Having tested several books to learn Japanese is simply saying, I prefer now to turn to this book much more effective in the long term. Most methods 'rapid' dodge writing and focus on the construction of simple sentences in phonetics. Here the manual is a textbook originally intended for college students. The texts are in hiragana and katakana, and gradually introduce kanji. The method is slower donation early since we must swallow the two primers in order to decipher the texts. The big advantage because then comes the reading of hiragana and katakana becomes much more fluid. Basically if you really want to learn Japanese and to decrypt Japanese there, it is a very good book for beginners. If you simply want to know a few pre-made phrases, other manuals are much more suitable.