Japanese Grammar

Its hard not to forget certain lessons because the explinations are so simpl and spaced out very well! Only issue is that I wish it was longer :(

This book covers the nuts, bolts, and gears of all the moving parts of Japanese language. It's a little book with a powerful punch. Easy to read through from cover to cover before going back to zone in on particular topics. It's well organized and the type/font is perfect and it's printed in two colors for easy reference. This book is not intended to teach you to read and write the language; it's designed to teach you the mechanics of grammar. Besides my dictionary, reading and writing books, and emmersion CD's, this book is a key tool that I'll refer to again and again. *****

In most cities Japanese lessons are hard to come by. I live in Shreveport, LA, and not one college in a city of over 150,000 people offers a Japanese class. That being such, if you want to learn Japanese the odds are high you'll have to go it alone. This was the first book I bought. While not offering the Japanese scripts in much detail (which are necessary if you ever want to write in Japanese), this book covers pretty much everything you need to know. From essential vocabulary to verb usage to particles, Barron really did come through again. Now that I'm an intermediate-level Japanese student, I find it a good resource, and when I was first learning it was incalcluably necessary. This book, while small, is like a miniature Japanese textbook. It runs through all the important nuances of the language that are so strange to us and puts it in a cut and dry format that nearly anyone can comprehend. Granted, grammar is boring; few people can stand to look at a page stating grammar rules, much less apprehend the knowledge because of their boredom. But this book is a good resource, even if it isn't a page-turner. At worst, you lose seven dollars. At best, you jumpstart your knowledge of the Japanese language and begin speaking. It's up to you.

Considering this book is over 240 pages long despite it's small size, and does a very nice job with the grammar, and is only 7 bucks to boot, it's a pretty good deal. It's small size makes it very portable and it would practically fit in your pocket.The author includes separate chapters on all the parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on, and most of the book is taken up by those aspects of the grammar.At the back of the book there is a Special Topics section. These include chapters or sections on Numbers, Telling Time, Classifiers, Days, Months, Seasons, and the Weather, Family Relationships, Useful Phrases, Borrowed Words (mainly from Chinese), Synonyms, Antonyms, Short and Long Vowels, Double Consonants, Same Pronunciation but Different Meaning (for 25 words), Different Pitch, Different Meaning (for 16 words), and a 250-word vocabulary list at the very back.The beginning of the book has chapters on pronunciation and phonetics, word order, and the Japanese writing system. The font is color-coded for certain things, which some people may find easier on the eye. I sort of wish language books, like the 501 Verbs books that are so well-known, wouldn't do this, but it's probably okay for most people.Japanese has one great advantage over the typical Indo-European language in that it has almost 100% regular verbs. There are only two that are irregular. (Turkish is one of the few languages I've seen with no irregular verbs). It lacks many of the tenses European and other languages have, and it lacks a true future tense. There is no case system such as in German, Russian, Latin, and Greek. However, it makes up for that in the complexity of its modal verbs or mood constructions, which signify conditionality, probability, unrcentainty, or the attitude of the speaker toward the subject. And the particle system, which serves diverse functions, from modifying the meanings of verbs to marking the subject or topic of a sentence, is also something very foreign to Indo-European language speakers, and is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the language.Another odd aspect of Japanese that is very different from most languages is that adjectives actually belong to verbs rather than nouns and are inflected to agree with them. A small grammar like this can't give you everything you need to know about these topics, but this little grammar is still a nice, compact resource, and as I said, the price is right. I you get a book on the particle system, such as A Dictionary of Japanese Particles, by Sue A. Kawashima, which treats 100 of the most important particles, you should be in pretty good shape.

This is an outstanding primer on Japanese grammar. Its small size makes it easy to tote around in a coat pocket. The explanations are very clear, and you can easily get a "macro view" of any area of Japanese grammar.

Trying to make sense of complex Japanese Grammar? Then this is the book for you, small, compact and covers anything an intermediate student might want to know about grammar!