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A Guide to Japanese Grammar: A Japanese approach to learning Japanese grammar
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- ISBN-101495238962
- ISBN-13978-1495238963
- Publication dateJanuary 23, 2014
- LanguageEnglish
- Dimensions7 x 0.8 x 10 inches
- Print length300 pages
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Product details
- Publisher : CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform (January 23, 2014)
- Language : English
- Paperback : 300 pages
- ISBN-10 : 1495238962
- ISBN-13 : 978-1495238963
- Item Weight : 1.2 pounds
- Dimensions : 7 x 0.8 x 10 inches
- Best Sellers Rank: #37,339 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- Customer Reviews:
About the author

Tae Kim started learning Japanese in college and ended the first year very confused and only able to use the polite form. Eventually, he figured out how to talk like a real person and started a website for learning Japanese (www.guidetojapanese.org) to explain everything he had to figure out on his own.
Since then, he has worked at a big Japanese company in Japan as a Java developer, passed the JLPT level 1, got a perfect score in TOEIC (the Japanese company administered it every year) , and continues to work on his next book for learning Japanese in his spare time.
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Reviewed in the United States on January 9, 2018
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Top reviews from the United States
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After I have completed this book, I can tell the most important reason why I recommend it.
The book shines new lights. For example, usually Te-form is treated as a "separated" conjugation, but the author of this book divides Te-form into smaller elements: the stems of verbs, and the suffixes. Therefore, almost all conjugations could be derived from the more basic units. Once you master what the stems of verbs are, you could easily conjugate verbs to Te-form, Ta-form and so forth. For me, it is much more methodic than treating each conjugation form as a separated one. It is helpful to construct the impression that all conjugations actually have connections, therefor avoid confusions.
Previous thoughts:
I have GENKI books and another Japanese grammar book, but I still bought this one.
As described, the book is a printout for who prefer having a physical one (or dead trees) in hands. It was printed once I placed order, considering the cost of printing and binding and shipping, I think it is dirty cheap and totally disagree someone giving 3 stars because it is “just press” of free content from the author's website, especially the description has already clearly indicated that.
I like the book because it doesn’t have ignoring Roma phonetic notions for whole sentences. I have browsed several Japanese grammar books, and really don’t like their clumsy phonetic notions. If someone even doesn’t want to grasp Hiragana, why bothers to learn grammar?
By the way, in addition to assumption that potential readers have already mastered Hiragana, the author would expect they have know the most common Kanji, at least, learning. Otherwise, you may find it is a kind of challenge to begin with the "Basic Grammar".
The book is organized in a clear structure of "grounding up", I agree it may make more sense than learning simple expressions first. I'm trying to master a language, not just go to Japan and order some dishes in a Japanese restaurant. Well, the GENKI books begin with a scenario of two students meeting each other, and most books teach this way, but I want to change the point of view, as the author stated, to the point of view of Japanese, because many Japanese expressions don't have direct counterparts in English. I also think that introducing masu-form expressions first is wired in other books, I do want to learn dictionary form of verbs first, then advance to conjugations.
Since I have learned some, I mainly take this book as a quick reference easy to shuffle and write down notes, yeah, there are a lot of blank spaces in pages because of layout design. Oh, one more thing, the font size of the book I have suddenly becomes smaller from page 37 (section 3.4 Adjectives). Although I don't care about this issue, I hope the author could modify. And, I prefer to have a wider line space.
Anyway, I really appreciate Tae Kim composed such a useful book.
Tai Kim gives explanations of all the basic grammatical forms with this informal usage. It makes the whole process more simple, concise, and logical. For example, fairly early on he uses verbs in a subordinate clause: Jon ga tabeta gohan oishi? (Was the meal that Jon ate tasty?) This construction requires the informal form.
After Tai Kim finishes the grammatical basis, then he goes on to show how it can be modified with more polite forms. After all, people don’t actually say Kore wa hon da unless they are implying that you must be awfully stupid not to recognize that it is a book. People actually say Kore wa hon desu. And people don’t usually say Asa gohan taberu, rather Asa gohan tabemasu. Tai Kim only goes on to the more polite forms, though, after he has completed a thorough grounding in Japanese grammar.
Genki starts out with desu and tabemasu. It must do this because it must get the students practicing in actual spoken Japanese immediately. It doesn’t have the luxury of giving a complete grammatical summary in the impolite form. This leads to some future complications, where changing back and forth in politeness levels is required, like with the subordinate clause case above.
For self-study or review, I find Tai Kim to be the most logical and easiest to understand. For classroom use, it is wholly inappropriate and Genki is the right choice.
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The typography is relatively low quality; pages often start or end with a single line (widows and orphans), and headers are sometimes at the end page before their content. These problems are relatively simple to fix, so their presence makes me think they hadn't even been considered.
There are also several lines in the book which still assume the text is on a website, asking the reader to "hover" over words to see their pronunciation. I would expect this sort of thing to be caught by even the most basic proof reading.
But perhaps most notably of all, there is no index in this book. On the website, one can simply search for material, but here there is no such option. This is a basic feature I would expect of any textbook, and it's omission here is obvious and detrimental.
Perhaps I'm being unfair. Fixing all these problems properly would take significant effort, and possibly significant investment in the assistance of a publisher. Nonetheless, I feel that I should point out these flaws, so that people understand what they are paying for.
In short: This is a nicely bound print out of Tae Kim's website, and nothing more.

It comes with extra explanations and useful information, why 4 stars because when it teaches new words it's at the end, the lay out is a bit strange. But if you have vocabulary behind your back it's ok.
MUST be able to read ひらがな and カタカナ before you pick up this book. But it's the first thing you need to learn anyway.
I only write this because I see SILLY reviews like can't read it needs more English 😒

Not by teaching you in the "normal" way of grammar and vocabulary so you can translate English into Japanese, but by explaining how Japanese works, and how sentences are constructed.
The possibly frightening thing for beginners is that the writing system is introduced and used in full - Hiragana (for Japanese words), Katakana (for words of foreign origin) and Kanji (the characters of Chinese origin which explain the meaning and origin of all vocabulary) too, right from the beginning.
As someone who learnt Japanese from a combination of books, university (UK) and immersion in the language, and has never properly got on top of Kanji, this book is a wonderful tool to make life easier for anyone wanting to really know and understand Japanese.
Thoroughly recommended!
Noel Howlett
(Currently teaching Beginners Japanese with U3A)
