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109 of 115 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Funny in many sense., November 16, 2007
This review is from: Dirty Japanese: Everyday Slang from "What's Up?" to "F*%# Off!" (Dirty Everyday Slang) (Paperback)
Well...seemingly this book has many funny Japanese words listed on it.
I'm a Japanese girl living in Japan, I read a few pages of this book and I found it very funny. However, some Japanese words/phrases in this book are not exactly correct. About 90% of them are correct, but 10 of them are not like the same as correct Japanese which Japanese's actually using. They are "Foreigner's Japanese", "Gaijin-no-Nihongo".
It's funny though, but also gives us some impression that she/he is not fluent in Japanese so much.
You know, Japanese people always say "Your Japanese is so great!" or "Sugoiiii~" when you speak a little bit of Japanese, but that doesn't really mean you are really good at speaking in Japanese. Yes, it's true when Japanese say "It's great" it is actually NOT great. But they say something like this to make people feel relieved.
It's "Honne to Tatemae", which means say some thing positively but we actually do not think it is really positive or we think it bad actually.
Anyways, I recommend to buy Japanese books which is written in Japanese authors.
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64 of 68 people found the following review helpful:
2.0 out of 5 stars
Beware..., June 2, 2008
This review is from: Dirty Japanese: Everyday Slang from "What's Up?" to "F*%# Off!" (Dirty Everyday Slang) (Paperback)
I am a student of the Japanese language so I bought a copy of "Dirty Japanese" thinking it would nicely round out my education, which is mostly from staid textbooks. Well, I showed it to a bunch of my Japanese friends, and they were laughing their a**es off at the extent to which many of the phrases in the book were either inaccurate or simply dated. I admit this book is somewhat humorous to read even if you don't speak Japanese at all, but beware, you might not be learning anything useful by reading it.
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78 of 85 people found the following review helpful:
1.0 out of 5 stars
A BIG DISAPPOINTMENT, July 25, 2008
This review is from: Dirty Japanese: Everyday Slang from "What's Up?" to "F*%# Off!" (Dirty Everyday Slang) (Paperback)
I have a fairly large collection of Japanese language textbooks (many of which I've bought at Amazon over the years). Much to my surprise, I've found that I consistently use all of them and none of them collect much dust.
However, with this particular title, I've finally found a real dud among my Japanese language learning texts.
The biggest problem is the lack of an index (which pretty much means that, while some people may find the book funny to thumb through, they won't find it useful as a reference book).
The second big problem is that the author injects far too much of himself into the book. He very loudly and aggressively wants us all to know that he is the hippest person to ever walk the streets of Japan.
That, combined with his endless, jarring hip hop/street slang is very distracting and annoying (it was annoying enough almost two decades ago when the middle-class Vanilla Ice tried to convince us he came from the 'hood; it's even more annoying now).
I would also fault the author's grasp of the Japanese language. His "English" translations of a lot of phrases include many expletives that simply aren't there in the original Japanese text.
Last, but not least, is that the author doesn't seem very well informed about Japan. He informs us that Japanese cops don't carry guns (not true) and that they're the biggest jerks in the world. The fact is, if the Tokyo police were indeed "jerks" to the author, he richly deserved it (as he gleefully spends much of the book talking about all the fights and reckless trouble that he got into while in Japan). For the record, I've visited Japan and found it to the safest, most peaceful nation I've ever seen. The Japanese people are some of the most polite folks on earth--but you'd think they were all a bunch of violent thugs after reading this book.
The world still needs a good comprehensive reference book that rounds up Japan's trendy language and street slang. This book isn't it.
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