A Guide to Japanese Grammar: A Japanese approach to learning Japanese grammar

by Mr Tae K Kim (Author)

583 ratings

ISBN-13: 978-1495238963

ISBN-10: 1495238962

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NOTE: The website (www.guidetojapanese.org) has the SAME content for free. This book is for those who prefer to have a physical copy. My guide to Japanese grammar has been helping people learn Japanese as it's really spoken in Japan for many years. If you find yourself frustrated that you can't understand Japanese movies or books despite having taken Japanese classes, then this book is for you. It will help you finally understand those pesky particles and break down grammatical concepts that will allow you to comprehend anything from simple to very complex sentences. You will also learn Japanese that's spoken by real people including casual speech patterns and slang, stuff that's often left out in most textbooks. Don't take my word for it, just check out my website and order this book to have it handy wherever you go.

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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 0.68 x 10 inches

Best Sellers Rank: #76,747 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
- #21 in Japanese Language Instruction (Books)

Customer Reviews:
583 ratings

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Mr Tae K Kim

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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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L.Hart

Blue book

Reviewed in the United States on April 22, 2014

Verified Purchase

I purchased the blue book version, printed in 2014, and it is smaller than the orange one (2012). It is easy to carry around in my purse around Tokyo. I've been studying using this textbook in Tokyo parks, restaurants, coffee shops, on the densha (JR train), while walking....

It has a wax-like coated cover (which is great given that Japan rains a lot) and gives it a nice, soft feel on the hands. I just wish there was a kindle formatted version too. Please, Mr. Kim, onegaishimasu.

Personally, my core set for learning Japanese, the cream-of-the-crop best items, is as follows:

1. Genki I and II, including the workbooks, 2nd edition - the textbook for UCLA Japanese classes. Absolute gem of a book. This is your go-to "traditional" textbook.

2. Heisig's Remembering the Kanji - Remember 2000 kanji in 2 months? Yes. It's amazing.

3. Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar (my cliff notes) - Great refresher for stuff you learned. This book is like the golden notebook that you stole from that A+ student in your college Japanese class.

4. "Japanese" app by Renzo Inc. from the Apple Store. Includes wwwjdic dictionary, all conjugations for every word (volitional, transitive, past, present, polite form, etc.) , a built in flashcard builder, kanji stroke order videos for all kanji, and more from this sweet app. Absolute must purchase. This is like a super-dictionary. Don't have an iPhone? Buy an iPod Touch 5th gen. and get this app. It is worth buying an iPod Touch just for this app.
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Optional study supplementals which are great for learning Japanese:
s1. White Rabbit Press - Kanji Flashcards 1, 2, 3 - best Japanese flashcards around with all the Joyou Kanji.
s2. NihonShock's Cheat Sheet Pack - 10 laminated colorful notes of all the vital Japanese grammar
s3. Anki - a flashcard program that lets you download shared cards created by other users & allows you to make your own flashcards on the computer.

331 people found this helpful

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brian wideman

Tai Kim or Genki?

Reviewed in the United States on May 4, 2020

Verified Purchase

Tai Kim reduces all grammatical explanations to the most informal. He leads off with da for State of Being : Kore wa hon da. In increasing order of formality, one could use de aru, desu, or de arimasu. For a question, he just uses intonation: Kore was hon? For verbs, he uses the infinitive form, taberu, not tabemasu.

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.

23 people found this helpful

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L0RD_BUG

Questionable Authority with Significant Problems.

Reviewed in the United States on June 27, 2021

Verified Purchase

I'm approaching the N4 level right now, so this was not my intro to Japanese and I could understand this text because of that, but after spending time with Japanese teachers in my school and with other textbooks, I also found myself actively questioning the authority of much of the text. I'm unsure if it's just carelessness in translation or if the author doesn't k or the two languages we'll enough to get into the nuance.

I think the most important thing to understand about this text is that's it's written by a Korean who offers no bio or explanation for why they are an authority in Japanese. It's not even clear how well Tae Kim speaks English, for that matter. This shows in ways such as how Tae Kim says that "the literal translation" of x is y when is clearly is not the LITERAL translation, and Tae Kim often undermines themselves when they proceed to "literally" translate two examples using different particles (はand が being the most common) the same way. The author's translations frequently give the wrong idea of what Japanese people are trying to say with their sentences. "勉強はした" does not mean "About study,did it," it just means "study did" or "did study." And, again, Kim is translating the は and が particles the same way. This is on top of a relatively superficial exploration of the particles, themselves, such that I don't see this helping new learners.

