanying Japanese workbook serves as a supplementary material as well as a standalone comprehensive workbook for practicing and reviewing the language. An audio CD containing drills, dialogs and listening comprehension exercises for most activities accompanies the workbook.

Eriko Sato received her Ph.D. degree in linguistics from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is currently a lecturer in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies there. She is also the Executive Director of the Japan Center as well as the Founding Director of the Pre-College Japanese Language Program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has written two other Japanese language titles, namely Japanese for Dummies and Japanese Phrases for Dummies.