Customer Reviews

The Structure of the Japanese Language (Current Studies in Linguistics)

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

 

 

This book is not for the novice and will not teach you the "Structure of the Japanese Language", irrespective of what the title says. This book is written for people who have a solid(at least level 3) understanding of Japanese and a basic background in linguistics. This requirement includes fluency with the language and deep knowledge of the grammar. The author covers grammatical points that tend to cause problems for the non-native speaker. This book is more for learning how NOT to use certain grammatical forms, and for understanding why certain sentences, phrases would be considered awkward or just plain wrong by a native Japanese speaker. Until you have a strong mental repository of positive examples of Japanese grammar against which you can compare, this book is of extremely limited use.

The book itself is well written and may prove useful for non-natives of Japan who are fluent in the written and spoken language but would like to improve by learning certain concepts. For a real book on the structure of the Japanese Language check out Alfonso Anthony's Japanese Language Patterns(JLP). The Anthony book starts for ground zero and just works out more complex and elaborated sentence structures. FYI, the editions I've seen of JLP are all in romazi.

To start with, this is from the perspective of a person learning to speak/understand/read/write Japanese, not a linguist.

This book is NOT for learning the basics of the language, but seems appropriate for someone of approximately at approximately JLPT3-level. Users of Jordan/Noda's JSL program will appreciate the depth of the grammatical notes; users of programs such as Genki who may have been looking for slightly more technical coverage of grammatical points will appreciate this book as well. In some ways, this is like a more in-depth version of those "understanding japanese particles" books, or perhaps like picking a few chapters out of the "Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar" and going into each one in more depth.

I did not find the book immediately applicable to my Japanese study in the sense adding new structure or particle usage to my daily usage. Instead, when I came across sentences that were described as "non-grammatical" or "unnatural", I found that thinking back to the book would resolve some of my curiosity about "why" it was non-grammatical/unnatural. One thing the book does very well is explain that certain Japanese grammatical constructions are no more strange than their English equivalents, the examples of convoluted (but technically legal) English are marvelous foils for the explaining similar points in Japanese.

One complaint others might have is that the book occasionally spends too much time talking about the minutia of English, as opposed to Japanese. While true, this is relevant to the book's primary audience (linguists), and I do not believe this is enough of a detriment to reduce it from a 5 star rating.