The author also insists on using informal speech first, but they conceded that one book can't teach everything. What Kim fails to see is that if students need to consult other resources, such as youtube, that most or all of these resources use the formal tense. Not only that, but a lot of Japanese Twitter accounts, YouTube channels, and such use formal tense anyway, so the idea that informal speech doesn't allow for immersion is frankly an outdated idea. Learning the informal た form is also easier after learning the て form anyway, I think.

The table of contents don't allow for reference easily. The adjectives entry in the table of contents, for example, is missing many of the rules for adjectives because it takes place early on, so for quick reference as had to handwrite the other conjugation rules, etc. In and page numbers.

Some of the vocab is ridiculous. Very early on Kim has readers learning the words for "to verbally abuse," "to knead," "to feel depressed," "to be resurrected," and "to turn over"--all with the kanji first! In fact all of those words are given on the same page. They're the second set of verbs given. Why on earth they come before more essential words I have no clue.

The rest of my criticism is mostly with carelessness. When conjugating verbs, for example, Kim runs into the 来る translating from くる to きた (that's ku-ru to ki-ta, as in the kanji, itself, changes pronounciation) without actually talking about the Kanji pronunciation change, which is really easy to miss and could be confusing to learners who've adapted to Kim's way of looking at kanji early on (this is in fact the first example in the book of a kanji having two pronunciations, but Kim doesn't talk about it)

Final words, you can tell that this "book" is a cut-and-paste of a web blog. It lacks the introspection given to proper textbooks when authors try to introduce a complex topic. It's a money-grab, and I don't trust the good review to this one.

I've used Genki, みんなの日本語, Japanese from Zero, among others, and I recommend them all over this one.

12 people found this helpful

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Top reviews from other countries

PrincessChooChoo

Just press Print

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 15, 2014

Verified Purchase

While I have found Tae Kim's website to be an excellent resource for learning Japanese, I was nonetheless rather disappointed with this book. Almost no effort has been made to adapt the online material to the rather different medium of the printed textbook.

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.

44 people found this helpful

Candle Owl

A must buy

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 8, 2020

Verified Purchase

I read the user review "Just press Print" here and was cautious about buying this, but for a reasonable price I could continue reading this offline. I felt that I wanted to make notes and flick back and forth, and having a physical copy would help me with this. I haven't been disappointed with my purchase, and I haven't found the issue where one word is left on a page like the previous review suggested, so maybe they have given the book a bit more love since then. There isn't an index but there's a contents page and everything is organised and labelled well. I just remove one star because the quality of the Amazon printed books (CreateSpace) is of sub-par build quality; the cover feels a bit cheap and the pages are a bit wavy, but the quality of the printed text is good. It's larger and thicker than I thought it would be, and is filled with excellent material. A must have for any Japanese language learner.

It's a good read, however...

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on September 22, 2019

Verified Purchase

When I reached page 30 in the book, I noticed that under the section of a 'Typical casual greeting' on page 30, there was a sentence that mentioned the way that men would use 'da'. There was no mention of how a woman would use 'desu'. Luckily, I have prior knowledge to this and know that I would have to use 'desu' as a woman. However, female readers would either: be expected to know or have to put in the extra effort into searching or, worse still, go to Japan and be viewed as rude/ learned Japanese 'wrong'. I know there is that tourists can be accepted when they make mistakes in Japan, but if you really want to learm correctly, either search or buy more books - that's how I learned.

If Tae Kim were to edit this book, this is something to hugely consider.

A Guide To Japanese Grammar by Tae Kim is a great book and I recommend it otherwise, just, if you're a woman and want to be able to communicate in Japan, you're going to have to do some research into how you would have to say things, as it is different.

3 people found this helpful

HD peter

A valued Purchase

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on June 7, 2019

Verified Purchase

So you have learnt ひらがな and カタカナ now grammar this is something I still to date and may always struggle with. As this is not a work book you can just pick this up give it a read like any other book or take notes, this will help you.

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 😒

2 people found this helpful

Nollwark

A revolutionary new way to learn Japanese.

Reviewed in the United Kingdom on October 14, 2013

Verified Purchase

This book teaches you Japanese by - well - teaching you Japanese!
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)

8 people found this helpful

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