Customer Reviews

Modern Japanese Vocabulary: A Guide for 21st Century Students, Hiragana/Katakana Edition (Japanese Edition)

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

 

 

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. Some related topics are kept together, others are not. The table of contents could be re-formatted to make it more useful - e.g., the contents could be visually divided into discrete groups of related topics.

Also, it would be nice to have the list of Sino-Japanese compound kanji -suru verbs, the prefix/suffix section, the homonyms section, and the "Vocabulary Associated with Some Major Kanji" section be made more extensive.

Don't get me wrong - of the vocabulary list books I've seen, this is my favorite. It has a kind of interesting quirkyness, and fits a lot of useful information into a small space, and mostly arranges it pretty well. But, it could be made better.

If you're like me, and remember things in contexts, then this might be helpful to you as well. This is the thing that I liked most about this vocabulary source book. The vocab is organized into topics. Also the words are about more modern sorts of things. My classic example is "parts of a car". I never got the chance when I was living in Japan to operate a car, so I didn't know the words for "steering wheel", "turn signal" etc., but always wondered. I also didn't hear Japanese well enough to watch the news on TV, so there are words dealing with government, finance and weather reports that I never learned.

I bought this book for review purposes and to branch out my vocabulary a bit, but I've been very disappointed to find numerous typos and errors in both English and Japanese. Now I always have to check words against another Japanese dictionary to be sure the ones in this book are correct. If you already know a fair amount of Japanese and kanji, it's pretty easy to catch the errors, but if you're a newer student trusting this text implicitly, then proceed with extreme caution.