Negative Positive
Title: Not helpful to a beginner!
Review: If you are just getting started learning Japanese, you WILL NEED supplementary material to go along with the textbook and workbook! Unless you are taking a class that REQUIRES this particular book, do yourself a favor and find something else. The book has a confusing set-up, and does NOT provide enough background information for a beginner to make sense of the activities. There will be sections instructing you to "learn this Kanji!" that do not give the definitions of what those kanji mean, or how they are pronounced, or any other information. Unless you already know a fair bit of the language and are just refreshing, this book will probably make little to no sense to you.
Is the review positive or negative? 