Earlier quoted context omitted.
I am going to knock this because I used it. Problem: the written part of Japanese. You read this book and learn how to talk a bit, take a plane to Japan, then bam - surrounded by the visually amazing, but daunting Kanji. The Jorden school of thought totally disregards the written and focuses on the spoken. That is fine, but the wrong path to real Japanese fluency. The best way to start learning Japanese is to get int…
This is a long-standing debate. :-) I do agree that people who use this approach are behind others in reading / writing performance. Indeed, it took me awhile to catch up. But fortunately this is something you can pick up on your own fairly well. On the flip side, to be brutally honest, 99% of the people (that I've met anyway) who come through programs that focus on reading / writing sound horrible when they speak. T…
That said, there are vanishingly few times in life when an engineer is required to handwrite anything other than their name and address, but I have to speak to people constantly. When I do, I'm consistently reminded how fortunate I am that I learned contextually appropriate Japanese, a strong foundation in grammar, and proper polite Japanese (something many American Japanese programs just abandon on the excuse "bah, that's hard and you don't really need it" -- which sounds great until we're being introduced to the mayor and you say "Yo gramps where's the crapper?").
That is not an exaggeration, by the way. I spent the next hour apologizing for her. (For students of the language: ジジ、トイレはどこ？ vs. standard Japanese トイレはどこですか？ vs. in consideration of the fact that the mayor vastly outranks both of us すみませんが、お手洗いはどちらにあるかご存知ですか？)