Eri Banno

Eri Banno is the first-named of the team behind Genki, the Japanese course most English-speaking beginners meet first. She made it with Yoko Ikeda, Yutaka Ohno, Yoko Sakane, Chikako Shinagawa and Kyoko Tokashiki, and The Japan Times has published it since 1999, now in a third edition. Genki I is the first of two volumes and covers twelve of the twenty-three lessons, carrying a reader from no Japanese at all through hiragana, katakana and the first stretch of kanji, with grammar, vocabulary, listening and conversation practice built around the same cast and situations rather than taught apart from each other. A workbook and audio go with it. Banno has taught at Okayama University.