Easy Japanese: A Direct Learning Approach for Immediate Communication (Japanese Phrasebook)

Samuel E. Martin

Aug 2013 · Tuttle Publishing

About this ebook

This user-friendly Japanese language book is a complete course, pocket dictionary and Japanese phrasebook in one.

Easy Japanese is designed for Japanese language beginners who are planning a visit to Japan or already living there and wish to learn spoken Japanese quickly and easily--on their own or with a teacher. This book introduces all the basics of the spoken language with an emphasis on practical daily conversations and vocabulary. It enables you to begin communicating effectively right away.

Key features of Easy Japanese include:

• Structured, progressive lessons
• Focuses on daily communication
• Native-speaker audio recordings

All dialogues are highly practical and authentic and illustrated with manga illustrations for easy memorization. Useful notes and explanations about the Japanese writing system, pronunciation and accent, greetings and requests, sentence structure, vocabulary, verb conjugations, honorific forms, idiomatic expressions and Japanese etiquette dos and don'ts are provided throughout the book. A useful Japanese dictionary of commonly-used words and phrases is included at the back.

Ratings and reviews

I bought the paper version because I like having the physical copy with me. But regardless of that its q really good book to buy. Its very helpful for beginners and for people who already know how to have a conversation. It has 3000 word dictionary and have a kana chart at the end which could be used to learn the writing for the phrases you learn in the book. Definitely worth for the price, I would actually be willing to pay more for the book

Gets right to the point and has lots of example sentences and vocabulary lists and explanations of the sentences and their grammar. Only covers the basics but it is a good start. There is also a 3000 word vocabulary list at the end of the book. Though be careful though words with slightly different Japanese meaning are given identicle English words. This can be misleading. The vocabulary list section would be much more useful if the differences in meaning were explained. For example 赤ちゃん and 赤ん坊 both mean baby in English but whose baby is being referenced is different for the Japanese. There are small mistakes in the form of small typing errors but they don't effect the content of the lessons. Lastly the words are all spelled out in a phonetic romaji rather than standard romaji this can sometimes make looking up the full details of a word more difficult than it needs to be. Still useful read however.

Contains almost no Japanese writing until the very end. That might be desirable for some people (in which case I recommend this book), but I'd prefer to see the Japanese spellings included.