Customer Reviews

Jazz Up Your Japanese with Onomatopoeia: For All Levels

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This is really a very good supplement to more traditional studies. The onomatopoeia here I have used with native Japanese speakers and all are understood and expressive.

I study Japanese to talk to my peers, to go out drinking, to watch and understand television, to tell jokes and offer conjecture. I don't study the language in order to make hotel reservations or constantly conjugate in an unnaturally polite fashion. Likewise, I spend time in Osaka and Nara, where people say "okini" and "nanbo", so the occasional kansai-ben is welcome.

Just this week I memorized casual sentances like "You don't look so hot", "When I got up this morning i felt a little woozy", "yeah, it's the pits all right" and "It's not like I drank too much last night - maybe I'm getting old". Do these really NOT sound useful? Do you never hear this sort of language in English?

These dialogues are AUTHENTICALLY casual, and they alternate between male and female. As a supplement that absolutely ROCKS - after all, 99% of Japanese-language learning material is polite and contrived... great for learning grammar and basic structure, but once you get to Japan you realize you can't understand anyone.

I was in New York and I used the phrase "shimijimi" with a Japanese woman and she smiled and asked - "How do know THAT? I don't even know how to say that in English." The sentence I used translated as "I was getting a little sentimental..."

This is a SUPPLEMENT, not a textbook, and a fairly advanced one, but emminently usable. It takes work to memorize and put into practice, but when I used 'berobero' and 'gongon' in conversations my friends unanimously agreed that Japanese folks use these phrases all the time. What else could you want?

this book was previously published as "Flip, Slither and Bang", which was a physically smaller edition, easier just to drop in a pocket. I would recommend this if you plan on hanging out in Japan, spending time with friends - it might be too much if you just need ask where the bathroom is.

Originally published by Kodansha as Flip, Slither and Bang: Japanese Sound and Action Words as part of their Power Japanese series, this volume has undergone a makeover for the 21st century. Fukuda has added a useful overview introduction, and revision quizzes, both of which should help key Japanese onomatopoeia stick in your head.

And there's a lot to remember. While Japanese has appropriated Chinese script for most of its conceptual words, and promiscuously borrowed from English and other languages for more recent phenomena such as computers, it can be proud of the homegrown nature of its pervasive onomatopoeia - not to mention their expressive `punch'. While in English, such words are often associated with animal noises and children's tales, Japanese uses onomatopoeia widely, in anything from literature to everyday adult conversations, and to express everything from a simple sound to a complex emotional state. What English often uses metaphor to express, Japanese gets across with onomatopoeia. Wanwan may indeed be the sound of a Japanese doggy, but mukamuka means seriously cheesed off, gennari means worn out, and sesseto means as regular as clockwork. Adult enough for you?

Fukuda's introduction helps the learner contextualise the different forms and uses of Japanese onomatopoeia. This, along with an overall book structure based around situational dialogues, creates a fairly structured learning approach. As usual with a book focusing on one aspect of language, there is the temptation to pack in as many target expressions as possible until the dialogues become a bit buyobuyo (bloated). But apart from this, the language is very natural (in fact, `too' natural for the beginner, who should first be learning standard Japanese verb forms, for instance). The dialogues are followed by clear explanations of the target onomatopoeia and example sentences. All text is provided in original Japanese (with furigana readings) plus an English translation, while the dialogues also come in a romanised form for the less able reader. Helpful cultural notes are also scattered throughout the text.

The quizzes at the end of each section review the onomatopoeia, and the handy indexes allow you to find both Japanese and English definitions, so you can locate a particular expression you've heard in Japanese, or find an equivalent for the English concept you want to get across, independently of the dialogue contexts. Note though that this book is not a substitute for a dictionary of onomatopoeia, as it chooses to be selectively detailed rather than comprehensive.

Jazz Up Your Japanese with Onomatopoeia is subtitled For All Levels, which I think is a little ambitious, as much of the material would be overwhelming for neophytes. But this very density of information is a boon for the more advanced student. It will reward close study by significantly enhancing your knowledge of an underemphasised aspect of Japanese language that in many ways embodies the Japanese mindset.

This book claims to be "For all levels," which in my opinion it isn't. It also claims to be a book on Japanese onomatopoeia.

The Japanese sentences are in my opinion way too hard to a beginning student, so if your Japanese is still very basic it is of limited usefulness.

50% of the dialogue in chapter 2 is in kansai dialect, which i find a bit tedious. If i wanted to learn kansai-ben I'd buy a book on it (infact i'm planning to).

The biggest annoyance however is the inclusion of romaji, which is near universal in books on Japanese-language. (but 2 wrongs doesn't make 1 right so i allow myself to complain about this too). Each dialogue is first presented in Japanese script with furigana, then a romaji version, and then English. If there'd been no romaji version in between I wouldn't have had to keep flipping pages all the time to get to the English translation. It's a matter of course that people who don't even know kana can't possibly benefit much from this book. (assuming they're as new to speaking and listening as they are to writing and reading.)

That's it for the negative stuff. Anyhow, I do strongly recommend this book to intermediate students of Japanese who're looking to improve both their understanding of the nature of Japanese onomatopoeia, and their vocabulary. I would've given it 5 stars had it not been for the ulcer-inducing romanization, the somewhat lack of focus at times, etc.

One of the more difficult aspects of the Japanese language for me has been learning the often confusing and ambiguous onomatopoeia that are essential to everyday conversation. This book compiles together many of the most common, and presents them in dialogues centered on amusing and memorable scenarios. The introduction of the book also gives an excellent description and analysis of the nature of Japanese onomatopoeia. Highly recommended.

Ivan Rorick

This book can be useful for learning onomatopoeia words but you can quite easily find them in a good dictionary.

The big problem with this book is its simply takes the Japanese language and tries to conjure up a sentence so complex that its just boderline stupid. The realtiy is that no japanese person I have ever met talks in such a ridiculous manner and you'll simply make yourself look stupid talking like this.

For example a sentence like; "my wife always bawls me out because I'm no good at pinching pennies"

seriously, who talks like that in real life? Nobody. This book could have given examples that made use of the onomatopoeia's without making the sentence sound so ridiculously silly and over the top.

Unless you're an experienced student with a desire to conjure up the most silly and ridiculous sounding sentences imaginable you'd be best to avoid this book