Customer Reviews

Japanese Grammar (Grammar Series)

5 star:		(27)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(1)

 

 

Considering this book is over 240 pages long despite it's small size, and does a very nice job with the grammar, and is only 7 bucks to boot, it's a pretty good deal. It's small size makes it very portable and it would practically fit in your pocket.

The author includes separate chapters on all the parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on, and most of the book is taken up by those aspects of the grammar.

At the back of the book there is a Special Topics section. These include chapters or sections on Numbers, Telling Time, Classifiers, Days, Months, Seasons, and the Weather, Family Relationships, Useful Phrases, Borrowed Words (mainly from Chinese), Synonyms, Antonyms, Short and Long Vowels, Double Consonants, Same Pronunciation but Different Meaning (for 25 words), Different Pitch, Different Meaning (for 16 words), and a 250-word vocabulary list at the very back.

The beginning of the book has chapters on pronunciation and phonetics, word order, and the Japanese writing system. The font is color-coded for certain things, which some people may find easier on the eye. I sort of wish language books, like the 501 Verbs books that are so well-known, wouldn't do this, but it's probably okay for most people.

Japanese has one great advantage over the typical Indo-European language in that it has almost 100% regular verbs. There are only two that are irregular. (Turkish is one of the few languages I've seen with no irregular verbs). It lacks many of the tenses European and other languages have, and it lacks a true future tense. There is no case system such as in German, Russian, Latin, and Greek.

However, it makes up for that in the complexity of its modal verbs or mood constructions, which signify conditionality, probability, unrcentainty, or the attitude of the speaker toward the subject. And the particle system, which serves diverse functions, from modifying the meanings of verbs to marking the subject or topic of a sentence, is also something very foreign to Indo-European language speakers, and is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the language.

Another odd aspect of Japanese that is very different from most languages is that adjectives actually belong to verbs rather than nouns and are inflected to agree with them.

A small grammar like this can't give you everything you need to know about these topics, but this little grammar is still a nice, compact resource, and as I said, the price is right. I you get a book on the particle system, such as A Dictionary of Japanese Particles, by Sue A. Kawashima, which treats 100 of the most important particles, you should be in pretty good shape.

This book is pretty good. I like the fact you can stick it in your pocket. One thing I can't stand is books that are loaded with a bunch of "filler" space just to make it look like it contains alot of information. I think alot of authors could learn something from reading this book: That it doesn't have to be big to be complete. The material is presented immediately and in a clear fashion. It's hard to NOT understand the usage of all the different particles, pronoun usage, wa vs. ga, etc after reading this book.

This book provides a good introduction to Japanese grammar for the beginner and there are plenty of usage examples. However, due to its small size some points are not explained in enough detail and in other areas you are expected to understand the grammar points through examples alone. I would not recommend this to intermediate or advanced level students, but for the beginner it provides a very good starting point due to its clear layout and uncomplicated explanations.

Overall, this book is a very good resource for beginning or intermediate students. It begins by explaining some of the very basic differences between English and Japanese (word order, verbs, etc) and moves on to some basic Japanese particles and their usage. The particles all have example sentences to show how they are used.

The main part of the text is a section showing different conjugations of verbs, all complete with example sentences. Verb conjugations include plain and proper forms, gerund, some conditional and imperative forms, honorific, and maybe a couple others. Actually I have yet to study some of the verb forms but there is a nice section showing in a chart form about 10 verbs with different conjugations.

Near the end of the book you get various little sections which cover topics such as counting numbers, calendar dates, suffixes for counting items, helpful Japanese phrases, and some others too; I can't remember all of them. At the end of the book is a glossary of different words that were used in the book. A very good overall resource...

So why the 3 star rating? The answer is simple. All romaji and absolutely no Japanese script. Actually I take that back. At the beginning of the book there are 3 or 4 pages explaining what a kanji is and where it is from. You will see the kanji for mountain, person, and Japan. Included in this 3 or 4 pages is a chart of both the katakana and the hiragana. After this point you will see no Japanese script at all.... very annoying. If you despise romaji, do not get this book. Otherwise you can do like I do, you can write all example sentences and words in Japanese (there is usually some white space) and then proceed to cross out all romaji so you do not have to read it; then you will also have some practice with writing.
This book would have earned 5 stars had it been written in Japanese characters. Still, I would recommend this book to all beginner and intermediate students as a basic overview of grammar and verbs. Oh yeah, the price is right too:)

Personally, I think this is a great book. It explains verbs and sentence structure in a clear and concise form, and it gets straight to the point, and I like how it is small and fits into my pocket, but it only gets 4 stars because of no kana

This book is an excellent commentary on the majority of Japanese learning aids in the Western world. The content is exceptional, and yet the book is almost entirely worthless because of some ridiculous shortcomings.

