QUARTET: Intermediate Japanese Across the Four Language Skills I

This excellent book published by The Japan Times is a comprehensive learning resource for intermediate Japanese students. It offers a well-balanced study experience of the four language skills – reading, writing, listening, and speaking – by offering expressions, grammatical structures, and other strategies required to properly communicate at the intermediate level. The book contains six lessons that are equivalent to the JLPT N3 level with 55 grammatical patterns and expressions, 327 kanji, ten reading strategies, and approximately 700 new words. One strength of this book is the easy-to-understand English explanations of grammatical patterns introduced in the two readings that start each chapter. The book also gives you opportunities to write compositions based on the model texts and to practice conversations using model dialogues. There is also a supplementary book that contains vocabulary and kanji lists and sample sentences using them. On top of that, there is a link to download 2.5 hours of audio files to help you with your listening. This is a highly recommended book for intermediate learners wanting to improve their Japanese in all areas.