Series 'Japanese: The Spoken Language'

Books in the 'Japanese: The Spoken Language' series

• Japanese : the spoken language : interactive CD-ROM program
• Japanese: The Spoken Language part II
• Japanese: The Spoken Language part III
• Japanese: The Spoken Language, Part 3
• Japanese: The Spoken Language, Part I
• Japanese: The Spoken Language, Part I: A Question and Answer Supplement
• User's Guide to Japanese : the spoken language : interactive CD-ROM program
• User's Guide to Japanese : the spoken language : interactive CD-ROM program

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:

1. 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.

2. Emphasis on memorization of dialogues and substitution drills.

3. 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

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 ... read more

Review of Japanese: The Spoken Language series 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's program and received a few lessons from Noda, I think very highly of the books (and Noda-sensei). However, there are some important things to keep in mind about JSL (especially when studying from it):

1. JSL is not meant to be just read. The book itself reminds you of the importance of constant practice, not just with sounds files, but also with native speakers.

2. JSL focuses on speaking and on structure. As a result your speaking ability and grammatical ability will probably be better than a student who studied from another textbook, but your vocabulary and reading ability will be weak.

3. JSL builds up Japanese grammar from nothing in an extremely structured way. From the beginning, it challenges you to abandon habits of your English language background and start at nothing in Japanese. It then builds up gradually by laying the foundations of Japanese grammar in Part 1, offering the meat of essential conversational grammar in Part 2, and teaching the final essentials of conversational grammar in Part 3. One of the tools JSL employs in this effort is using odd English glosses, which is both a blessing and a curse. You will encounter very unnaturally phrased sentences in the English equivalents of Core Conversations because the authors are trying to more accurately mimic the Japanese structural patterns.

4. If you have not already learned Japanese grammar, the books are little help to you if you do not complete all three. Important grammatical structures such as the conditional, the causitive, the passive, and the potential are left to Part 3. Also, Parts 2 and 3 reference terms (such as "extended predicate") that defined in Part 1, making it important to start from the beginning.

5. (Nearly) all Japanese text in JSL has accent marks. Even the parenthesized examples in the grammar explanations have accents. (I wish more Japanese language materials were like this.)

6. The book was written nearly 20 years ago. This has an effect on virtually every aspect of the book, for better or worse. This means it was written in an era where most interest in Japan was business related (remember that Japan seemed poised to overtake the US economically in the 1980s), hence the styles of speech in this book are extremely polite, intending to prepare the student for a business environment. This means that you will learn keigo very well, but you might get used to talking too politely for interactions with friends and strangers. (Although I wonder if this is a problem universal to all foreign language textbooks.) It also means that the vocab in this book is somewhat out of date (for example, 携帯(JSL:keetai) and メール(meeru) are not present).

7. JSL uses romanization entirely. This is because it focuses only on speaking and not at all on writing and leaves study of the writing system to other books. Also, this romanization is only used in JSL. It a modification of the Kunrei-shiki romanization. Instead of using macrons, JSL romanization has the vowel written twice (e.g. 映像（えいぞ う） would be romanized as eezoo). I think this system is elegant, except for words like ティーシャツ, which would be romanized as t(e)iisyatu in JSL.

As for many people's complaint that you are left at a disadvantage for using romanization exclusively for so long, I partially agree. When I studied abroad in Japan, I thought that it would have been nice if JSL at least exposed me to kanji for the vocab lists or conversations, but I didn't think that a book written entirely in hiragana and kanji would offer any advantage. After going to Japan, I found the switch from romanization to kana instantaneous, something critics hypothesize to be difficult.

8. JSL is not all of the grammar there is to study in Japanese. I learned this the hard way when I went to Japan and realized that I even needed to tweek my usage of some of the structures introduced toward the end of JSL. (Actually if anybody could recommend a source that would finely explain the difference between "to site" and "ni site", the "to" particle that is similar in function to "ni", the "datte" that comes at the beginning of sentences and is used for explanations, the difference between "sureba" and "suru nara", and other grammatical points at this level, I'd appreciate it very much.)

I think the authors of JSL are very aware of its weaknesses, especially its growing age and the frequent complaint about using only romanization. I've heard rumors that about updates to JSL and JWL, but I can't say much for sure because I'm still a lowly undergrad. This much I can say though, JWL is finally making the transition out of Field Test edition (thank god), and a companion DVD for JSL is in the works.

☆ See all reviews by Brian Baker.