Customer Reviews

How to Tell the Difference between Japanese Particles: Comparisons and Exercises

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

 

 

"I sat at the chair." "I went on school today." That is probably what most of us sound like when we start really speaking Japanese, merrily swapping around all those cute little "ni"s, "wa"s, "de"s and "ga"s. It gets even worse at an upper level when the mysterious "hodo"s and "kana"s start rearing their ugly heads. Particles are one of the most confusing aspects of Japanese, and one of the biggest road blocks to conversational fluency.

Every student of Japanese could use "How to Tell the Difference Between Japanese Particles." It is a practical, concise little book that contains a wealth of information. Unlike Naoko Chino's previous particle book, "All About Particles," this volume contains practice exercises and demonstrations of the most common mistakes of Japanese particles. It is more of a workbook, that should be followed from start to finish.

Chino takes several similar but confusing particles, such as "particles indicating time" or "particles used for comparison," then highlights the different usages of each particle, along with demonstration sentences in both English, kana and romaji. Like all good Japanese books, the emphasis is on the kana, with the romaji and English doing support work. After each chapter, there are several quizzes to test your new knowledge. The book closes with an overall test on the entire book.

The comparative nature of this book, along with the repeated quizzes, make "How to Tell the Difference Between Japanese Particles" one of the most useful Japanese study guides that I own. It serves a niche purpose, but a very useful and necessary one.

This book does a superb job teaching the difference between closely related particles, allowing students to grasp subtle distinctions in meaning and usage.
Chino has written an excellent book - the text is very clear and concise, well organized, and illustrates each point with great examples. Students can study the particles by reading through the book and then reinforcing what they've learned by taking the quizzes at the end of each chapter. Afterwards you can continue to use the book as a handy reference guide.
The book probably isn't suitable for beginner level, as the example sentences are too difficult and many of these particles are beyond the scope of beginners. But intermediate and advanced students will definitely benefit. In the blurb, the author promises to quickly give students a knowledge of the particles that would normally take years speaking Japanese to acquire, and this is no exaggeration.
I strongly recommend this book as a great way to quickly pump up your Japanese grammar.

This book is absolutely fantastic and critical for students of Japanese--from beginners, who are just learning about particles, to advanced students, who should brush up on particles and learn as much as they can about them. This book can't even compare with dictionary definitions--it goes much further beyond that! Instead of giving flat out definitions and making groups of particles all sound the same, it gives examples and restrictions of when and how to use the particles.

There are also quizzes at the end of each section and a main test at the end of the book. These are very useful, and it gives you more motivation to take notes in the book.

The author groups the particles into sections--the first one dealing with particles about time. This is very smart, considering that some particles--if spaced out throughout the book too far--could become confusing with one another. Although, please note, that some particles found in much later chapters are much more common than some found in the first chapter.

Kudos to Naoko Chino. Kudos.

I like how she grouped the particles. It definitely makes comparing and contrasting them a lot easier. My only complaint is that you need to have a wide vocabulary to make the quizzes worth your while. If I can't understand most of the words in each sentence, how am I supposed to know which particle to use? Constantly having to look up words is more than a little annoying. (This is mostly due to the sentences being geared more towards business people, thus using a lot of terms that you don't hear in everyday speech.) Other than that, this is a great book just for the concise descriptions of how to use each particle in what situation.

I was expecting too much of this book. I thought I would get a detail difference between similar particles. Isn't that why we purchase this book at the first place. But the explanation is so short. And really not clear enough to understand completely the particle. It's good that it has Exercises. But, I'd rather have more detail and examples of the comparison particles.

Get another particle book if you're expecting to mastered the difference between particles. I don't recommend this one.

I first checked out the author's All About Particles: A Handbook of Japanese Function Words (Power Japanese Series) (Kodansha's Children's Classics). I didn't like that book.

This new book by the same author basically covers the same ground, some 50-60 particles. However, it organised by topics instead of alphabetically. That makes the understanding and learning so much easier.

I just read one of the other reviews where somebody said that they are having to look up a lot of words in the sentences. Every sentence in this book is translated so I'm not sure why somebody would have to look words up. When I ran across words that I didn't know, I just looked at the translated English sentence. But I totally agree with that reviewer that it would be unpleasant to use this book if you have a very small Japanese vocabulary.

