Customer Reviews

Essential Japanese: An Introduction to the Standard Colloquial Language (Tuttle Pbk) (Tuttle Language Library)

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(0)
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1 star:		(0)

 

 

It can be greatly improved by using Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji
in the text. All Romaji is the only weakness of this book.

I concur with the other users of this site in my opinion of this book. You really can learn colloquial Japanese from this book. It is a bit dated - it was, I believe, originally written for American GI's and missionaries who found themselves in Japan after World War II and needed a good self teaching book which could be used on the ground, preferably with a native speaker to go through the material with you or at least to provide pointers on pronunciation. However, this doesn't mean that what you're learning is too basic. Virtually every feature of the spoken language is at least touched on, and best of all, there are a lot of illustrative sentences for every item covered. The whole book is split into only ten lessons, and each lesson seems to last forever, but when you actually start working with the book it is much easier than it initially appears.

There is another book by Martin out that includes copies of the dialogues from this book in written Japanese, if you really feel a need for that. While of course it is a nice idea to be able to work with the writing system immediately when learning a new language, with Japanese I don't really really believe that this is a good idea. All told, Japanese is probably the most difficult language in the world to learn to read and write correctly, more so than Chinese, so I would suggest to the would-be learner that she work with this book for a while and then start on the written language with other learning materials.

Of all the courses I have purchased, I keep returning to this one. It is thorough in its pedagogy, and provides enough practice material to really drive the grammar into your head.

I would like to see tapes for this book. It would really enhance its overall coursework.

This book is probably the single best book I have found for teaching yourself real conversational Japanese along with enough grammar neccessary to understand it and use it! It gets a nine because it could be better only with kana and kanji. If you want to learn Japanese, you will save much time with this book

I have been studying Japanese for two years. I'm a very analytic sort when it comes to language. I love grammar; I have successfully learned several languages and actually teach languages.

This book is incredible. For two years I have sought a book like this; at last I have found one.

It seems that there are usually two choices in Japanese grammars written for English speakers. Either they are so oriented to modern descriptive linguistic theory--always hedging and qualifying statements--that they are difficult or, at times, impossible to follow, and, therefore, are inefficient guides for someone who just wants to know how to say something; or they merely give models for emulation with little explanation of the underlying grammatical principles.

This book is not like that. It's quite old-fashioned. In fact, I doubt a book like this would be written nowadays; its approach is just not fashionable. In a prescriptive context, it methodically and succinctly and thoroughly explains the structure of well-formed Japanese utterances.

I bought an edition from the 1960's, and it has one flaw that I can see people not liking: the Japanese is written all in Romaji. It may be that later editions have corrected that. To be fair to the author, his express purpose is to get people speaking Japanese, not reading and writing it; his view is that people can go elsewhere to begin the daunting (but not impossible) task of reading Japanese. This flaw may be addressed in later editions.

All this being said, most people would not like this as a beginning textbook. It's really suited for intermediate students who are seeking lucid explanations of grammatical issues they may have learned in a less thorough way.

If you really want to understand basic Japanese grammar, get this book!

I bought this book primarily as a comapanion to A Japanese Reader: Graded Lessons for Mastering the Written Language (Tuttle Language Library), which was designed to accompany the Martin book. Only Lessons 18-30 of the Miller book are meant to be used alongside Martin, but they are tied somewhat closely. Though I have some solid experience with Japanese, I did find that there were a few forms in Miller that would trip me up a bit, and it was also assumed you would already have gotten the vocabulary from Martin (though it was somewhat rare for me not to know the words, as the vocabulary was mostly very basic), so I thought it would be worth having.

The book (Martin's) covers an enormous amount of ground very quickly. I don't think I could recommend it as a first book on Japanese, unless you were willing to spend quite a lot of time hammering in the knowledge from each page yourself. The book was chiefly intended for people who were already actually living in Japanese, and needed a roadmap to the language. Both the vocabulary and the grammar can be quite old, including terms that really aren't used so much any more, or aren't used in the same ways (this may have changed since; my copy is a used 2nd edition, revised in 1956). Still, most of what you see in this book still applies today.

The book does a very excellent job of explaining difficult and complex concepts as simply as possible, where many other texts struggle ineffectively to convey them. It also describes Japanese pronunciation much more accurately than I have ever seen elsewhere. I would recommend this for any student of Japanese who has had some experience with the language; however, due to its out-datedness and very, very brisk pace, I don't think I'd recommend it for new students of the language.

The book is both exhaustive and concise, which makes it a superb reference or grammar-refreshment book. Perhaps the best recommendation I can give it, is that it taught me more about Japanese in one book than I've previously gotten through several successions of college textbooks.