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A Note on the Hiragana/Katakana Edition: The phonetic renderings in this book are entirely in hiragana and katakana. (A subsequent edition is planned with romaji entries in the place of the kana script.)
From the Author
A good command of Japanese vocabulary yields practical benefits each time that you use the language. This book is not intended to function as a dictionary, but rather as a tool for active study to prepare for specific situations. Suppose that you are going to a party tomorrow night and you have heard that a number of computer types will be in attendance. Spend a half hour or so in the section of this book entitled "Computers and the Internet," and you will know the proper Japanese words for "bandwidth," "spreadsheet software" and "cable modem." Or perhaps you will be having lunch with a person who works at a publishing company. If so, there is a section in this book that will give you the words for "weekly magazine," "index," "news conference," etc.
This is an excellent reference book with one flaw that makes it hard to use. First, the good stuff.
1. This book provides useful sets of related words grouped by topic. For example, one of the topics is relationship terms (my mother, my father, other people's mothers and fathers, etc.). This organization is useful because if you are speaking about a topic, you probably need to know a number of related terms.
2. Both the kanji and the kana versions of each Japanese word are included. This means you have to be able to at least read hiragana/katakana, but today's students of Japanese are expected to learn those anyway. I consider this a plus.
3. The typeface is nice and clear and readable.
Now the big drawback: The sections are randomly organized instead of being organized alphabetically, and there are a lot of them, so it takes a while to find the topic you are interested in. For example, to find the section on Colors, you have to read through the several pages of topics in the table of contents to find the Colors section, which falls toward the end of the book. If the sections were arranged alphabetically, this work would be much better.
Overall, it is a useful addition to my growing collection of Japanese books.
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21 of 22 people found the following review helpful
Note first of all that pronunciations for the words in this guide are in kana and not romaji.
The range of topics is vast. There are internet terms, historical and cultural terms, and the most thorough section on colors that I have seen anywhere.
I also liked the section on Japanese prefixes and suffixes, as most standard vocabulary guides don't cover these. (Most publishers seem to want you to buy another book to get this information.)
The type and the layout also make the book easy to use.
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17 of 18 people found the following review helpful
This is another reminder that students of Japanese have it pretty easy these days - there is enough supplemental material to keep us busy for hours, to put into immediate use.
this is a slim book, but if you know you're going to the Hiroshima museum, for example, you study the section on "Military" and "Weapons". If you're meeting at a shrine, spend some time with the section on "religion". Vocabulary galore - but none of it overwhelming.
File this little book under 'secret weapon'. It's really that good.
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This is quite a nice book for working vocabulary. Has many modern words that would make it troublesome to find separately in a dictionary. The layout and design of the book is nice and its size is almost a pocket book, making it nice to carry along when you are doing other things apart from studying japanese. For travellers it may also be a good option, but a more tourist oriented dictionary may be more useful. Good for those who appreciate japanese culture.
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This book consists of vocabulary lists for various topics. While I think this book is very good for what it is, it could be made better (perhaps in a subsequent edition)
Each vocabulary list should be made more complete. Some lists are missing really basic terms. For example, in the "Law" section, words like "judge", "statute", "case law" are missing. In the "Crime and Punishment" section, "jail", "prison", and "incarceration" are not included. In the section "Dermatology", common words like "sunburn" and "acne" are missing. In the "Dentistry" section, words like "cavity", "crown", "filling", "to brush one's teeth", etc. are missing. In the section "Parts of the Automobile", basic words like "transmission", "glove compartment", "turn signal", etc. are missing. There are many more examples of really basic terms that you think should be there, but are not. (At the same time, in some other sections it's the opposite: There are really specific terms that you are surprised to see.) So, the vocabulary lists here are not definitive, but more a point of departure for further study. This book could be made really great by adding more terms to each list, and then logically grouping words within each list.
The organization of the book itself could be improved. Most topics seem to be arranged in a kind of intuitive systematic way. But at other times, related topics are scattered around in different parts of the book. For example, the section "Government" is on page 36, while seemingly related sections like "Law", "Local Government", "Politics", etc. occur much later starting on page 111. The table of contents iteself could be better arranged/presented, too. The book as it is arranges the topics in quirky way - sometimes they are logically arranged, sometimes randomly.Read more ›
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