Series 'Japanese: The Spoken Language'

Books in the 'Japanese: The Spoken Language' series

Reviews of the 'Japanese: The Spoken Language' series

Review by Charles E. Tuttle catalogue

The "Jorden philosophy" emphasizes the careful study of the fundamentals. Part 1 spans basic topics such as greetings, shopping, time, phone calls, and visits. Part 2 covers topics such as inns, offices, renting a house, department stores, and friends.

Review by Chris Kern

Probably the biggest defining features of her system are:

Intense work on spoken Japanese in the beginning with no written Japanese whatsoever. Even kana is not done until perhaps the second semester of a college-level class.
Emphasis on memorization of dialogues and substitution drills.
The idea that work in the beginning should be focused on the tapes/CDs and drills with native speakers. The romaji writing is used only to remind the student of what he's already heard on the CDs -- it is not to be used for learning new material.

Review by Brian Baker

JSL is a controversial set of textbooks. At OSU, the university where co-author Mari Noda teaches, the students are split; some moan at its idiosyncrasies, some love the book and/or the program built around it, and some don't have any opinion except that Japanese is hard. Having gone through OSU' ... read more

Review by Brian D. Franke

I'd say you can't do better than "Japanese: The Spoken Language"(3 volumes) by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Mari Noda. These books are what I used, and to me they really get to the core of understanding Japanese grammar. As a bonus, there is also a set of listening tapes that goes with the books, and a videotape as well. My advice - DON'T NEGLECT THE TAPES! They are your only hope for ever understanding what is said to you without spending considerable time in Japan.

Review by Josh Reyer

Review of Japanese: The Spoken Language series by Josh Reyer

Recently, a family emergency necessitated returning to the States for a few weeks. My brother-in-law took three years of Japanese back in the mid-90s at Cornell, using the same text I was using at the same time - Japanese: The Spoken Language, by Eleanor Harz Jorden and Mari Noda. He is an inveterate pack-rat, and the basement of his house is filled with bins filled with old textbooks, including all three volumes of JSL, the field test editions of JWL, and the Japanese typescript supplements. So I took the opportunity to raid his basement, and reread these texts that I haven't seen or used for nearly 10 years now. Being 18 years old and with no experience in Japanese didn't prevent me from having a completely unqualified opinion of the text at the time, but I thought it would be interesting to see what I thought *now*, now that I at least know what I'm talking about...

The first thing that jumped out at me is that the grammar is wonderfully descriptive. I'm a hard-line descriptivist (I'm not sure when exactly I became so), so that was a nice surprise. In fact, there were a few things that I had thought Jorden definitely said were bad, but turned out to be descriptively dealt with. For example, ～をしたい vs. ～がしたい. I had it in my head that Jorden had said が was standard and を non-standard, but actually she details the nuance of both. Not to mention a few things I thought I had learned later, in Japan, when actually they'd been covered in JSL.

Also, I marveled at how natural the conversations were, from a rhythm stand point. Fragments, repeated phrases, 相槌. Reading the core conversations, I could "hear" them in my head.

Drills. Lots of drills. Drills are good.

And the grammatical and cultural explanations are fantastic, with nothing that especially went counter to my own experience. Everything rang "true".

I see now that my 18 year old self had been pretty unfair to the book. Too ready to believe a classmate who spent a summer in Japan over a linguist with a lot more experience with the people and the language. Too eager to want to talk to my friends in tameguchi to see the benefit of learning polite language and keigo.

To be sure, I still have a few quibbles. While I think learning keigo is great (better to have and not need than to need and not have), the overall tone of the conversations skews a little 水臭い. But that's a judgment call. Also, a couple times Jorden seems to take a few needless shots at Hepburn romanization. Sure, it isn't analogous to the kana, but that's not it's purpose. Jorden's romaji is for representing the linguistic structure of the language; Hepburn is so that the lowest common denominator and at least approach something that sounds like a Japanese word. I dunno - maybe Jorden was tired of having to defend herself for not using Hepburn or something.

So much ink and bandwidth has been wasted on the use of romaji in the books, and I thought it was ironic how much of a non-issue it is, at least in my case. I was taught for three years with JSL and its crazy romaji, and this time around I read all the Core Conversations and Drills using the Japanese typescript supplements (written for the native Japanese instructors, but wisely purchased by my brother in law). I can't read swaths of romaji of any stripe these days, even though I spent so much time using the Jorden romaji. I can absolutely see where the naysayers were/are coming from: when you are used to reading Japanese in kana and kanji, the book is daunting to go through, a veritable pain in the ass. But most beginners don't carry that baggage. The learn the romaji, but if they stick with the language in real sense they'll spend more time with kanji and kana. And it seems like claims that not going to kana right away stunts reading development are largely anecdotal, and anecdotally, it wasn't the case for me. Some folks should really do some longitudinal studies.

☆ See all reviews by Josh Reyer.

For questions, comments, or if you would like to add your review to the above list, please email Ben Bullock <benkasminbullock@gmail.com> or use the discussion group for this web site.