Is there any reason to purchase text books?

I personally like the direction and additional details that a textbook offers. The resources pointed to on Bunpro are often well written and accurate, but because they are often from a wide variety of sources, there’s often a disconnect in perspective and terminology between sources that can be difficult for a new learner to reconciliation. A textbook on the other hand is usually written by one author who maintains a consistent perspective and terminology throughout the textbook. Furthermore, textbooks often take more time to establish the bigger picture of Japanese language that you simply can’t get just by knowing all the individual grammar points.

Whether or not a textbook will help you personally is up to you, but if you think a particular textbook would help you out, I encourage you to pick it up. A bit of extra money spent to help learn something faster or more effectively is one of the better ways money can be spent.

If you’re looking for recommendations, I’ve found 80/20 Japanese to be a good introduction for new learners at a beginner N5 level and is pretty cheap at $40 if you’re willing to get the e-book version. If you’d like to look into it, the author has multiple sections from the book available for free up on his website if you’d like to look into his writing and teaching style.

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If you open Tobira, each chapter grammar notes takes only 3 or 4 pages, the rest are readings, dialogues and, exercises. The readings and dialogues provides the context for grammar points. I imagine that you could learn without using textbooks but for me, it would be too painful and not fun to learn without this additional materials.

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I like the way that Genki opens each chapter with some dialogues that include the grammar points that you will be learning that chapter. It puts dry grammar into context with examples. There are also loads of drills in the practice sections. It’s probably more useful for classrooms as there is a lot of ‘role-play with a partner’ exercises. I’m sure that a class going slowly through Genki and doing a lot of practice conversations are going to get a more rounded learning experience than I am doing my own thing online.

How much you will benefit from textbooks, or classes going through textbooks together, will also depend on your learning goals. If you’re only interested in consuming content in Japanese and have no need to actually converse in the language or go to Japan for any length of time then just stick to consuming content and learning from that.

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Regarding JLPT books… I can mainly talk about grammar as I basically used N3/N2 grammar books to find explanations in Japanese for the grammar points found in Bunpro.

Kanzen Master is great for the listening, reading and grammar book. The grammar books have the most grammar points per book. The language / vocab used the the Kanzen Master is quite different compared to normal Japanese too and closer to the language used in the Exam. They are really well suited for solo learning in my opinion.

Nihongo So Matome N3 and N2 grammar books. I think they are great but lack good or any explanations. They are really really good if you have a teacher.

There are comprehensive books too like : JLPT KANZEN MOSHI N3 ZETTAI GOKAKU . These are great too as they will have a little bit of everything.

There were also some books with like 300+ JLPT questions and answers. eg SHIN NIHONGO 500-MON N3

My one tip would be to read as much as possible, for the N2 (and N3) there is a lot of reading on the exam hehe

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