There are some very careless mistakes in the quiz answers in Chapter 13, which could screw you up pretty bad if your intuitive grasp of the grammar isn't good enough to recognize that the book is mistaken. I watch a lot of Japanese drama so I am starting to know what would be right and wrong in Japanese. I asked some Japanese experts and they confirmed that I am correct and that the book has mistakes.

I was sort of mad about the mistakes and even more mad that after I wrote the publishers about the mistakes they didn't even bother to respond to me. This book is supposed to be teaching me particles and if the answers are wrong then it is going to misdirect my learning. I thought the book was supposed to catch my mistakes not vice versa.

I will type out the mistakes so that you can see for yourself if the book is wrong or not. You are supposed to choose the correct particle and place it in the empty space.

Question:

Toshokan ( ) Chuugoku-go ( ) shinbun ( ) arimasu.

1. no 2. ga 3. ni

Answer:

2, 3, 1.

So this book is saying the correct placement of the particles would make this sentence: Toshokan ga Chuugoku-go ni shinbun no arimasu.

Ok. That sentence makes NO sense whatsoever. If anyone cares to know what it should say, I am 99 percent sure that the correct sentence would be, 'Toshokan ni Chuugoku-go no shinbun ga arimasu.' Translation: There is/are Chinese language newspapers in the library.

And quiz question 5 in the same chapter has a big mistake in it also because it has four spaces where a particle is required but then it lists three particles as the answer.

Question:

Watashi ( ) ie ( ) chikaku ( ), ku ( ) kouen ga arimasu.

1. ni 2. no

Answer:

2, 1, 2.

I believe the answer should be 'Watashi no ie no chikaku ni, ku no kouen ga arimasu." That would be 2,2,1,2. Translation: Near to my house, there is a neighborhood park.

Uh, can the incompetent people who typed or edited this book count? Four blank spaces but three answers....These mistakes are so outrageous that I am giving the book 1 star. Anyone who bought this book and diligently studied from it deserves an apology from the publisher. I wonder how many other mistakes are in it.

As a grammar reference, this book is good. As a workbook, just ok. I like it that all of the Japanese text is presented in both kanji/kana and romaji because it means I don't have to look up kanji that I don't know. This book has taken the approach of giving the learner the main rule for each particle in a given situation.

The book seems to maybe be geared toward working adults. Many of the example sentences use words like 'business meeting,' 'project,' 'business trip,' 'supervisor,' etc.

The general test in the back of the book and the quizzes after each chapter are very easy. But that might be because I watch a lot of Japanese movies so I am beginning to have an intuitive understanding of what particles to use when even though I have never formally studied particles. I think the quiz questions are shallow in their scope. I began by taking the General Quiz in the end of the book without having read any of the book yet. I did that so that at the end of the book I can have an idea of how much I learned from the book versus how much I already knew. I got a 70 percent on the General Quiz before reading anything in the book. I think the General Quiz was watered down. Perhaps it was made to be very easy (a lot of the answer choices were very obvious) so that, due to receiving a good score, anyone finishing the book would believe they learned a lot from the book. Perhaps I am a cynic but for what other reason would the final test be so easy? I also had a score of 80 percent on the first quiz of the book when I pretested myself without reading any of the book. There is no way I should be doing that well on any test of Japanese particles before studying them.

But this book does make for pretty painless learning. So far it has only taken me about 30 minutes to read each chapter and less than 15 minutes to complete the chapter quizzes. The general quiz is longer. There are 19 chapters in the book so I think you could finish this book in two weeks if you spend an hour studying it everyday. I went through half of the book the first week by spending about an hour studying from it each day.

I liked this book okay but I am put out by the mistakes in the answer key as well as by the publisher's failure to respond to my email to them about the mistakes. I do like "The Japanese Particle Workbook," by Taeko Kamiya better. I have a review of that book, too.

By the way, what is with these complete wanks that will tag your review that 'it wasn't helpful.' Uh, hello, it is obvious that they are just doing that because they don't like my opinion. I leave pretty thorough reviews so I don't see how I am not helpful. Whether you agree with me or not is another matter. What is this? A popularity contest? Hmmm, I guess they are not voting for me for prom queen, either? Well, good, then I won't have to go Carrie on them. Hey, Stephen King, if you are reading this--that was a hell of a book...Where did you get the idea for the creepy prayer closet? Brilliant. I've been in a gypsy fortune teller's house--no kidding, they actually had a frigging little prayer closet in there. But there was no red-eyed little Jesus in there.