My japanese teacher uses "minna no nihongo" as textbook.
I myself had gone searching for many textbooks from many book stores, from friends, from libraries, and also open domain textbooks.
On a related note, not limited to N4, there's one particular course material used by diplomats, which is from FSI, Foreign Service Institute. You may find it helpful, I'll reference it at the end.
There are free downloads from FSI, there are also old course materials that are no longer found there but someone has uploaded their older archive somewhere and i've also downloaded all of the old course materials.
The current FSI website looks a bit broken though...
Back to topic, I am flooded with so many textbooks to choose from, that i finally settled on using renshuu and it's collection of japanese language learning exercises aggregated across many textbook. I gladly paid for renshuu pro, of course.
References:
https://www.fsi-language-cours...
According to FSI:
What are FSI FAST Courses?
The Foreign Service Institute (FSI) is a branch of the US government that has been providing language training for diplomatic staff for around three-quarters of a century. The core of FSI’s teaching is the Basic course, intensive programs of around six months that were intended to leave students with a high level of competence in their target language in a relatively short amount of time.
However, not everyone can dedicate six months to full-time study, so FAST courses were developed as an alternative for those with more limited time.
FAST stands for Familiarization And Short-Term Training, and these much shorter courses were designed to give students a basic grasp of the language at the same time as proving them with an introduction to the culture and customs of the destination country.
This way, they would have received at least some degree of preparation before beginning their postings abroad.
What is FSI Japanese FAST?
FSI Japanese FAST was published in 1988 and consists of eight chapters, each dealing with common situations you might expect to face while traveling, living or working in Japan. In each chapter, you learn the necessary basic phrases for dealing with each situation confidently, without dwelling too much on linguistic or grammatical detail.
The emphasis is on communication rather than total mastery of the language, and the goal of this six-week course was to leave students feeling confident and ready to try their new language skills when they arrived in the country.
How can you use FSI Japanese FAST?
This FSI Japanese FAST course would have been an excellent resource to work through before a trip to Japan since it teaches you a useful stock of basic phrases and expressions, giving you the linguistic tools you need to make the most of your time in the country.
Unfortunately, the audio recordings that go with the course are currently unavailable, making it much less useful than it would otherwise have been.
However, if you are studying Japanese with another coursebook – or even taking lessons with a teacher – working through the text of this course could still be a good way to consolidate your knowledge of the language while learning a bit more about Japanese culture.
If the recordings become available in the future, I will upload them to the site to go with the text to help anyone hoping to study Japanese with this course.
Alternatively, the complete Japanese Headstart course is available on this site, so you might consider trying that instead.
I'm looking for a textbook at about JLPTN4 and I'm wondering if y'all have any suggestions
wow thanks, i wasnt expecting such an indepth response. I'll have to try them out
