Japanese Made Easy

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... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0804812195
• ISBN13: 9780804812191
• Release Date: January 1989
• Publisher: Tuttle Publishing
• Length: 204 Pages
• Weight: 0.50 lbs.
• Dimensions: 4.3" x 0.5" x 7.2"

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.