Japanese Step by Step

by Gene Nishi

Book Overview

Offers an approach for beginning learners of Japanese, as well as a reference for intermediate students. This work teaches us how to construct Japanese sentences, from the simplest to the most... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0658014900
• ISBN13: 9780658014901
• Release Date: April 2001
• Publisher: McGraw-Hill
• Length: 255 Pages
• Weight: 1.05 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.5" x 7.4" x 9.7"

Customer Reviews

Delivers the goods for adult learners

After I read the glowing reviews of this book on About.com and Japanese123.com, I decided that I had to add it to my own collection. As I am learning Japanese as an adult professional, I appreciate the grown-up approach that the author takes. So many Japanese texts talk down to the reader, or concern themselves solely with juvenile/school-oriented situations. This book contains language that will be useful to businesspersons from the beginning. The explanations of grammar are flowcharted out in a way that makes it easy to see how Japanese sentences are constructed. Although the author has a Japanese last name, he was apparently born and raised in the United States. As I worked through the book, it was evident to me that Gene Nishi was explaining the Japanese language from an English-speaker's point of view---whereas many Japanese language texts written in Japan do not take into account the unique problems that English-speaking students of the langauge face. Bottom line: if you are a beginning or intermediate student of Japanese, this book belongs on your bookshelf.

Very clear and well-presented

People will debate whether Japanese language books are better off written in Hiragana or Romaji. This book is primarily in Romaji (with accompanying Kanji/Furigana) and that's the smart move. This book is aiming to get you speaking as soon as possible. I think the practice of reading and writing Hiragana/Kanji can be done in other ways and with other books. I really like the approach this book takes to getting you right in there. There are tons of examples and so the book has a good flow. The reader isn't apt to get bogged down on one page or a particular idea. In a lot of books, you are left to figure out the language e.g. "...so I guess this is how you would say that, etc.". Nishi's book tells you exactly what you are learning and so you really feel like you have a birds-eye view of the language. I cannot tell you how reassuring that is. I teach English here in Japan and even after hundreds and hundreds of lessons, I am still discovering the best approaches to help my students. Learning languages is still an 'art' (and may always be) but this book gives a real sense of direction and makes you feel like you have a solid start.

Good book, maybe a little too basic.

This book is great for people just starting to study Japanese. If you have been studying at college level for over a year, you may find this book basic. However, it is still good for review. This book is great for the computer programmers. The author worked at IBM as a programmer, it is designed to suit the programmer mind. The book does well to show you inflections and accents. It is not romaji exclusively; though I find it has a bit more then I would like to see. Overall, add this to your collection if you are of a programmer's mindset, and just starting with Japanese.

This book delivers the goods.

Read this book first before wasting your money on other books. I just finished my first read through of this book. It was amazing. I learned more about how the Japanese language is structured in a few days than I have from other books in months. Many students of Japanese just need basic information at the beginning in order to be productive in their studies. Gene Nishi gets straight to the point, starting with the basic sentence structure, adding more information as the book progresses. And since everything complex is made up of simple things, you can start to see how a complicated Japanese sentence can be analyzed and understood. After reading through this book, I could get the "gist" of basic to intermediate Japanese sentences even though my vocabulary is yet not up to snuff. I could just tell that "someone gave something to someone else at such and such time", for example. While that may sound trivial, my abilities will only increase as I engage in Japanese conversation and read the Japanese papers, because the blanks will be filled in from the context, just like any other language acquisition process. The point is, I now know where the blanks are,thanks to this book! Gene Nishi also does an excellent job of targeting this book to a particular audience: adult professionals who need to conversate with Japanese adult professionals(although this book would work for any student). Right now, I do not need to know all of the embellishments and ornaments in everyday Japanese language. I don't have the time. I just need to be able to have relatively educated conversations with a native speaker. This book has all of the tools to enable me to get the solid foundation needed to achieve that goal. He describes the different classes of adjectives, verbs and some of the more common particles(wa, ga, ni, de, no) in a clearer manner than anywhere else. Gene also said that learning the 1006 Kanji taught to Japanese grade schoolers would cover 90% of those used by newspapers. That was quite a relief! I had heard there were 20000 of them! If I learn 3 a day, I'm on my way. See how this book reduces some of the complications? Finally, Nishi's organization of this book makes a lot of sense. He starts from simple examples and works up to more complicated ones. A few notes, while this book is an excellent start, once you finish it, to get the deepest understanding you will need to look at other books for the following reasons: 1. Understanding the Japanese language from a linguistic perspective. A few of Gene's descriptions do not match what I've learned elsewhere(for example, the Japanese characters or "Mora" are not divisible! You should not think of the particle "no" as a combination of the n sound and the o sound. To the Japanese, the particle "no" is one indivisible unit.) 2. Mastering the Kana 3. Learning Kanji 4. Understanding the tonal structure of spoken Japanese 5. Doing exercises! This is not an exercise oriented book. The books by Eleanor Jorden are

An excellent first step

I had been gradually absorbing japanese for a few years from such sources as anime, and old samurai films. Six months ago, I decided to take the plunge and devote some time to learning Japanese, so I picked up this book. I was immediately impressed with the organization, and lucidity of the material. Before, I was totally mystified by the Kanji. I thought I'd never be able to understand " all of that crazy chickenscratch", as I sometimes (jokingly) put it. I tought that I could get by understanding the Kana, or maybe just the Romaji. I was totally put off by the different readings of the Kanji. Now, I understand more kanji than kana (granted, I'm still pretty much the equivalent of a slow-witted japanese kindergartener). This book erased most of my initial apprehension over the subject. The grammatical structure is handled, in my opinion, in the proper way. For the first few chapters, the reader is presented with a somewhat simplistic view, which must be learned by rote. As the reader progresses in the book, some of the earlier schemas are expanded, and elaborated, leaving the reader with an ever increasingly profound grasp on the language. The presentation and progression is in a logical order, allowing those with a scientist's (like me) or engineer's brain quick access to the language. This is, of course, not to say that one can attain a complete mastery of the language by reading this one book. As I alluded in the title of this review, this is merely a good first step. It never pretends to be anything more. If one studies from this book with discipline and diligence, one should not have trouble making oneself understood in japanese.