Japanese Step by Step: An Innovative Approach to Speaking and Reading Japanese [Paperback]

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 the best in that area. I plan on going that route after mastering this book.

...this would be the programmer's tech manual.

JAPANESE STEP BY STEP was written by a former IBM engineer. He applied tech-manual principles to the organization and presentation of the inner workings of the Japanese language. The author makes heavy use of logic flow charts to show how Japanese verbs are conjugated, and how present, negative, past and past-negative tenses are developed. He also presents five basic sentence patterns to be used as building blocks for more complex and compound sentences. And, the roman-alphabet representations of Japanese use CAPITAL letters to show the raised pitch accent.

Although the book uses Japanese characters above the roman text (romaji), it uses the 2000+-character KANJI with no furigana (small hiragana characters to show the `reading' of the kanji characters.) I'd like to be able to cover up the romaji and read just the Japanese characters, but the lack of furigana forces dependence on the romaji.

Another thing I found frustrating is having to flip back and forth through the book to figure out how a particular verb conjugates. This could have been solved if the author had either provided an appendix with all the verb conjugation flow charts, or (better yet,) provided an additional set of charts showing how to conjugate each type of verb into all the possible conjugations.

This book is NOT the only book on Japanese you'll ever need. But it's a useful addition to the Japanese-language student's arsenal of reference works. It presents information in a different way, which may be just what you need to get from confusion to increased understanding.

This book will not by itself have you speaking or reading Japanese. As a reference, especially for the verbal idioms, it is quite useful, but only after the fact, I fear. There are no drills, no exercises, and vocabulary is simply listed at the beginning of each major section. Here are 100 verbs, now go learn them. Here are 100 nouns, do likewise. His insistence that Japanes "adjectives" are "words to modify a noun" just as in English, can only confuse. "You mean adjectives conjugate just like verbs rather than decline like nouns?"

His presentation of the Kana is also "Here it is, now just go and memorize these tables." Even his presentation of the traditional syllabary tables is quirky, filling in the ya and wa columns with standard vowels, not at all helpful to the beginner, especially without explanation.

There is no practice reading connected prose. There aren't any connected dialogs at all. Any discussion of politeness levels and the in-out group dichotomy is totally missing. You just don't see/hear real Japanese here, spoken or written. There is no indication that real Japanese is often written vertically right to left. There is no discussion of innovative versus traditional Katakana spelling. Related to this, there is, quite surprizingly, no discussion of modern "loan" words, especially the huge modern English-borrowed vocabulary, and the rules of "transcribing" and "trans-speaking" English into Japanese. Especially surprising for someone in the scientific and engineering fields.

There is no help with real pronunciation (devoiced high vowels and the "soft" medial "g" of the Tokyo dialect for example), and no help at all with determining general pitch patterns of connected speech. Once again, just memorize each sentence as you come up against it. Don't ask why, just do it. Most un-engineer-like.

His Romaji is also, to say the least, quirky. Capitalization to show pitch levels can make the neginning English user fall into stress accents rather than pitch accents very easily.

Last, but certainly not least, his non-explanation of Kanji, especially the possibility of multiple readings, of proper names in particular, and the "just throw it at you in unrelated chunks of vocabulary" are not at all helpful for a beginner. Let alone how you might write it yourself - stroke order and the like. No clue, either, how to use a Japanese-English dictionary.

All in all, a disappointing book. Being an engineer myself, I was hopeful that an engineering/scientific approach to Japanese might be interesting, but there is little here. Stay with the tried and true language experts. Eleanor Harz Jordan and the classic "Reading Japanese" and Part 1 of "Japanese, The Spoken Language" will be much more rewarding to the beginner, even if teaching him/herself.