Customer Reviews

Japanese Step by Step : An Innovative Approach to Speaking and Reading Japanese

5 star:		(23)
4 star:		(16)
3 star:		(6)
2 star:		(4)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Read this book first before wasting your money on other books. I just finished my first read through of this book. It was amazing. I learned more about how the Japanese language is structured in a few days than I have from other books in months.
Many students of Japanese just need basic information at the beginning in order to be productive in their studies.
Gene Nishi gets straight to the point, starting with the basic sentence structure, adding more information as the book progresses. And since everything complex is made up of simple things, you can start to see how a complicated Japanese sentence can be analyzed and understood. After reading through this book, I could get the "gist" of basic to intermediate Japanese sentences even though my vocabulary is yet not up to snuff. I could just tell that "someone gave something to someone else at such and such time", for example. While that may sound trivial, my abilities will only increase as I engage in Japanese conversation and read the Japanese papers, because the blanks will be filled in from the context, just like any other language acquisition process. The point is, I now know where the blanks are,thanks to this book!

Gene Nishi also does an excellent job of targeting this book to a particular audience: adult professionals who need to conversate with Japanese adult professionals(although this book would work for any student). Right now, I do not need to know all of the embellishments and ornaments in everyday Japanese language. I don't have the time. I just need to be able to have relatively educated conversations with a native speaker. This book has all of the tools to enable me to get the solid foundation needed to achieve that goal. He describes the different classes of adjectives, verbs and some of the more common particles(wa, ga, ni, de, no) in a clearer manner than anywhere else. Gene also said that learning the 1006 Kanji taught to Japanese grade schoolers would cover 90% of those used by newspapers. That was quite a relief! I had heard there were 20000 of them! If I learn 3 a day, I'm on my way. See how this book reduces some of the complications? Finally, Nishi's organization of this book makes a lot of sense. He starts from simple examples and works up to more complicated ones.

A few notes, while this book is an excellent start, once you finish it, to get the deepest understanding you will need to look at other books for the following reasons:
1. Understanding the Japanese language from a linguistic perspective. A few of Gene's descriptions do not match what I've learned elsewhere(for example, the Japanese characters or "Mora" are not divisible! You should not think of the particle "no" as a combination of the n sound and the o sound. To the Japanese, the particle "no" is one indivisible unit.)
2. Mastering the Kana
3. Learning Kanji
4. Understanding the tonal structure of spoken Japanese
5. Doing exercises! This is not an exercise oriented book. The books by Eleanor Jorden are the best in that area. I plan on going that route after mastering this book.

...this would be the programmer's tech manual.

JAPANESE STEP BY STEP was written by a former IBM engineer. He applied tech-manual principles to the organization and presentation of the inner workings of the Japanese language. The author makes heavy use of logic flow charts to show how Japanese verbs are conjugated, and how present, negative, past and past-negative tenses are developed. He also presents five basic sentence patterns to be used as building blocks for more complex and compound sentences. And, the roman-alphabet representations of Japanese use CAPITAL letters to show the raised pitch accent.

Although the book uses Japanese characters above the roman text (romaji), it uses the 2000+-character KANJI with no furigana (small hiragana characters to show the `reading' of the kanji characters.) I'd like to be able to cover up the romaji and read just the Japanese characters, but the lack of furigana forces dependence on the romaji.

Another thing I found frustrating is having to flip back and forth through the book to figure out how a particular verb conjugates. This could have been solved if the author had either provided an appendix with all the verb conjugation flow charts, or (better yet,) provided an additional set of charts showing how to conjugate each type of verb into all the possible conjugations.

This book is NOT the only book on Japanese you'll ever need. But it's a useful addition to the Japanese-language student's arsenal of reference works. It presents information in a different way, which may be just what you need to get from confusion to increased understanding.

This book will not by itself have you speaking or reading Japanese. As a reference, especially for the verbal idioms, it is quite useful, but only after the fact, I fear. There are no drills, no exercises, and vocabulary is simply listed at the beginning of each major section. Here are 100 verbs, now go learn them. Here are 100 nouns, do likewise. His insistence that Japanes "adjectives" are "words to modify a noun" just as in English, can only confuse. "You mean adjectives conjugate just like verbs rather than decline like nouns?"

His presentation of the Kana is also "Here it is, now just go and memorize these tables." Even his presentation of the traditional syllabary tables is quirky, filling in the ya and wa columns with standard vowels, not at all helpful to the beginner, especially without explanation.

There is no practice reading connected prose. There aren't any connected dialogs at all. Any discussion of politeness levels and the in-out group dichotomy is totally missing. You just don't see/hear real Japanese here, spoken or written. There is no indication that real Japanese is often written vertically right to left. There is no discussion of innovative versus traditional Katakana spelling. Related to this, there is, quite surprizingly, no discussion of modern "loan" words, especially the huge modern English-borrowed vocabulary, and the rules of "transcribing" and "trans-speaking" English into Japanese. Especially surprising for someone in the scientific and engineering fields.

