Everett F. Bleiler (1920–2010)

I really love this book. HOWEVER! There is one huge warning that is a major defect of this book: it only focuses on Japanese in the romanji writing system. In order to fully understand how Japanese works, you are highly advised to master katakana, hiragana and begin to learn at least the more important On and Kun yomi pronounciations of the most commonly used kanji.

If you take away the limitations of this book, it's still great. Did you know that Japanese doesn't have a future tense as such? You have to add a word like tomorrow, next week or a specific hour in order to imply something will happen later.

The book explains verb tenses, negative, a basic introduction to politeness degrees in pronouns, some idioms (many people complain the idioms used are sort of unfashionable but native speakers will understand you nonetheless), adverbs, adjectives and the two numerical counting systems.

I really love this book, it has helped me so much speaking to people during my two trips to Japan. It's such a shame they don't release an updated version in kindle because the book is really worth it. My copy is covered with coffee stains and the front cover is falling apart from overuse. One of the few books I read over and over again.… (mais)

I really love this book. HOWEVER! There is one huge warning that is a major defect of this book: it only focuses on Japanese in the romanji writing system. In order to fully understand how Japanese works, you are highly advised to master katakana, hiragana and begin to learn at least the more important On and Kun yomi pronounciations of the most commonly used kanji.

If you take away the limitations of this book, it's still great. Did you know that Japanese doesn't have a future tense as such? You have to add a word like tomorrow, next week or a specific hour in order to imply something will happen later.

The book explains verb tenses, negative, a basic introduction to politeness degrees in pronouns, some idioms (many people complain the idioms used are sort of unfashionable but native speakers will understand you nonetheless), adverbs, adjectives and the two numerical counting systems.

I really love this book, it has helped me so much speaking to people during my two trips to Japan. It's such a shame they don't release an updated version in kindle because the book is really worth it. My copy is covered with coffee stains and the front cover is falling apart from overuse. One of the few books I read over and over again.… (mais)