Customer Reviews

Basic Connections: Making Your Japanese Flow (Power Japanese)

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This could be the most important Japanese grammar book you could buy, and I'll tell you why. If you're already learning Japanese, you know how complex the sentence structures and grammar can be. It's one thing to be able to get your ideas across in a reasonably intelligent manner, but it's another thing entirely to make what you're saying flow and sound natural. This book teaches you how to connect ideas and sentences so they more naturally flow into the next one. Now, if you're like me, you might be really good and saying things in Japanese, as long as you don't have to build on what you said the sentence before, or put together one long thought or sentence. This book shows you how to "look ahead" so you can figure out how to construct the sentence from the beginning so that, by the time you get to the end, everything has neatly connected itself along the way.

My only regret is I didn't find this book sooner than I did. It is truly invaluable for the beginning student, and even for the intermediate student, as well. Don't even hesitate to buy this book. It is cheap and EASILY worth the price.

I have read/used almost all of Kodansha's "Power Japanese" series. "Basic Connections" (BC)and its immediate predecessor "Japanese Verbs at a Glance" (JVC) are the best. "All About Particles" and the many idiom/vocabulary books are useful references with nice examples (though many typos, especially in "Love, Hate, and Everything in Between"). However, BC and JVG are more communication/learning-oriented. They present very useful forms clearly. Moreover, BC has some discourse-level passages and actual exercises to do. It is by far the best in a great series for intermediate Japanese students.

One useful addition would be an index. It's very difficult to find structures, especially as the layout is a little crowded. But overall I enjoyed it very much. It contains structures that I read and hear all the time in Japan, but don't fully understand yet. The male/female usage designations were also helpful.

This book is a great reference for nearly any student of Japanese who wants to learn some common Japanese sentence structures. The book does assume that the reader knows some basics, such as simple verb conjugations, but even if one doesn't, the book is still a wonderful guide. It goes into enormous detail about many expressions of the language--too many to count--and has several examples for each (in kana/kanji, romaji, and English), to demonstrate all their possible uses. Also included are exercises and answers that the reader can practice with to guage his or her progress. The author has packed an overwhelming amount of information into this seemingly small volume, and it's simply too good a deal for anyone learning Japanese to pass up.

This is a great book for beginning/intermediate Japanese students. It describes the usage of particles, select verb phrases, and common sentence patterns very thoroughly, especially where appropriate context is required. Instead of just saying "A kara, B" means "because of A, B", this book delves into the complexities of kara implying direct cause and effect, even blame.

As for the use of romanji, it's annoying and ill-suited to a book that is not for absolute beginners. However, in a way it's also better than furigana because it's easier to practice reading kanji. I find that I've developed the annoyingly lazy habit of just reading furigana even if I know the kanji.

All in all, a great supplemental text!!

After you've spent a few months studying Japanese, you will begin to realize why a book like this is necessary. Saying short simple sentences in Japanese (e.g., "I want to go to that coffeshop" "the cake is good at that coffeeshop", "I want to go with you") is relatively easy. But saying anything more complex (e.g. "I want to go with you to that coffeeshop because the cake there is delicious") is HARD. And making relatively complex sentences sound natural takes a long time.

So the concept behind this book is brilliant. Lower intermediate students NEED this kind of instruction. This book, though, while well written and certainly useful, didn't really live up to my expectations. Why?

Because this is a slim little volume, too short to really deliver on the substantial promises it makes. Many of the explanations felt rushed to me. There are just one or two examples for each explanation, where four or five would be far more useful. And the exercises are too few and not always very well conceived.

So it's a great concept and a good book, but it could definitely be improved. Mostly it needs to fatten up. A future edition, with twice as many examples and exercises would be heartily appreciated.

I bought this book in order to prepare myself to take the JLPT4 exam. And, well, I was in for a shock. The title is nothing if not misleading. The grammar covered DOES NOT focus on what you would expect to be basic material. Of the hundred odd "connections" that the author has chosen, only a handful are JLPT4, and the other half are split between JLPT3 and JLPT2. Other cons are that the language of the author is of a very wordy and academic nature, so the explanations seem more complex than clear or concise! And, contrary to the premise that much of this book is aimed at beginners, in the majority of cases the author clearly expects readers to already have a grasp of intermediate grammar, thus leaving far too many things improperly explained, skimmed over, or even lacking in any explanation at all.

However, this is not to say that this book is a waste of good paper. If you are of an intermediate-higher level (read: higher JLPT3 and above) it can come in quite useful, because it at least alerted me to a lot of aspects many other grammar books did not even touch on, even though it failed to explain many of these in detail. And if you're a beginner, consider it for future reference, but don't be in any hurry to buy it.

I'm a beginner in Japanese and have been learning for about a year or so. To give you an idea of my level, I've just completed the first thirty lessons of Pimsleur's Japanese 1 (a conversation-based Japanese course for English speakers). So I can converse at a basic level in a variety of situations but I don't know much about Japanese grammar.

I was looking for a book to supplement my Pimsleur studies. This book is at the perfect level for me. I've read the first few chapters and already some concepts have fallen into place. Looking ahead to later chapters, I can see that many of the areas I have questions about get covered. I also like the fact that all the sentences are written in romaji as well as kana and kanji, as I'm also trying to make the transition away from romaji, but gradually.

The other book that I am finding very useful is Naoko Chino's 'All about Particles', by the same publisher. Earlier, I made the mistake of buying 'Japanese Sentence Structure for Effective Communication' by Taeko Kamiya and 'How to Tell the Difference between Japanese Particles' by Naoko Chino. Both those books will be very useful later, but are currently above my level.

The field of language books and Japanese language in particular, is as enormous as can be. It's important to know where to start, and how to accumulate information in order to make a steady move forward while learning any language. This book, though trying to give you as much general information about the language as possible, is not for beginners. If you want some real basic Japanese, try any Kodansha book or any other college students book that will give you the right start. Although not for beginners as I said, it's a very handy book for the more experienced Japanese learner, and will give you bunds of information that'll make your language familiarity better. Again, a book not to start from, but a great supplementary didactic tool for the advanced user.

When you're reading something in Japanese, do you ever get the feeling like, "oh, we never learned how to use this particle like THIS." Or maybe you're not sure of when certain to use certain grammar constructions in conversation or in writing. Or perhaps you just think your speech is stale and repetitious and you wanna try and spice things up. Well this book will definitely help you.

This book will not teach you the basics, but rather it will expand upon them. Go into depth on things you may have learned and solidify them. For instance, the usage of the particles ' has six different uses and it goes into the nuance of each; how to say "but" three different ways; etc...

It's not a textbook, it's supplemental reading...but I think most english speakers of Japanese should read it. There are many shades of meaning in Japanese that sometimes can be hard to learn from a textbook and I think this book tackles some of them.

My only gripe with the book are that I wish there were more examples for some sections and possibly more in depth explanation, but other than that it is a very solid purchase.

This book is very informative but it doesn't keep your attention for too long. It is written almost in the nature of a school's textbook and tends to be a bit bland forcing me to re-read certain sections after my attention span nosedived.