Speak Japanese in 90 Days: A Self Study Guide to Becoming Fluent

I am on Day 7 now and I’m just as excited and pumped as I was on Day 1. I am retaining all the words and grammar as well as sentences, I feel like I finally found my solution for learning Japanese. I tried Duolingo for years and although I learned many words, there wasn’t nearly enough grammar. Also over time I got tired of trying to make it to the top spot, repeating the same lessons over cause I got tired of it. I also tried Pimsleur which unfortunately the lessons are very long and drawn out. I also hired a tutor via Preply but the tutor spoke most of the lesson so it wasn’t very effective. I have tried learning Nihon for the past few years off and on. Me and my husband spent a whole month there last year and will be back soon. I am excited to finally be somewhat fluent to be able to communicate on our next trip. With this book, I have been really enjoying learning! I created my own flash cards as mentioned in the book and it has been very effective for me. The book is broken down into daily lessons and he lays out a plan for memorization, it is perfect. I have literally been taking time every day to do the next day’s lesson and it is seriously working! I am super excited and can’t wait til the end of the 90 days to update this comment. I think to add more accountability at the end of each week I’ll create a video of my progress, going through each flash card for that week. I highly recommend this book! Itterasshai!

The book is called Speak Japanese in 90 Days. As a tool for learning how to speak Japanese, this is a great resource. I have a fairly large Japanese vocabulary already, from watching Japanese shows, but I needed to learn how to structure them in sentences as well as grammar. This book helps me with this. It divides the lessons into 10 vocabulary words for each day. It starts off at beginners level; how to pronounce the vowels, a chart of katakana, etc. Then the first lesson is structured as so: 1. english word in bold romaji katakana The setup is very easy to understand and the next page includes sentences using those 10 words as well as other words which you can familiarize yourself with. There can be lengthy pages of him explaining grammar which I thought could be laid out better than just paragraphs, but it is easy to understand once you looks past the huge paragraphs. I bought this book as well as Japanese From Zero. I actually prefer this book better in learning new words as well as sentence structure. However, if you lack motivation it is very easy to fall behind and forget what you have learned before. What this lacks in it encouragement to learn how to read and write the Japanese alphabet. However, this book is called SPEAK Japanese, so you shouldn't expect it to. I would say the biggest con of this book, is that there is no vocabulary in the back. So if I forgot the work for apple, I cannot just go and find it in the back. I would have to actually search for it through the book. But Google is a useful tool as well :) Overall, I think this is a great resource for beginners to learn how to become proficient enough in speaking Japanese that they can go to japan with ease of mind.

The author breaks every lesson down into very small sections and explains everything in a very simple, easy to understand manner. There's also a ton of vocabulary to learn in this book which is awesome. However, in every lesson there is a section with example sentences. This would be really helpful if the words used in the sentences had been words the book had already gone over. There's also a small list of vocabulary words at the end of every lesson as well but oddly enough the words used in the example sentences wouldn't be in the vocabulary list for the lesson. I found this really odd. Why didn't the author just used vocabulary that we the reader already would know? Or at least include it in the list? I found myself having to look up words using a different resource in order to get the full benefit out of these example sentences. There's also a decent amount of typo errors throughout the lessons, but that's of course not a very big deal. Overall I've found the book really helpful thus far but every now and then it'll randomly refer to a subject that hasn't been addressed previously and not explain it. Almost as if the author just assumes that you already know, yet this book is aimed for complete beginners. This isn't a huge deal. I'd just look up whatever it is the book randomly brought up. But for a book marketed towards a beginner it seems to every now and then assume you know something without having explained it prior. But as a whole it was really useful and I love the amount of vocabulary it has in it. Next to all of the vocabulary and sentences is the romaji, kanji, and hiragana/katakana versions. This is really helpful for beginners however the romaji can be distracting when you are wanting to try and only look at the Japanese characters. Regardless the author explains everything in an easy to understand manner and its nice that the lessons are broken down into such small pieces. Ideal for someone who can only study for small periods of time everyday. A nice book to have for a beginner.

