Kakehashi Beginning-Intermediate Japanese textbook
The author of the Kakehashi series of educational materials is a professor of Japanese and comparative culture at a private university in California. Living much of his life abroad and working as a diplomat, social integration was not only a personal must, but part of his job.  Through his experiences, he came to understand that, since language is a part of culture, functional language acquisition is impossible without learning to think like a native speaker of the language.   The Kakehashi series is the embodiment of this realistic approach to learning and understanding language in its cultural context.