So when I first started learning Japanese I was looking for something interesting and also for a text book which actually had good content. I wanted something to follow the Japanese pop culture but also have good teaching. In short, after spending a long time reading amazon comments, I went with the book "Japanese in MangaLand". Yeah I know how it sounds haha, but the cover itself will intrigue you before you even get to the contents.
The title "Japanese in MangaLand" makes it pretty obvious you will be learning Japanese with manga. The book itself consists of around 30 lessons (covering big topics). Each of these lessons has an example section that makes use of Manga illustrations to get across the lessons content. I believe the book itself is aimed at people wishing to read manga. What I like about this is that it starts from the useful Japanese straight away. Traditional textbooks will teach you the formal Japanese long before any casual Japanese. You don't want to be stuck in formal forever, and i'm glad that this book quickly introduces both. This is done especially because Manga (and anime) often use informal language.
So, this book is about learning the basics (as it says on the cover). It lead me through learning all of the writing systems: hiragana, katakana and beginning kanji (Chinese characters). After first introducing the writing systems at the start, with great charts and an excellent Kanji reference in the back, it will then use them for the rest of the book. In my opinion, i'm glad the book had a solid stance on learning all of these from the start. Many people will know one or two of the writing systems, but you really need all of them to even begin reading. The sooner the better (esp because the more kanji you know, the easier it is to learn new words and guess meanings of new words).
The books topics range from the writing systems, to basics like counting, days & months, to things like Swear words and insults, onomatopoeia, particles etc. If you actually have the guts to stick with this book (which isn't to hard to do because of the manga) you'll come away with a good foundation. Of course, this will not be your only Japanese textbook, but it does a great job getting past those basics and actually covering some advanced grammar. Again, this shouldn't be your only textbook, you will never only have 1 textbook when studying languages. One thing this book doesn't have is audio so you can hear the new vocabulary, however, the Japanese language is not exactly the hardest phonetically. But make sure you have a few text books to strike a balance ;) I myself use about 2-3 different sources (textbooks and online).
To those about to come to Japan. If you haven't started studying the language yet, you could probably pick this thing up and get through it nicely (at a nice pace) in 2 months or less.
Anyways, cheers, hope you find this book as helpful and enjoyable as I did.
(Also there are workbooks, intermediate and advanced levels of this book)
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