Reviews by Warren Savage
Japanese Beyond Words
Approximately half of his observations on learning and speaking Nihongo I've heard or read before (example: At puberty, losing the ability to easily learn to differentiate sounds from languages other than your native language.) The rest of the information I got from the book feels like common sense (pardon my wishy-washy statement.)
Japanese Step by Step
I like the flowcharts for sentence 'tense' (present, negative, past, and past negative,) and for verb conjugation, and the book presents the pitch stress of the Japanese words (lowercase letters for normal pitch, uppercase for raised pitch.) But I didn't find anything that mentioned how to pronounce the final "n" in the word "sen", as in "sen en."