# My Background
I’ve enjoyed Japanese media for most of my life and after a trip to Japan, realized that I was missing out on a lot of things because I don’t speak the language. I took half a semester of Japanese in the early 2010s in college and dropped it because it was too much work with my course load. I’ve been self-teaching Japanese since October.
The only language I speak fluently is English. However, I studied Hebrew for eight years in a Jewish day school, Latin in high school, and self-taught Portuguese using Duolingo. The Latin in particular has helped me a lot with understanding grammar and inflection.
I knew some basic Japanese grammar points after past attempts at learning, some basic things like “word order is SVO” and “there are different politeness levels you need to be aware of when speaking”, and some basic words like すみません and こんにちは, but couldn’t string a sentence together. I also self-taught kana.
I recently finished Chapter 4 of 10 in Tobira: Beginning Japanese, and decided to write this review because I have found no other ones from someone who has actually used the book for self-study.
# What is Tobira: Beginning Japanese?
The Tobira series has been known for its intermediate Japanese books for years. It’s often recommended as a followup to Genki II. If you search this subreddit, all posts prior to 2021 that refer to “Tobira” are for the intermediate series.
[Tobira: Beginning Japanese](https://www.9640.jp/nihongo/en/detail/?870) is two volumes that teach Japanese from scratch. The first was released in 2021 and the second in 2022. The first book has two workbooks – one for writing practice and one for grammar practice. As of January 2024, the second has a workbook for writing practice released last month, and does not yet have a grammar practice workbook.
I will not be reviewing the writing workbook because I didn’t buy it, as I’ve been using other resources to learn how to write.
# Why did I switch to Tobira: Beginning Japanese?
Simply put, I tried Genki and quickly got bored with it after three chapters. The biggest reason I didn’t like Genki is that it’s heavily focused on college situations and has a lot of school-focused vocabulary, and I am a career professional in my 30s who can’t relate to any of it anymore. I also found Genki’s exercises to be very repetitive in terms of what they ask you to do, and that it was difficult to find particular information in the book without copious post-it notes. After skimming some books at Kinokuniya, I found that Tobira 1 looked good and fully switched over.
# Why do I like Tobira: Beginning Japanese?
**I like Tobira because it is very practical.** While Tobira has some school-focused vocabulary, it’s very much limited to the beginning of the book and it mixes in lots of non-school vocabulary. For example, one of the first phrases you learn is 私はXが好きです so you can talk about what you like.
In general, TBJ focuses largely on how to describe yourself and your life using Japanese. So, rather than drilling “What major are you?” and “What year are you?” a hundred times, it asks you to talk about what Japanese media you enjoy, or to look up Japanese fast food chain menus and read the prices and offering, or to talk about something that’s popular where you are and to invite a friend to do that activity with you. It helps that TBJ’s frame story is “you are living in a dorm with Japanese students who you’re making friends with while learning Japanese”, whereas Genki’s is “you are an exchange student at a Japanese university who predominantly talks about the people there as an observer.” (Also, Tobira’s group has a cat!)
**Unlike Genki, Tobira has lots of color.** Vocab is listed in two consecutive sets of pages: One with the words and a separate diagram for every word, and another with the words organized by grammatical function with pitch accent marked. Exercises always have diagrams associated with them to enforce the meanings of words. Some chapters have photos of actual Japanese signs and other text and ask you to translate them.
I also find that **Tobira is great at teaching similar concepts together and ensuring that you understand the subtle differences between them.** I noticed that Genki teaches the words that you use to describe someone else’s family members well before it teaches you how to describe your own e.g. お父さん and お母さん before 父 and 母. Tobira not only teaches both sets of words together with a family tree diagram, but gives you exercises where you’re speaking to another person about your respective families and have to remember which words to use to describe your own family vs. the other person’s family.
## Exercises are very diverse
I’m making this its own section because it is the main benefit of Tobira to me.
**Every chapter has a ton of exercises that are highly varied**, and that’s not even considering the workbook with more of them. For example, asking you to pick which adjective best describes an object in a diagram, or asking you to read a description of someone’s trip and answering questions in Japanese about it. When teaching you how to read prices, it uses a mix of currencies, rather than just 円.
