A complete self-contained language course for beginners teaching you to read, write and speak Japanese. A previous 3-volume series by this author with 3 workbooks but no audio recordings was published by Japan Publications Trading between 2004 and 2006 and sold well (see Comps list below for details). Some old copies are still available on Amazon. The manga previously appeared in the workbooks whereas in the new Tuttle editions they will be integrated into the textbooks (and there will only be 2 volumes, not 6). The Tuttle version will be in 2 volumes with audio recordings and manga interspersed through the books. Manga comic strips are used extensively; similar books with manga have sold extremely well (see comps) . An exciting manga story centering on characters who live on a distant war-torn planet weaves throughout the book in 4-page installments, with progressively more challenging Japanese vocabulary and grammar as the student learns more of the language. A step-by-step approach teaches the language systematically step-by-step covering all the key grammar points, illustrated with manga excerpts showing how Japanese is used in real-life dialogues.

Includes lessons on reading and writing the hiragana and katakana alphabets plus 160 kanji characters. Japanese script and Romanized pronunciations are provided for all Japanese words and phrases. Free online audio recordings provide native-speaker pronunciations for all the Japanese texts in the book. Hundreds of drills and exercises suitable for self-study or classroom use with a teacher are included. The focus is on informal, everyday language by young people in Japan today rather than on formal language. Plentiful practice exercises and regular review sections are included throughout the books. Each volume will have approximately 350 pages (total of 2 volumes); Volume 2 will appear a year later. Each volume will include answer keys for the exercises and an extensive bidirectional dictionary.