There is no help with real pronunciation (devoiced high vowels and the "soft" medial "g" of the Tokyo dialect for example), and no help at all with determining general pitch patterns of connected speech. Once again, just memorize each sentence as you come up against it. Don't ask why, just do it. Most un-engineer-like.

His Romaji is also, to say the least, quirky. Capitalization to show pitch levels can make the neginning English user fall into stress accents rather than pitch accents very easily.

Last, but certainly not least, his non-explanation of Kanji, especially the possibility of multiple readings, of proper names in particular, and the "just throw it at you in unrelated chunks of vocabulary" are not at all helpful for a beginner. Let alone how you might write it yourself - stroke order and the like. No clue, either, how to use a Japanese-English dictionary.

All in all, a disappointing book. Being an engineer myself, I was hopeful that an engineering/scientific approach to Japanese might be interesting, but there is little here. Stay with the tried and true language experts. Eleanor Harz Jordan and the classic "Reading Japanese" and Part 1 of "Japanese, The Spoken Language" will be much more rewarding to the beginner, even if teaching him/herself.

This is a exellent text that explains alot about japanese to the beginning, and advanced student. It lays out the basics in an easy to understand way, and builds upon that foundation with easy to follow, explanations. The one criticism, is, though it is not actually very fair, is that it is low on exercises. Which makes this more of a book about japanese, than to practice japanese.

it's an important point, because I find that foreign learners of japanese, especially Americans tend to take shelter from making progress in using the language fluently by studying it academically much more than is necessary. I think it comes from the way foreign languages are taught in schools-- we are tested more on how much we can academically talk about how a language works, than on how well we can actually communicate in the language.

--but Mr. Nishi isnt trying to make a workbook here, so its really up to the student to avoid the trap of being able to discuss how japanese expresses something, but not actually be able to express anything that way in japanese yourself.

--One last point is-- I love how this book uses all 2000 necessary Kanji with zero furigana. there is romaji, and there is Kanji. This is perfect. Some reviewers here seem to think that Romaji is an evil crutch, but if romaji is a crutch, furigana is a worse one in this case.-- Yes, furigana is the phonetic transcription of kanji but the 2000 kanji deemed necessary for daily life are rarely if ever written with furigana (only for kids in kids books). you cant read real japanese and rely on furigana--

This makes the lack of furigana a bonus. Romaji can be readily understood--no questions of if you're looking at 'nu' or 'me'-- which just distract beginners.--- plus you can cover up the romaji, and try to learn to read the words without any visual cues.--- if this book used furigana... this would be impossible. You would never have to read the kanji, your eyes would always cheat and check the furigana--

you become dependent. and sorry to say it, but even though it might be more popular to claim that you dont read romaji, but only kanji texts with furigana-- you are still only reading
F-A-K-E
japanese.

Cheers to Mr. Nishi on this great resource, every student of japanese should own a copy.

After I read the glowing reviews of this book on About.com and Japanese123.com, I decided that I had to add it to my own collection. As I am learning Japanese as an adult professional, I appreciate the grown-up approach that the author takes. So many Japanese texts talk down to the reader, or concern themselves solely with juvenile/school-oriented situations. This book contains language that will be useful to businesspersons from the beginning.

The explanations of grammar are flowcharted out in a way that makes it easy to see how Japanese sentences are constructed. Although the author has a Japanese last name, he was apparently born and raised in the United States. As I worked through the book, it was evident to me that Gene Nishi was explaining the Japanese language from an English-speaker's point of view---whereas many Japanese language texts written in Japan do not take into account the unique problems that English-speaking students of the langauge face.

Bottom line: if you are a beginning or intermediate student of Japanese, this book belongs on your bookshelf.

The focus of the book is on Japanese Grammer, which it does very well and very logically. It does have a very good method of demonstrating how to pronounce words, but it usually omits the actual kana/kanji and shows only Romanji. The author misses a golden opportunity to teach the actual Kana/Kanji vocabulary that way.

Buy the book if you need a logical explanation of grammer. Pass on the book if you also want vocabulary.

