This Japanese language book contains 45 short lessons grouped into 12 chapters--each of which presents a wide variety of activities and exercises and yet is designed to be covered in a single session. This "daily multivitamin" approach to learning Japanese makes it easy to track your progress and to review later! An audio CD comes free with the book, providing native speaker recordings giving correct pronunciations for the dialogs and vocabulary in each lesson. Contemporary Japanese is a textbook series for beginning students of Japanese at the college or high school level. It is intended for classroom use as well as self study. Each lesson is concise and has a single, clearly-defined objective. All lessons make use of the "active discovery" approach which encourages rapid learning through "guess and try" problem-solving and participation as opposed to rote memorization. This highly effective method uses real-life conversations that make learning fun by involving you in a conversation with your peers. It also removes the fear of saying something wrong! Available separately is Contemporary Japanese Workbook Volume 2 .

This accompanying Japanese workbook serves as a supplementary book as well as a standalone comprehensive workbook for practicing and reviewing the language. An audio CD containing drills, dialogs and listening comprehension exercises for most activities accompanies the workbook.