So first, the positive. This book, though pretty abbreviated due to the small format, nonetheless manages to weigh in at a respectable 270 pages absolutely loaded with useful grammar tips. Don't quite remember the rules for conjugation? Need some help with particles? It's all here, and it's all very easy to learn or to read in its summarized form to get you back up to speed. The content is very accurate, and presented well. Many portions are overly concise- you might for example only get two or three examples of irregular conjugations instead of a fuller or comprehensive list. The brevity makes this a "pocket guide" instead of a desktop reference- but assuming this book is part of a larger language class, that's not a big issue, and the book serves the role of a pocket reference very well. Theoretically.

But this book does not contain a single character of written Japanese. Front to back, it's all in romaji (English spellings). It isn't just that certain exercises are in Japanese, or that certain examples are in Japanese. If you're not advanced enough to read Japanese text at all, you're probably learning Japanese from another book and owning this book is just a redundancy. If you're an advanced enough student to be using this book as a quick reference, you need Japanese text to reinforce the language instead of relying on romaji crib notes.

So I really can't strongly recommend this book at all, despite the quality content, unless you're interested only in spoken Japanese and don't intend to learn the language (why you would want to remain functionally illiterate is beyond me). If this volume had combination hiragana/romaji so students of all levels could benefit, it would be an instant perfect rating. As it stands, it's merely another book where I'm left scratching my head wondering who can really benefit. What's the point of trying to teach someone another language, entirely in English?

This is an outstanding primer on Japanese grammar. Its small size makes it easy to tote around in a coat pocket. The explanations are very clear, and you can easily get a "macro view" of any area of Japanese grammar.

In most cities Japanese lessons are hard to come by. I live in Shreveport, LA, and not one college in a city of over 150,000 people offers a Japanese class. That being such, if you want to learn Japanese the odds are high you'll have to go it alone. This was the first book I bought.

While not offering the Japanese scripts in much detail (which are necessary if you ever want to write in Japanese), this book covers pretty much everything you need to know. From essential vocabulary to verb usage to particles, Barron really did come through again. Now that I'm an intermediate-level Japanese student, I find it a good resource, and when I was first learning it was incalcluably necessary. This book, while small, is like a miniature Japanese textbook. It runs through all the important nuances of the language that are so strange to us and puts it in a cut and dry format that nearly anyone can comprehend. Granted, grammar is boring; few people can stand to look at a page stating grammar rules, much less apprehend the knowledge because of their boredom. But this book is a good resource, even if it isn't a page-turner. At worst, you lose seven dollars. At best, you jumpstart your knowledge of the Japanese language and begin speaking. It's up to you.

I'm a beginner in Japanese, but I really appreciate the holistic approach towards a foreign language: if I study a language, I also want to be literate / be able to read in that language. The point of this book is JUST to teach you some very basic grammar, and that's about it. It's obviously intended for those learners of Japanese who wish to master only oral Japanese. In the whole book, there are practically no examples written in any of the Japanese syllabaries, hiragana or katakana. Of course, kanji is out of the question. I understand that this may be what some readers actually prefer, but I'd really appreciate if the publisher described this book appropriately: Amazon's description above does NOT explicitly mention that this book has all Japanese examples written in Latin alphabet / romaji. All the product description says is: "All Japanese words are presented phonetically", which I understood quite differently. This would be a much more useful book to me, if it presented all examples BOTH using the original Japanese writing AND their romaji (or furigana) representation.

This book is an in depth look at the basic grammatical structure of the Japanese language. It allows non-linguists to understand grammar by defining the terms it uses and comparing Japanese to English and other European languages. It's mainly for beginners, but intermediate students and second-language speakers could get a more thorough understanding of the grammar rules by reading it. It's nicely sized, too; a "pocket-book" that actually fits in a pocket.

The only down-side to this book is the use of Romaji throughout the entire text. In the front of the book there are a few reference pages that show and explain the use of the Kana, but the rest the Japanese in the book is entirely in Romaji. Not something I prefer, but it's something Barron's always does. If you're not interested in using the script, or you know it already, then go for it.