Contemporary Japanese: A Text for College Students is designed for beginning students of Japanese language at the university level, intended for use in the classroom as well as for self-study. Each lesson is based on a single communicative objective and uses a "guess and try" approach to learning, which encourages problem-solving instead of rote learning. This innovative way of teaching through observing real-life conversations enlivens the learning process, and will motivate independent and non-vocational learners.

Contemporary Japanese: A Text for College Students Volume I contains 14 chapters, broken into 61 short lessons, each of which involves a variety of activities and is designed to be covered in a single session - the 'daily multivitamin' approach. An audio CD containing pronunciation guides, and dialogs for each chapter is included with the book.

The Japanese language portions of this book are written primarily in the Japanese scripts of kana (hiragana/katakana) and kanji with furigana (hiragana in small print above the kanji character as a pronunciation guide) to further language immersion, though the first chapter does use romanji as an introduction to the Japanese characters.

Written by Eriko Sato.