Comments on: Book Review: Understanding Basic Japanese Grammar

By: Robbed Jack

Robbed Jack — Fri, 03 May 2019 12:06:56 +0000

The CD with the new edition only includes a small portion of the book’s content.

The book boasts about having a CD on the front cover, the back cover, and the spine. But there’s nowhere near enough content on it to acquire the grammar points in the book.

Bordering on a scam. I want my money back.

By: EskimoJo

EskimoJo — Fri, 03 Apr 2015 08:16:56 +0000

Some years later, the new edition now comes with a CD. However, I can’t tell if it now goes beyond N4/JLPT3 or the grammar level has stayed the same…

By: The Hikaru no Go 完全版 is looking good | Japanese TeaseJapanese Tease

The Hikaru no Go 完全版 is looking good | Japanese TeaseJapanese Tease — Sun, 02 Mar 2014 17:20:42 +0000

[…] the Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar and a classic textbook. I discovered it on the great ajatt blog and exactly what I was looking for. It offers a great overview about the most common […]

By: James DiGriz

James DiGriz — Wed, 15 May 2013 02:57:39 +0000

A book on learning a foreign language without an Audio CD is absolutely useless. I used that book and know what I’m talking about. By the way, by its vocabulary and grammar it is on JLPT3 level only – it also says so in the introductory message.

Anyhow, this books feels like it’s a half-finished project. Very good idea, but very poor execution.

By: Rum

Rum — Mon, 17 Oct 2011 11:27:05 +0000

Does anyone have any idea where this book corresponds with genki? Does it cover all the grammar in Genki I + 2, for example?

By: ルイス

ルイス — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:22:34 +0000

I completely left out why I was on AJATT to begin with. Did you have a post about how many sentences are in each book? I could have sworn you did. If not, would you consider having the readers submit estimates for books they’ve used, and books you’ve used?

By: ルイス

ルイス — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:18:07 +0000

Sorry about the derailed sentences, I should really read what I write before I hit submit.

By: ルイス

ルイス — Thu, 13 Mar 2008 05:16:23 +0000

Hi Khatzumoto,

I decided to buy this book after reading this review a while back. Thank you! I think it’s fantastic. I also picked up Japanese in MangaLand, because, event though I don’t read manga, it sounded like a cool concept.

About the Nishiguchi book though, it’s just like you said it is. Each concept has more than enough example sentences to get the idea. And the concepts return later on in more detailed and complex forms, with even more examples. The last con on your list “only has a few illustrations, these are all small and in black and white,” is a pro! That means more room for grammar!

About the MangaLand book…

Hmm…I haven’t started on it yet. I was worried about wiring my brain with manga-speak before I got the basics down. But I did flip through it, and a lot of the example sentences I saw were really rude looking, a few mentioned murder and such. There was a pickup line that made me laugh, but I don’t think it would work in the real world. I think there was also a section devoted to how to read katakana onomatopoeias. This section seems fascinating though, because I had no idea that dogs and cats and cars make different speak dog and cat and car-Japanese. Lol…

As far as sentence-mining goes, it’s about 90% English. I’m not too excited about MangaLand…but that was just my first impression. I hope it’s better than it seems…

But thanks again for this write-up. This book is much more suited to the method than other books I’ve seen (Genki, JfBP, Japanese Step by Step <—Abomination!).

You should add it to your Phase X pane, definitely!

By: Charles A

Charles A — Thu, 20 Dec 2007 09:41:33 +0000

Yesterday, I went to the mall to replace the two Kodansha books I lost on the bus and happened to see one copy of this book on the shelf. Being only $17 or so (1900 yen), it’s not a big dent, so I bought it along with the other three books. I can see the benefit of it flipping through the pages. It’s as dense as Japanese for Everyone but without the wasted space of “exercises”.

Now, I’m finding myself torn. I had just begun using Genki for structure and progression with Kodansha’s Verbs, Particles and Adjective books as supplemental sentence sources. This book kinda does all that for me. Oh well. I’ll go with UBJG as it’s less page flipping.

By: Brett

Brett — Thu, 26 Jul 2007 09:51:58 +0000

Khatzu – Good on you for this site. I’ve been floundering for a while and since I stumbled upon this, I’ve been super motivated to get back on track. While these methods aren’t new for me, I admit it never even occured to me to get systematic on the setences before. What I would do occasionally is put some funny sentence (usually from Jim Breen’s Jdic) into my flashcard prog to help me remember some new word/piece of grammar. The sentences would invevitably stick and I could often whip them out for fun at opportune moments. One of my favorites was –

それから、最後の恐ろしい叫び声とともに、怪物は山から下方の岩に身を投げて死んだ。

I didn’t manage to say it too often for obvious reasons, but after the first time it was permanently imbedded in my brain.

I’m sold on the children’s dictionary. I just ordered it. And the shipping costs more than the book which sucks (I’m in Thailand). I guess I’ve been laddering Japanese from Thai because I have too. I’ve never seen any Japanese-J or Chinese-C dictionary here and its kind of expensive to order them from abroad.

I have another book to recomend which is rather fun and even a relatively high-level beginner could make use of…

ドラえもんの国語おもしろ攻略漢字・熟語を使い分ける (ドラえもんの学習シリーズ) (単行本)
ISBN4-09-253189-3

Its a kids book (Doraemon) so it has plenty of furigana for those characters you can’t read yet. It has a bit of everything: idioms(熟語）, Homonyms (同音異義語),　antonyms and more. The setup has Doraemon explaning all these things to Nobita. Check it out.

PS – Can you give us some more starter sentences please ?