Anyone learning Japanese in an academic environment or by themselves has definitely heard of the Genki textbook series. As weird as this may sound, I never touched a Genki textbook until I started my Advanced Japanese 1 class here at UTSA. With this textbook, I laughed, I cried, and sometimes, I wanted to tear out the pages one by one.
I’m kidding. Maybe.
But I did find a few things I wanted to discuss when it came to Genki that could help you decide whether or not this popular book is made for you.
1. The water is cold. Very cold.
Opening a Genki textbook was like diving into a pool for the first time. I had no idea how cold the water was, or how deep the pool itself was. The more we used this book in class, the more out of place I felt. What I noticed is that Genki builds off of the vocabulary explored in the books that come before the edition you may be using. This means that vocabulary in previous books and new vocabulary from the chapter itself is being used in a lesson. As someone who wasn’t familiar with the Genki vocabulary, this felt like a dive into ice-cold water. It wasn’t entirely bad though, I personally loved a bit of a challenge. I liked the idea of having to expand my vocabulary.
On the other hand, the 4 years of Japanese I took in high school were not useless at all. I noticed that there were a handful of my peers who didn’t know certain words or grammar structures that I had been using since my sophomore year of high school. This is because my Japanese teacher in high school taught a lot differently. She had us students read authentic Japanese stories, articles, data & statistics, etc… By “authentic,” I mean that it wasn’t taken straight from a textbook. These were real resources that native Japanese speakers actually read and utilized. While we didn’t know every single word from these materials or how they were supposed to be read, we were taught keywords, along with how to pull as much information as we could from context and said keywords. Our Japanese teacher didn’t like how most textbooks teach Japanese, which leads me straight into my next point that you’ll see in a little bit.
Bottom line: If you’re a newbie when it comes to Genki like me, don’t freak out.
2. Textbooks Tend to be Tacky.
If there’s anything many Japanese learners can agree on, it’s how unnatural some textbooks tend to sound. I’ve always found myself avoiding textbooks. The phrasing for some sentences being taught to learners sounds exactly like something from a textbook to many native Japanese speakers, and this often leads learners down the wrong path.
Are all textbooks like this? Of course not! I’m not trying to push anti-textbook propaganda. I’m just saying that people who only use textbooks as a resource for learning Japanese often have trouble on how to sound more human and less like a textbook. Please don’t become a walking and talking textbook.
My opinion when it comes to Genki is that it does sound a bit too much like a textbook sometimes. However, it also teaches some grammar points that make a learner’s spoken Japanese sound very natural. Genki is not as bad as some of the other textbooks I’ve encountered, so I think that this is a strong point for the Genki textbook series.
3. The Workload.
Genki probably has the largest workload for learners, at least out of the textbooks I’ve encountered. There are numerous writing and reading activities for learners to practice the grammar lesson they have been introduced to. Whether that’s a plus or not is totally dependent on the learner. I found it a bit bothersome sometimes, but in the end, I liked it because practice is the key to retaining newly learned grammar concepts. However, it did become a little redundant from time to time, to the point where I was just answering questions using the grammar concept and was a little lost on what exactly the concept meant or was trying to say. In other words, I blindly did some lessons without knowing what the examples were actually saying. All I knew was how to conjugate for the grammar point and move on.
It was a bit annoying when I stumbled across vocabulary from previous lessons that I didn’t know which resulted in me having to frantically flip back 15 pages until I could find which lesson that one word was introduced in. Which leads me to make the point that there is so much vocabulary dumped onto a learner at the start of each lesson, that it is unreasonable to assume that they remember every word 5 lessons later. The vocabulary, in my opinion, isn’t slowly and subtly enforced onto the learner. It just comes and goes. A word you may have learned and used in lesson 10 disappears and makes a sudden comeback in lesson 20. Maybe this is just an unpopular opinion of mine, but I feel like gradually building up vocabulary so that it finds a home in a learner’s long-term memory is better than just cramming it in.
4. The Way it’s Put Together.
I’m not going to lie, I really like how the Genki books are organized. It feels pretty consistent and it’s very easy to access vocabulary lists and lessons from specific grammar points. Additionally, the textbook doesn’t really dump pages and pages of text blocks on learners. It has a few pages of text explaining the concept in-depth, examples, and then practice right after. Genki is very hands-on, as explored in the last point. I think the way it’s organized makes Genki stand out and remain popular among many learners.
So, SHould you buy it?
I don’t hate Genki at all. There are parts I like and dislike, and the same goes for many others. I think it just takes some getting used to. My tastes when it comes to how I like to learn may or may not be different from yours, and that is absolutely okay. If some of the points I made revealed things that you would like in a textbook, then go for it! Genki is for you! If you want to explore what the Genki books are like a little more, there may or may not be PDFs of some editions floating around.
You didn’t hear it from me.