/jp/ - Otaku Culture

I just finished the first season of "Let's Learn Japanese" and figured I'd give my thoughts on it for anyone who is curious about it (this wasn't my first exposure to Japanese grammar).

Pros:
- The skits were genuinely entertaining.
- The material is presented in an easy to understand way.
- Lots of repetition to reinforce your memory/make sure you understand.
- Lets you practice your listening comprehension*.

*Especially if you watch the main skit once, then read the transcript from the accompanying .PDFs, then watch the main skit again. In the main skits, the actors speak full speed and make absolutely no effort to clearly enunciate things, so it can be really difficult to get everything the first time. I even struggled with a couple of parts AFTER reading the transcript, honestly.


Cons:
- The explanations tend to be over-simplified, I guess to cater to idiots and avoid scaring them off.
- I don't think the distinction between "u verbs" and "ru verbs" was mentioned at all. I think there was the occasional mention of there being different types of verbs, but there was absolutely no effort made to teach you about them or how to tell which type a verb is.
- They stuck with -masu forms all the way through the series and only used dictionary forms of verbs if they were forced to be particular bit of grammar they were teaching. I think this was probably so they didn't have to explain "u verbs" and "ru verbs".
- "i" adjectives and "na" adjectives were only acknowledged to exist on one occasion and there was basically nothing about the distinction between them besides "one ends in 'i' and one ends in 'na'" or something to that effect.
- Many ways of making compound sentences were not covered.
- Actually, lots of grammar was not covered at all. One glaring absence which I kept expecting to see covered was という, but it never was.


Overall, my thoughts are that it could be a good introduction for someone too lazy/unmotivated to read a guide, but I think you would almost certainly need to read a grammar guide anyway afterwards to get a proper understanding of all the things it glossed over or didn't cover at all.

I might watch the second season which aired 10 years later and see if that fills in the gaps sufficiently, then post a follow-up review/summary talking about that.