Essential Japanese Grammar: Dover Foreign Lanuage Study Guide [Paperback]

Everett. F. Bleiler (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: June 1, 1963

This logical, developmental presentation of the major aspects of Japanese grammar includes all the necessary tools for speech and comprehension. Designed for adults with limited learning time who wish to acquire the basics of everyday Japanese, this grammar features numerous shortcuts and timesavers. Ideal as an introduction, supplement, or refresher.

Product Details

• Paperback: 156 pages
• Publisher: Dover Publications; 1St Edition edition (June 1, 1963)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0486210278
• ISBN-13: 978-0486210278
• Product Dimensions: 8 x 5.4 x 0.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (7 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,344,219 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #43 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Reference > Dictionaries & Thesauruses > Foreign Language > Japanese
  • #49 in Books > 4-for-3 Books > Reference > Foreign Languages > Instruction > Japanese

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars Not the best out there..., October 5, 1998

By 

[e-mail] (Knoxville, TN) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Essential Japanese Grammar: Dover Foreign Lanuage Study Guide (Paperback)

You get what you pay for. This short book provides enough info so that one has a VERY basic understanding of Japanese grammar and sentence formulation. Some of the vocabulary is outdated and it could have been written with a more readable layout, but then again, you get what you pay for. Okay for the beginner, but certainly not as a standalone.

2 of 2 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars none too good, March 29, 2004

By 

John F. C. Kusske - See all my reviews

This review is from: Essential Japanese Grammar: Dover Foreign Lanuage Study Guide (Paperback)

I agree with an earlier review that "you get what you pay for", and if you find this book secondhand somewhere it will be worth picking up for two or three bucks. But do not go out of your way for it. I don't mind the datedness too much, but to me having no Japanese script at all throughout the book is a real drawback. I'm a stalwart of the kana-as-soon-as-possible school of thought and I bought this despite its lack of them (I thought I could get enough from my other books that one just in roomaji wouldn't be too bad). But I was wrong. All in all, this is by no means adequate for a good grammar, and I'd say look elsewhere to fill this role (there are some good texts out there these days, for beginner, intermediate, and advanced levels alike).

8 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Good little grammar for my purposes, November 8, 2003

By 

magellan (Santa Clara, CA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Essential Japanese Grammar: Dover Foreign Lanuage Study Guide (Paperback)

My interest is in comparative and structural linguistics rather than in learning to speak, so I didn't mind that this is now a fairly old book and some of the information on current usage is dated. I'm not interested in speaking it so much as understanding a little more about how an Altaic family language works in more detail, as I already have a pretty good grasp of Han Chinese, Germanic, Slavic, and the Romance family grammars and patterns. And for that purpose this book was fine.

For example, I learned that Japanese does not have a true future tense--you have to use a version of the present progressive for that--very interesting. In fact, Japanese has none of the complexity that Indo-European family languages show with respect to the handling of time and temporal relationships. However, it is much more complex in the area of modal or mood constructions, which signify a speaker's attitude toward the object, necessity, or probability. Japanese verbs are very regular and are not conjugated for person or number as in many languages, and the few irregular verbs can be counted on the fingers of one hand. What a dream--if only Spanish, Latin, Russian, and French were like that. In that regard, it's very similar to English--as well as Chinese.

Another interesting area where Japanese differs radically from our pattern is that adjectives are conjugated to agree with the verb, rather than declined to agree with the noun, unlike English and the other Indo-European languages, and Semitic family languages like Arabic as well. For example, in Japanese you would say, "That sounds interestingly," for which in English you would say, "That sounds interesting," with the word "interesting" simply being a subjective complement rather than an adjective being treated like an adverb. But in Japanese the adjective agrees with the verb rather than the noun. Go figure. So overall, this was a nice introduction to the subject that filled a gap in my own background.

By the way, in the last 20 years, since I was first studying linguistics, there has been considerable advance in the understanding of Ural-Altaic family languages and their relationships, and there are several good websites that have information on that. So if you're like me and want to pursue the subject further and don't have access to a fine linguistic library like at U.C. Berkeley or Indiana State University at Bloomington, you can find some of that on the web now.