The Complete Idiot's Guide to Conversational Japanese with CD-ROM [Paperback]

Ph.D., Naoya Fujita (Author), Naoya Fujita (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: July 19, 2002 | ISBN-10: 0028641795 | ISBN-13: 978-0028641799 | Edition: 1st

Beginner's guide to conversational Japanese. Softcover.

Product Details

• Paperback: 432 pages
• Publisher: Alpha; 1st edition (July 19, 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0028641795
• ISBN-13: 978-0028641799
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 7.4 x 1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.6 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #835,194 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Good book, bad CD, March 17, 2005

By 

Alana (USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Conversational Japanese with CD-ROM (Paperback)

This book does a wonderful job conveying Japanese through Romanji. The author has clearly worked very hard conveying his subject matter. However, my problem is with the CD. The CD comes with a number of tracks. Each chapter has ONE TRACK. Each track is divided into about 10 sepearate sentences/examples. What that means is at each example in the text, you have no way of repeating the sentence unless you skip back to the very beginning of the track, or if you use a slider bar on a computer audio program to effectively guess where the sentence would start. Also, there is no long pause b/t the examples. This makes using the CD effectively difficult. It is beyond important to hear the Japanese, since many Japanese words written in Romanjii are pronounced quite different then they are spelled, IE, vowel sounds are dropped from the end of some words. An example would be the verb "desu", being pronounced as "Dess"

14 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars It Does What it Claims to Do..., July 13, 2005

By 

Mikiyuki "3rd generation Japanese" (Texas, USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Conversational Japanese with CD-ROM (Paperback)

In the beginning I wanted to speak Japanese as soon as I could, and this book gave me a jump start. It's really reader-friendly, explains things clearly, and not at all dragging because each chapter is bite-sized (about 10 pages on average). It features helpful side information on the Japanese custom (ie bowing without your hands clasped together) and some other insightful things that might help you retain the lessons more successfully. You also get to learn how to pronouce the words correctly despite the fact that each track on the CD has almost no pauses in between, so you have to be alert on pressing the pause button on your CD player. I especially like how this book is written, because it stands apart from the generic language aid books that sound so technical and systematic that will bore you to tears. This book is not overly literary (no impressive big words) but rather simple and straight to the point. I've learned a lot from it and I've covered only half of the book. Unfortunately I decided to make Japanese my second language, so I had to stop further advances in this book and took people's advices not to cling on romaji (romanized Japanese),as it is heavily used in this book, and learn Kana and Kanji as soon as possible from other sources. If you're really serious about learning the language inside and out, there are a wide range of books out there that helps you with that (ie books that are published by Kodansha). However if you were like me before and wanted to be able to just speak Japanese as quickly as possible, then this book might just be the right choice for you.

16 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Good Intro to Japan, but not so much the language, December 28, 2002

By 

"soreloser" (Singapore) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Idiot's Guide to Conversational Japanese with CD-ROM (Paperback)

I can't say this book isn't good, but I just think that it wasn't what I had expected. It has lots on Japanese culture and tradition, and information on how to place yourself during your stay in Japan. The extensive stuff about the culture is probably the main good point about this book. But as for the content about the language itself, I think it is better called " an introduction to introductory Japanese". While it does have a chapter or so on grammer as it claims, it is very very super basic. I was able to learn and had already learnt about the same material from various websites on the internet already. You can probably formulate and understand sentences like: This is a little dog. It is not a big cat. It has four feet, etc. and of that sort, but nothing more complicated really.

Although yes you will learn more complicated sentences in later chapters, but they are fixed to certain topics. You will learn how to say specific things in specific situations, but not learn how to make general sentences of that kind. Yes you will learn quite some vocabulary, counting, time-telling, but nothing special that you couldn't find elsewhere. Knowing this won't help you put the language together or understand its sense at all. It basically focuses on taking you to the airport, shopping center, hotel, etc and teaching you to say the common things a tourist would say. I certainly think that it should be renamed something like "Japanese 911 for Tourists". If you use this book alone in your studies, I can gaurantee that you still won't be any better in understanding or speaking Japanese than before. For example it teaches you a specific query and then maybe 2 possible responses. It's very unlikely that all the people you encounter in Japan will respond to you in the exact manner the book tells you they will, and thus there is a high chance you will end up not understanding anything they say anyways. Besides, the book only teaches you the formal way of saying things, and no hint to the normal casual way at all. (ex. 'ikimasho' - let's go, can be said more casually as 'iko')

I only recommend this book to you if you are in an emergency of wanting to know some basic of the basic Japanese "phrases" so that you may survive? in Japan, although I doubt that there won't be a single soul that knows English wherever you're going in Japan. Anyways, I gave it four stars because atleast it does a pretty good job at the tourist thingy. A nice preview to Japan in general, some emergency phrases, and an average audio CD is what you'll get for your money. But if you're more serious or interested in getting a basic sense of the Japanese LANGUAGE, look elsewhere.