This book, "Speak Japanese in 90 Days" was a great help for my husband and me during our trip to Osaka, Japan. The way the author has designed the language learning curve is quite efficient as the book is divided in 90 lessons that you have to read as one per day. Each daily lesson has 10 vocabulary words for you to memorize and most of those daily lessons do contain some grammar structure to memorize as well. It is recommended to write down those 10 vocabulary words on 10 separate cards, on card's front face you will write the English word and on the back side you will write the Japanese word, you must say out loud each word in English and then in Japanese, in that way you will help yourself to memorize each word. The author also recommends to repeat each word at least three times a day in order to increase the memory ability of every single word included on each lesson. After that, you can try to make sentences with the words learned in order to improve your memory ability and language structure. An explanation about the Japanese writing system and its pronunciation is also described by the author. In our own experience, this book helped us a lot; although, we also carried a dictionary and other language devices, but still without understanding the basics of a foreign language, there is very little you can speak. Therefore, this book gave us a much better understanding of the Japanese language and its structure so it was easier for us to deal with several important situations as getting train tickets, ask for directions, buying food, get a room and some more regular daily situations.

This book is an excellent learning tool! What I like best about it, and what sets this book apart from others, is that words are written in hiragana and katakana first, and added in the second place are the kana plus kanji writing. Furigana and Romaji are helpful, but at times it can overwhelm the new learner, so to keep it simple is a must. And that book does exactly that. It is written by a Western speaker who now became a teacher of that beautiful language. So, he knows exactly how to tech it in a way that the learner still feels motivated despite the Mt.Fuji's size of learning, and eventually achieve a conversational level and later on - a mastery level (a coveted goal and dream of every student who chooses Japanese as a second (or 3rd, 4th, 10th language. This book motivated me to practice writing hiragana, and now I'm able to do so with ease (photo enclosed).

I wasn't sure about this book at first, as the organization is a little strange, and there's a long introduction with somewhat iffy formatting in places (leftover notes from Word, maybe? And some distracting emphases and poor/random spacing). Once I got into the meat of the book, however, and started skipping around according to my personal needs/interests (after which I just went right back and read everything I'd skipped over, because though the introduction is long, it's all necessary), I became more and more impressed. Everything I've ever really wanted to know about Japanese is right there, including some excellent, readable discussions of syntax, culture, and nuance that are just as useful and interesting as the vocabulary. This book is plainly written by someone deeply interested in the culture, history, and people of Japan and the ways these all influence the language. The book is also nicely encouraging, and strikes just the right balance between informally friendly and professionally complete. Even a short way into the book, you'll find you've learned a tremendous amount. I'm grateful the author took the time to write and publish this book. I can't recommend it enough.

It's a decent ebook and is fairly decent for beginners too. However, I wouldn't recommend it over something like Tae Kims Guide to Japanese Grammar as this book relies way too much on Roumaji (actually it uses it entirely throughout the entire book), or using the English alphabet for Japanese words. In fact, it should have dropped the Roumaji entirely and used Hiragana and Katakana before even introducing Grammar and Vocabulary. Something advertising fluency in the title should drop the crutches early on because if you have to use Roumaji to understand Japanese past learning Hiragana and Katakana I can tell you that you won't be learning Japanese fluently. That may sound harsh but that is just how it is. I can tell you that you won't be speaking fluently in Japanese within 90 days using only this book, you will almost definitely have to use other resources in conjunction with it to make it work. If there is a second volume or more it would be best for the author to drop the crutches for the readers. The day by day system was good though as some other resources don't really set a pace, such as Genki which is annoying to use as a self-learner and is best used in a classroom environment. The "Self-Study" part of the title was accurate for the most part. 3 stars. Has potential but needs a bit of work.

This book will teach you Japanese in 90 days, but it won't be easy. The book goes into a lot of detail for memorization purposes and explaining grammar rules, focusing on visual and audible memorization. One thing to note is the book says to learn hiragana and katakana first, (basically two of the three Japanese alphabets). These are easy to memorize, but the book doesn't go into detail on ways to memorize them- just power through it. You need to set aside about 2-3 hours each day if you want to do this in 90 days, but you can definitely do it in longer if necessary. The stuff you learn in this book stacks, so if you forget a rule you may need to re-look over previous chapters.