**The exercises liberally mix in words and concepts from previous chapters.** For example, sometimes a character will use 僕 instead of 私 to describe themself even though the word hasn’t appeared in three chapters. The book does this a lot with adverbs like それから and だから (which helps because I forget those the most). If you forget how to say “Saturday morning”, then there will be an exercise in the current chapter that forces you to remember it.
**One highlight of TBJ is its eavesdropping exercises.** You listen to a conversation in Japanese at native speed that has a lot of words you don’t recognize and try to understand the gist of the conversation. You’re then asked questions about what you heard, and are asked to come up with followup questions to ask the person.
Tobira also has some additional practical guides. There’s an in-depth guide on typing Japanese on a computer keyboard, complete with practice exercises. There’s another on how to properly transliterate foreign words directly in katanaka.
# Downsides of Tobira I: Beginning Japanese
**The biggest downside to Tobira: Beginning Japanese is that it’s a new resource.** There are a ton of videos and online supplemental materials to Genki, and virtually none for TBJ. There’s an [Anki deck for vocab](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/557145562) but I’ve found clear problems with some of its furigana, and have to double check every card when I start a new chapter.
Relatedly, **TBJ doesn’t have an app.** I really like that you can download Genki’s dialogue to the Japan Times app and play it back very easily. TBJ has everything on the website [tobirabeginning.9640.jp](https://tobirabeginning.9640.jp/), which has confusing menus and a terrible mobile interface. It also doesn’t let you vary the speed of the dialogue. The non-listening exercises are all “Japanese spoken very slowly”, while the listening exercises are all “Japanese spoken at full speed.”
I also don’t like that it waits four chapters to introduce kanji. I’ve been self-teaching kanji using Kanji Damage for a while and introducing kanji with furigana earlier would have saved me a lot of time. However, this is more of a personal nitpick.
Some more nitpicky things are:
* There is a vocab index organized by Japanese, but no corresponding English one.
* Pitch accent is only marked on the grammar vocab pages. It’s not in the index or on the picture vocab pages.
# Grammar is a mixed bag
TBJ teaches some grammatical concepts very well, and others quite poorly. I like that Tobira does a great job preventing you from shooting yourself in the foot. I like it the second it teaches you と, it emphasizes that it’s only to join nouns. I don’t remember Genki having that explanation. Similarly – as mentioned above – it teaches both “my family” and “your family” words together.
However, **TBJ’s grammatical explanations are much sparser than Genki’s.** Consider na-adjectives. TBJ gives you a very basic explanation (“na- adjectives look like this and take a form of desu at the end”), two sentences with na-adjectives, and then reinforces them in later exercises. It does not try to build intuition around *why* na-adjectives take a form of desu. Genki goes one step beyond and explains that na-adjectives act like nouns. Neither book explains that adjectives have the copula built in. (For reference, my college Japanese course used Japanese: The Spoken Language, which defines all adjectives as predicates. I personally don’t think TBJ or Genki have grammatical explanations nearly as good as JSL or Cure Dolly.)
TBJ also tends to separate similar concepts because it’s largely focused on teaching you how to use Japanese in your everyday life. This can be a pro or a con depending on how you learn. It teaches demonstratives (これ、それ) but saves place markers (この、その) for the next chapter, where it mixes them in with location words (左、右).
I also noticed that unlike Genki, Tobira separates out similar concepts when some of them are difficult. It teaches how to count to 99 in Chapter 1, but saves numbers beyond that for Chapter 4, which it teaches alongside counters for money, hours, minutes, and つ. Presumably this is because of the sound changes associated with 百 and 分, and some of the confusion from Westerners on the switch to grouping digits in fours instead of threes.
# TL;DR: Should I self-teach with TBJ or not?
If you want less sparse grammar explanations, a ton of online supplementary resources, a mobile app, and don’t care about a book that’s school-focused, then Genki is probably better for you.
If you want a variety of exercises, an engaging book, don’t care about a lack of mobile app and a bad mobile website, and are fine waiting for the Tobira II grammar workbook to be released, then I highly recommend TBJ.
by coffeecoffeecoffeee