No one book is going to give you everything you need, and I am surprised that other reviewers have given it as high marks as they have. I was disappointed with this book's 'innovative' teaching system, in which cryptic letters and subscript numerals are used to identify certain sentence patterns. Rather than explaining Japanese grammar in tutorial form, it focuses more on making the reader memorize patterns, and it is constantly referring ahead or back to other parts of the book, making it hard to build one level of understanding on top of another. Some people apparently respond well to this IBM engineer's 'innovative system', but be warned, it is not for everybody. I used the book for a year and found it to be a somewhat useful supplement to my learning, as it did reinforce things I was picking up elsewhere and also contains information that isn't in other books, but it did not work out to be my primary resource for study. Japanese The Easy Way, by Karen Sandness, when paired with (Barron's) Japanese Grammar, was much easier to follow and learn from, and the knowledge I gained from those books and the Langenscheidt Japanese-English dictionary ended up being far more helpful when I was traveling in Japan. What I did like about this one was that while it is romaji-based, it still has a fair amount of kanji and kana, and it is the only book I have found that provides pitch cues for the vocabulary words; most other books I've looked at don't even mention the fact that Japanese uses pitch to distinguish between homonyms. So, overall, I'd consider it good to have in your library, but it isn't an ideal primary reference.

I thought it ridiculous that people frequently pointed out just how it was that this book came from a programmer's mind until I actually bought it.
The book is short, and concise. Superfluous information is rarely given, and things are presented in such a way that, if you practice exactly what is given to you, you can speak Japanese well. That's a good thing, obviously. However, some people want more in-depth knowledge, and for those people, this book is not for you. You will be given things in a specific order, regimented carefully, and if you're extremely inquisitive you'll probably find this frustrating. If you combine this book with a few others, you'll do well. Finish this first, then do a book on particles, then on verbs, etc.
If it sounds like I'm being scornful of this book, you should know that I am not. I am merely saying that it, as any book, is not the perfect solution for becoming fluent in Japanese. However, no book is. What this book IS is a great resource and a great way to systematically learn the language in a brief period of time... step-by-step.

In summation: I strongly recommend this book, but it's not gonna work for everyone.

(If you're gonna buy this book, I urge you to also buy Kodansha's Kanji Learner's Dictionary, Kodansha's Dictionary of Japanese Particles, and a good J-E dict [I'd recommend Random House's J-E/E-J dictionary or Kodansha's Furigana J/E-E/J dictionary; the latter being strongly preferable.])

I had been gradually absorbing japanese for a few years from such sources as anime, and old samurai films. Six months ago, I decided to take the plunge and devote some time to learning Japanese, so I picked up this book. I was immediately impressed with the organization, and lucidity of the material.
Before, I was totally mystified by the Kanji. I thought I'd never be able to understand " all of that crazy chickenscratch", as I sometimes (jokingly) put it. I tought that I could get by understanding the Kana, or maybe just the Romaji. I was totally put off by the different readings of the Kanji. Now, I understand more kanji than kana (granted, I'm still pretty much the equivalent of a slow-witted japanese kindergartener). This book erased most of my initial apprehension over the subject.
The grammatical structure is handled, in my opinion, in the proper way. For the first few chapters, the reader is presented with a somewhat simplistic view, which must be learned by rote. As the reader progresses in the book, some of the earlier schemas are expanded, and elaborated, leaving the reader with an ever increasingly profound grasp on the language. The presentation and progression is in a logical order, allowing those with a scientist's (like me) or engineer's brain quick access to the language.
This is, of course, not to say that one can attain a complete mastery of the language by reading this one book. As I alluded in the title of this review, this is merely a good first step. It never pretends to be anything more. If one studies from this book with discipline and diligence, one should not have trouble making oneself understood in japanese.

As a number of people have already noted that this is more an adjunct to a "regular" Japanese language text than a text in its own right, so I won't dwell on that point. Suffice to say that using this book along with another text will give a "heads up" on what is to come.

This book takes the approach of presenting the skeletal structure of the language and in doing so it covers a lot of material in a short space. I really like this approach as it removes some of the frustration that can arise from having the language revealed slowly over the course of many chapters in a regular text. This can also help to get a better overview by allowing you to see connections that might be a little obscured by the "drip-feed" approach taken by most texts.

However, there are some weaknesses. Firstly, the text could do a lot more to explain the logic of the language. As an example, various uses (though not all) of the "te" form are covered, but there is no explanation of why the te form is used in those cases; there is no explanation of the underlying similarity to all those uses. The only overall explanation of the form is to note that it is sometimes like the present participle in English. It would be so much more helpful to note the similarities between the "te" form and "de" (which had been covered in a previous chapter). In virtually every section of the book there are similar insights that could have been given.

Secondly, there is some inconsistency with the presentation of kanji and kana. Now, I'm not a "romaaji-phobe" like many people these days, but having been given the impression that kanji and kana will be used throughout, it is a let down to find some items rendered only in romaaji.

Finally, the later parts of the book have a rushed feel to them, one gets the impression that it may have been cropped to meet space restrictions.

In short it is a very worthy, but not quite perfect attempt at an outline of the language. I would love to see an updated version that addressed some of the points above, as well as one or two errors and questionable generalisations- in two volumes if neccesary. With a little more work it could be a classic work.