Is it worth completing Minna and Genki?

Japanese
#1

Hello! This is my first time posting =)
I have recently finished Genki 1 text book, I also use Wanikani and Bunpro. I also have the Minna no Nihongo books beginner 1 and 2 and am going back to finish the first minna book.
There seems to be a fair bit that wasn’t covered in Genki or that its helpful for me to go over, but equally I’m not sure if its just keeping me on the beginner books longer than I need to.

Is there anyone on here who completed both genki and minna beginner? Is it worth my time completing both or should I go straight to genki 2? Thank you so much for your help!

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#2

Welcome to the forums :tada:

I would say just move on to genki 2 if you feel solid with genki 1. I used the genki books and from what I remember minna and genki were comparable options. Mostly the same with a couple different choices of Grammer. Personally, I would see it as redundant and not worth the extra time that could be spent towards completing genki 2. But if you want to review them again in a different book go for it. Just remember that bunpro has both series in decks. So if you continue on with genki 2, you can go back to minna deck and see what you missed. It’s really however you want to proceed, just know you’ll be fine either way

I will add that most learners pick a single series to follow, not both. Some people prefer one series overall feel/presentation better than the other. So if you were okay with the way genki was structured, I’d say continue on to genki 2. Likewise you can try out minna2 next to see if you’ll like it

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#3

Thank you so much for your really awesome and helpful reply =D

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#4

Just to say that if you’re doing Bunpro as well, it might be overkill and you could maybe think about using some of the time you would be spending on multiple grammar textbooks to do something else like reading/listening practice.
But it really depends what you’re getting value out of - if you want to focus on grammar a lot and find multiple resources help reinforce things for you, and if you say spread that out over time to help you retain the grammar knowledge more, then by all means :smiley:

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#5

Since you actually have the Minna books, then I might suggest:

  1. Continuing on with the Genki II book (as @IcyIceBear suggest), since it will follow on from where you left off with Genki I, and there will be less ‘overlap’ between the two, by design.
  2. Use Bunpro’s Decks feature (requires opting-in to the Beta program; just go into your account Settings and opt in) to track your progress in Genki II using the Genki II Deck. Mark the Genki II Deck as your ‘Primary Deck’.
  3. Simultaneously mark the Minna no Nihongo 1 Deck as your ‘Secondary Deck’. This way, you can – at your own pace, whatever feels comfortable to you – also Learn items from the MNN books that maybe weren’t covered by Genki I and/or II.
    • If an item you Learn from the MnN deck is easy for you to learn, just by using Bunpro alone, then great!
    • If the item is a little too unfamiliar to you, well, “Hey, presto!” you actually have the MnN books available for you to reference. Just go to the chapter the item comes from and read about it directly from the book.
    • With an actual textbook to ‘fall back on’, you can just follow Bunpro’s lead (which itself follows the same order of the lessons in the books), and thus easily cover any items that are in the MnN books, but not in the Genki books, without also having to re-study the stuff that’s already covered by the Genki books.

This way, you get to learn all the items from all the books you own. Since Bunpro treats grammar points as independent things – i.e. whether you’re learning する verb grammar from Genki or from Minna, it’s the same grammar point on Bunpro (する (JLPT N5) | Bunpro – Japanese Grammar Explained) – then by using Bunpro to help you select lessons from the Minna decks, there won’t be any overlap or missed grammar points. If you were only studying the books, without Bunpro, it would be harder to avoid such overlap.

Personally, I’ve used this primary/secondary decks feature to ‘fill in the blanks’ from all the beginner textbook decks, just so I know I have all the basic textbook grammar points covered. You don’t have to do this, but I kinda like it myself.

P.S. If you haven’t been using the Decks yet (i.e. if you’ve been using the standard Paths instead), then you may not have seen Bunpro’s Vocab study yet. Several decks – in particular Genki and Marugoto, but unfortunately not Minna no Nihongo – include not just the grammar points, but the vocab used in the books as well. Therefore, if you want to ‘pick up’ the vocab that was in Genki I, while you’re studying Genki II, you could temporarily make Genki I your secondary deck, and relatively quickly Learn vocabs from Genki I in the same way as described above. Once you’ve got the vocab from Genki I caught up, you can switch your secondary deck to MnN 1, and proceed as described.

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#6

Wow thank you so much for your really hepfull reply! I didn’t know about Bunpro’s deck feature =D
That’s a great idea i’ll do that, that way I’ll get the most out of all of my text books

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#7

That’s a realy good point and one of the things I was worried about, thank you so much =D

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#8

I did both Genki books and BP in tandem. Having different explanations and example sentences helped reinforce the items. Also there’s something about things written on paper, I learn it more readily for some reason.

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