Customer Reviews

501 Japanese Verbs

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(3)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(9)

 

 

I compared this book with the Japanese verb guide I actually bought, called the Complete Japanese Verb Guide. I highly recommend that book over this one. I agree with the other reviewers here that 501 should have Japanese characters. The Complete Japanese verb guide gives the kanji for the verb as well as romanization for beginners. It's a better book all around, so I would suggest turning this one down.

As has been mentioned by other reviewers, the very concept of this book is flawed, since Japanese verbs are basically regular. Anyone with two years of Japanese learning could have compiled this book themselves with the help of a Japanese dictionary. To use an analogy, it's as if someone decided that instead of teaching the rules of addition, a book of 501 sums would be more useful to children, from 1+1=2 to 97+35=132.

The verbs selected by the author are frequently antiquated. For example, the book uses the word "nomu" for "smoke" instead of the common "suu." This is great if you want to sound like a ninety-year-old or read Natsume Soseki in the original (and anyone doing that would have thrown this book in the recycling bin years ago), but for beginning students hoping to communicate with living Japanese it is clearly inappropriate.

Add to this a romanization scheme certain to be confusing to beginners, and almost completely out of use in Japan. Expecting beginners to learn that "tya" should be pronounced "cha" is a complete waste of time. It would be faster to teach them kana.

The fact that this book has remained in print suggests that beginning Japanese students who have learned other languages believe that a compilation of Japanese verbs would be useful, and new generations of them make the same mistake every year. In other words, the continued publication of this book is little more than a SCAM, profitable perhaps, but poorly conceived and badly executed.

I originally bought the book as a resource for teaching a Japanese class. Then I returned it to the book store because it was not useful enough. I found it useful because it shows how to conjugate verbs. However, the one important thing that it is missing is ACTUAL JAPANESE CHARACTERS. Japanese can be written for foreign language learners using the Roman (or Latin) alphabet, in the way this book does. However, if you want to learn Japanese, you have to see it in Japanese characters. This book does not use any Japanese characters.

Like some of the previous reviewers, I have to complain about the lack of kana and kanji in this book. Romaji just isn't worthwhile for anyone even remotely serious about learning Japanese.

That said, I would have to add that this resource book is wasted on the Japanese language. The 501 Verbs books for languages like Spanish or French, were there are so many irregular verbs, are invaluable (I had the French one grafted to my right hand...jk). But with Japanese, there are only two irregular verbs, and if you don't know those by the first year of Japanese study, you should quit. This book is really nothing more than page upon page of the EXACT same conjugation being repeated over and over and over...

Find a resource which will explain to you the pattern of verb conjugation in Japanese, and you won't ever need a book like 501 Japanese Verbs. I bought it several years ago, and I only took it off my bookshelf to move to a new apartment.

It's not the publisher's or author's fault; it's just the right resource for the wrong language.

I bought this useless book and a similarly useless book for conjugating Korean verbs before Amazon started publishing reader reviews, so I didn't know the conjugations were romanized. Any serious learner of Japanese learns the Kana right away, so using romanized Japanese in this kind of book is silly. I could not read it.

Do not buy this book. Unlike English Japanese verbs are extremely regular and easily congugated. It is more important that you learn the rules and not very difficult, then you will be able to congugate every single verb yourself.

This is probably one of the least useful Japanese language learning tools I've bought.

In fairness to the Author(s), it does cover what it claims, it will. It just isn't really very useful or interesting.

Everything is in romaji which makes the book limited in application and at the same time the 501 verbs really only cover a few different verb types. You would be better offer with a shorter intridcution to Japanese verbs (Like The complete Guide To Japanese Verbs) and a dictionary.

For serious students of Japanese, this book is useless because all the verb conjugations are done in Romanji. I am an American learning Japanese in Korea, and here students learn Hiragana from the first day of class. If this book is published in REAL Japanese, then I will buy it.

I like it because it describes verb tenses I had never seen before reading this book. However, I have some serious complaints about it. First, it does not give general verb patterns; it just lists 501 verbs. Second, it uses only romaji and no kanji or even kana. Third, as if that weren't bad enough, it uses a system of romanization that is very confusing for Japanese students ("shi" is written "si", "tsu is written "tu", etc.) They say the Japanese think of, for example, t, ch, and ts, as the same sound and so a romanization system should be based on Japanese sounds, but they're forgetting who uses the romanizations! Fourth, they seem to forget that Japanese uses a kana (syllabary), not an alphabet. For example, they separate the stem from the ending in the middle of the syllable. For exapmle, "ik.u" [sic] is divided into "ik-" and "-u" through the use of a period, but in Japanese, it is composed of the kanji for this verb and the hiragana "ku".

Other than that, I find it to be a useful reference for conjugation of Japanese verbs, but please note that I had already been studying for six months when I bought it. Had I bought it as a beginner, I would have been very confused.

I have many Japanese friends and they tell me the verbs used in this book are rarely used in Japanese conversation. The only reason I still use it is conjugate verbs into te and ta forms. I would seriously consider anyone interested to look elsewhere, for this book has been a big dissapointment.