Good japanese books to learn from ?

Hi all,

I've been learning japanese quite randomly in the few past weeks, mainly with basic grammar lessons, hiragana/katakana tables and lots of animes that i would pause ach 10 seconds to try and understand what they say.

However, i'd like a more formal and academic approach to it. Does /lang/ have tips for any particular books for this purpose ?

I'm using the Japanese for Busy People series myself (I'm in the third and last book currently), although it's not for everybody. They only teach adult "survival" Japanese, and the vocabulary reflects this, so if you choose this series you should use some extra sources to acquire some relatively simple vocabulary that is not in the books.

They do teach the grammar well, though.

Another series is Genki. I haven't tried it myself, although I have it as a pdf file (torrents lol...). It looks nice, but is very expensive. I don't know how far it takes you eventually, but vocabularywise it's excellent.

I've been looking into getting a hold of "dictionary of intermediate Japanese grammar", it looks pretty detailed

I've been using this French language book up to now
http://www.maisonneuve-adrien.com/description/japonais_chinois/shimamori_grammaire1.htm

Does somebody know what "Japanese for Young People" is worth ?

http://www.polarcloud.com/rikaichan/

this tool is very useful, especially if you plan on using Japanese sites to learn from

get a furigana dictionary too.
i recommend kodansha furigana dictionary. they are worth about $60 (Australian) but totally worth it