Customer Reviews

Japanese (Lonely Planet Phrasebooks)

5 star:		(4)
4 star:		(8)
3 star:		(2)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

This book has the right idea: a pocket-sized book with a good variety of useful everyday phrases, organized by subject. However, there are enough flat-out mistakes to be pretty annoying. Also, the English and Japanese did not line up perfectly on the page which, in combination with the the print being quite small, made it difficult to figure out which defintion went where (perhaps this is not a problem with all these books but it was with mine). But most annoying are the errors and typos.

I found this book very useful and easy to understand. I would recommend this book to people who have had no background in the language and those who have studied but have forgotten some of it. This book is very practical and may inspire to want to learn more Japanese!

this book is wonderful! It's perfect for a traveler or someone who just wants to learn Japanese. It gives you uncompleted sentences like "I like-" or "I have a-" and then provides you with words in the English-Japanese dictionary in the back. It also has things listed by categories like "student life" and "request and complaints". In the back there is also a Japanese-English dictionary. This awesome book also contains the Hiranga and Katakana alphabets. I highly recommend this book to anyone who's even bothered to read my reveiw.

The sheer amount of 'stuff' that is crammed into this little phrasebook makes this the best Japanese phrasebook I've ever seen! There's just so much covered in this book, it'll be a while before a beginning student of Japanese outgrows it.

However... there are a small number of serious mistakes in the book. Not many but enough for me not to give this book 5 stars.

Here's an example in which you can use simple grade 2 math logic to figure out that its wrong:

ichi = 1; jyu = 10; ichi man = 10,000; jyu man = 1,000,000

(Excuse me? 10000 x 10 is not a million!)

I bought this on my first flight back from Japan after taking my first semester in Japanese. I thought that it supplied a ton of useful auxillary vocabulary to run with at the level of grammar I was capable of using. The book also has many slight mistakes, even I, a first year student, was able to pick out. It's got a few cute but dumb, potentially racist but we'll say ignorant drawings included. But so few that it cues one in as to how cheaply produced this probably was. I give it three stars though because I learned it forward and backward and broke it out numerous times to meet my needs in bars and train stations (never in restaurants for some reasons). And, to get me comic leverage in many conversations where I was not privy to the Japanese side of the chatter.

I used this book extensively while in Japan. It contains the most commonly useful phrases and a bare-bones grammar section, but the organization of the material could be better.
The format is "back-pocket" handy with a durable binding so it won't fall apart...unlike other phrase books I have used.

I found this very easy to understand, as did my husband who had no prior knowledge of the Japanese language. I read it many times before our trip, in order to remember important basic words.
We referred to it many times during our trip, and it was very usefull. I would suggest everyone purchase it.
Its small size is also great, easy to put in a pocket, backpack or handbag.

I feel this book is not only usefull for comunication with other people during my travel but also very well prepare to be user friendly. It was exellent in my trip to Japan have it with me.

This book was invaluable to us in Japan. The size made it easy to carry around and it had all of the basic words and phrases that we needed to communicate. (We did supplement with a English-Japanese dictionary for some words, so that's why I've given it 4 stars instead of 5.)

The English was spelled out to make it easier to pronounce the Japanese words. In cases when I butchered the pronounciation and was not understood, I could show the book to someone who would read the Kanji symbols to see what I was trying to say.

The book was organized in a way that made it easy to find the phrase you were looking for. I bookmarked frequently used pages so I could access them even quicker. This was definitely a great reference for traveling to Japan.

This it a very useful pocket reference to use when travelling. I just wonder how easy these phrases are to remember for a person that knows absolutely no Japanese. For me it comes easier because I have studied the language as well as the sentence structure, so a lot of it is just remembering the vocabulary. I think another point that any traveler needs to keep in mind is that Japanese focuses on intonation as well. If someone uses the wrong intonation, it could completely change the meaning of the word. Unfortunately, this book doesn't really express that. For example: "kAmi" (with the stress on the "A") means "god", whereas "kamI" (with a stress on the "I") means "paper". Usually context will help, but it's just a point that travelers should be aware of. I would recommend other references that also include audio so that you can hear how the words sound.