Japanese Made Easy: Revised and Updated: The Ultimate Guide to Quickly Learn Japanese from Day One

By Tazuko Ajiro Monane

Book Overview

This is a self-study guide to the Japanese language

Harvard University's Tazuko Monane teaches you the secret of speaking Japanese fluently in simple 20-minute lessons. Each lesson zeroes in on one everyday activity: introducing yourself, asking directions, ordering sushi, giving directions to a taxi driver, eating with friends, and other everyday conversations. Japanese Made Easy is designed for people living in or going to Japan who would like to learn Japanese but have never studied it before. Obviously, living or traveling in Japan is itself not the secret to learning Japanese--many Westerners live in Japan for a long time and except for a few words learn very little about its language. The important thing will be your motivation to learn. An ability to speak Japanese and read Japanese is vital to understanding your surroundings. Whether you travel to Japan as a tourist, student or businessperson, whether you use this book before or after your arrival in Japan, what could provide better motivation than knowing that a familiarity with the Japanese language (and with the culture it reflects) will help make your stay in Japan much richer and more interesting.

If you have the good fortune to know a Japanese person, he or she will surely make your learning even easier--especially when you study pronunciation. But don't be discouraged if you have no "live model" to learn from. By following the simple suggestions given here, you will be able to come out with good understandable Japanese on your own. Key features of this book include: More than 40 social situations commonly encountered by foreigners in Japan--including greetings, asking directions, dining out, visiting places, and shopping. Practice exercises based on over 30 of the most important Japanese sentence patterns, with example sentences and answer keys. Notes on the key points of Japanese vocabulary and Japanese grammar. A comprehensive glossary of important Japanese words and an index of vocabulary and grammar items.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 4805309636
• ISBN13: 9784805309636
• Release Date: March 2010
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
• Length: 256 Pages
• Weight: 0.80 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.7" x 5.3" x 7.9"

Customer Reviews

Highly recommended for beginners and tourists!

Japanese cannot be made truly easy, but this book does make it easy to learn some of the fundamentals of the language. I read through several different books in preparation for my first trip to Japan, and this was the one that I found to be the most useful. Unlike a tourist phrasebook, Japanese Made Easy teaches you basic grammatical structures, so you can actually build your own sentences, rather than simply repeating phrases like a parrot. But unlike the usual beginner's textbook, the vocabulary in Japanese Made Easy is for the most part limited to the sorts of words that a tourist would want or need to know. The Japanese in this book is entirely romanized (with the exception of a list of words commonly seen on signs), so anyone wanting to gain a reading knowledge of the language will need to go elsewhere. Even as a textbook of conversational Japanese, the scope of this book is quite limited, but for a tourist or a short-term visitor to Japan seeking to learn the largest amount of practical Japanese in the shortest amount of time, I would recommend this book above all others.