Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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19 of 19 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This is the best first step ..., December 17, 2002
By A Customer
Wanting to learn japanese I gathered up about ten books, programs and tape studies. After breezing through each I discovered this book was the best first step. Japanese is a very different language from the European languages, so it takes a lot of effort to really come to grips with the sentance structure (which is nearly backwards from English) and pronounciations (more vowels then English). By knuckling down and trying about 30 minutes a day of hardcore memorization i was able to power through a good deal of the book and gather a decent beginner vocab. Fun enough, the title is 'Japanese in 10 minutes a day' but it doesn't apply to anything in the book...there are no 10 minute regiments. You will just have to work through at your pace. The dialogue and vocab is laid out very well so you start with words that can identify things, and things to identify (colors, objects, destinations, food, buildings, etc). Then it branches out into verbs and adjectives. It has a very simple layout that makes the language as easy as possible for beginners. When done you should have about 1000 words under your command and a basic, usable understanding of Japanese sentace structure. The heavier technique of Japanese Language doesn't come through the book- verb conjugation and explainations of the particle words that are so tricky. But this book ramps you up to begin studies in other books and programs that aren't as well laid out, or simple to follow.
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18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Inovative ideas, good book, but won't teach you to speak, April 1, 2003
This book is neat, it has many pictures, and ideas for learning things, like stickers you can put all over your house that label things in japanese, and a number of other exercies (crossword puzzes, short quizzes, etc) that force you to use as you learn. For this it is quite a good book.I don't give it 5 stars because it seriously lacks in teaching actual comprehension. You'll learn a lot of words in this book, but don't expect to learn how to speak or understand natural sentances. There is very little mention of sentance structure or particles.
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12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
This actually works!, October 8, 2001
By A Customer
I needed to learn basic Japanese fast, and by scheduling a lesson a day about a month before my trip to Japan, I was able to complete each lesson in the book (although admittedly, to say it only took 10 minutes a day is a bit of a stretch).The best things about the book are the friendly font and that instructions are written in an engaging, non-academic tone. Often, the lessons substitute one Japanese word for a common English word until you become accustomed to that particular word, even in the middle of a sentence. For instance, "Doko is the bathroom?" ("Where is the bathroom?") There are really handy yellow stickers that you can put on objects in your house and the like to help you remember things, and you can cut out ready-made index cards, which were quite portable and helped me en route to Japan. What's missing from this book are more Hiragana/Katakana/Kanji written clues. Although that might be too much to ask for from a beginning textbook like this, the essentials could be presented so that one could recognize basic signs in the midst of being lost in the Tokyo subway system. Don't buy this, however, thinking you'll be fluent. It's meant to be, and is, a survival tool for travelers.
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