It’s about as complete as Tae Kim in the sense that it’s a bunch of stuff someone should know well to start taking on native materials, but it sure as hell won’t prepare you for something like N2 for example. It’s been a while since I went through the book, but I remember it did give me insight into what I did and didn’t know well enough, and after I ironed those out, I had mostly enough grammar to go months without looking up grammar in my readings (at approximately an N3 level at the time).
I’m currently working through it and I feel it’s okay. It teaches enough to start reading native material, in my opinion, but it’s not great if you want explanations on some finer details. Just today, I did one of the exercises and wondered why the example sentence used ikenai and the one in the exercise used ikanai. I looked it up on imabi and I got the difference but it’s not explained anywhere (as far as I know) in the book. The explanations are usually short with a few example sentences and then an exercise. I bought it because this system looked good to me and so far I think it’s working. My Japanese is still pretty basic but the book definitely shows me the areas where I need to work more (like conjugation for example). The use of romaji is a bit irritating. There’s a little dictionary at the back which is kind of useless because it doesn’t have any kanji, just romaji-English. I haven’t tried other books, so I can’t tell you if this book is better or worse than others.
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It’s about as complete as Tae Kim in the sense that it’s a bunch of stuff someone should know well to start taking on native materials, but it sure as hell won’t prepare you for something like N2 for example. It’s been a while since I went through the book, but I remember it did give me insight into what I did and didn’t know well enough, and after I ironed those out, I had mostly enough grammar to go months without looking up grammar in my readings (at approximately an N3 level at the time).
I’m currently working through it and I feel it’s okay. It teaches enough to start reading native material, in my opinion, but it’s not great if you want explanations on some finer details. Just today, I did one of the exercises and wondered why the example sentence used ikenai and the one in the exercise used ikanai. I looked it up on imabi and I got the difference but it’s not explained anywhere (as far as I know) in the book. The explanations are usually short with a few example sentences and then an exercise. I bought it because this system looked good to me and so far I think it’s working. My Japanese is still pretty basic but the book definitely shows me the areas where I need to work more (like conjugation for example). The use of romaji is a bit irritating. There’s a little dictionary at the back which is kind of useless because it doesn’t have any kanji, just romaji-English. I haven’t tried other books, so I can’t tell you if this book is better or worse than others.