Hugo's Japanese Phrase Book

This book is a great tool to familiarize a western traveler to Japan. Nice comprehensive book, well laid out, good graphics describing a beautiful country.

Having been to Japan a few times, and exposed to the sound of the language, I can very well see how helpful this nice, concise volume is, and how well the phonetics work. It was well thought out regarding the most common and useful words and phrases, the portability, the division of contents. An easy learning guide, and great to pull and peruse on a short train jaunt.

Wonderful pocket-sized reference. The alphabetization of phrases is particularly helpful, as it made it very easy to quickly look up the phrase I needed, rather than scouring through the "categories" system that many phrasebooks seem to utilize. The first section of the book provides a very basic little grammar primer and also a section on other language basics, like numbers, months, times, dates, and the most basic phrases (hello, excuse me, I didn't understand, etc.). At the end you'll find a list of colloquialisms, a "reverse-lookup" section from romanized Japanese to English for phrases you might hear, and a second reverse-lookup from kanji to English for common signs/words you might encounter in your travels (train station, entrance, ticket office). Finally, the book ends with a reverse-lookup *food* section from kanji to English, for reading menus. Phrases are provided not just with romanized pronunciation but also in kanji, which is *tremendously* helpful -- as you can point out the phrase to a Japanese speaker if the two of you are having difficulty understanding each other. The book is definitely geared towards tourists and travellers, but offered a broader range of phrases and vocabulary than I expected (the word for "suntanned"? phrases for getting a haircut?). Sprinkled throughout are various minor cultural & travel notes, such as typical bank hours, notes on major holidays, descriptions of the different kinds of payphones you might encounter, drinking etiquette, etc. All this, and it can be tucked into your back pocket! Crazy! The book is compact, but I personally found the layout & type-size quite easy to read -- particularly as the translations next to each phrase are printed in green ink, so they stand out from the word you're looking up. I did find that while the mini dialogue boxes were helpful in familiarizing myself with particular basic conversation constructions, they were often placed in not necessarily instinctive spots in the glossary (for instance, a dialogue about whether a hotel has a single room for the night & how much it costs was in the "n" section -- presumably for "night"). It's not going to make you fluent by any means (and if you think a mini phrasebook can do that for you, more power to you!), but it is a marvelous little tool for getting around, particularly with a little studying behind you. I took a few basic phrases gained from beginning Pimsleur lessons and this little phrasebook with me on a three-week trip to Japan, and was able to communicate the necessities throughout -- often with hilarious results, as my conversational partner and I came to an understanding through trading one or two word exchanges and clumsily constructed sentences in each other's language. Highly recommended, and well worth the $6 or so it will run you.

I took this to an immersion camp having had absolutely no Japanese before arrival, and found it more useful than my dictionary. As Japanese sentence structure is not so intuitive (to native English-speakers), the included phrases are a must to understand how words and particles fit into sentences. I also prefer it over other phrasebooks as it is arranged alphabetically, not thematically, in the English to Japanese section, which is the majority of the book. The grammar section and culture notes are also helpful. I absolutely recommend this to anyone who has never studied Japanese before, and needs a dictionary that will help you make sentences.

This book has a lot words in Japanese that you will have to know when visiting a country that speaks the language. If you mispronounce words from the book while speaking to someone, don't worry, they will correct your pronunciation and anunciation. I highly recommend that you get audio tapes so you can not only learn the tranlations from English to Japanese, but you can learn to pronounce them correctly as well. I am currently on a seven month deployment in Okinawa, Japan, as an Infantry Officer in the United States Marine Corps. This book has been a great help and it is small enough to stick in your pocket and read later when you are waiting for an appointment, etc. The trick to learning words from this books is to learn a little at a time.