Japanese Grammar (Barron's Grammar)
by Carol Akiyama, Nobuo Akiyama

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• ISBN13: 9780764120619
• Condition: New
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Book Reviews of Japanese Grammar (Barron's Grammar)

Book Review: Nice little Japanese grammar, and the price is right
Summary: 5 Stars

The author includes separate chapters on all the parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on, and most of the book is taken up by those aspects of the grammar.

At the back of the book there is a Special Topics section. These include chapters or sections on Numbers, Telling Time, Classifiers, Days, Months, Seasons, and the Weather, Family Relationships, Useful Phrases, Borrowed Words (mainly from Chinese), Synonyms, Antonyms, Short and Long Vowels, Double Consonants, Same Pronunciation but Different Meaning (for 25 words), Different Pitch, Different Meaning (for 16 words), and a 250-word vocabulary list at the very back.

The beginning of the book has chapters on pronunciation and phonetics, word order, and the Japanese writing system. The font is color-coded for certain things, which some people may find easier on the eye. I sort of wish language books, like the 501 Verbs books that are so well-known, wouldn't do this, but it's probably okay for most people.

Japanese has one great advantage over the typical Indo-European language in that it has almost 100% regular verbs. There are only two that are irregular. (Turkish is one of the few languages I've seen with no irregular verbs). It lacks many of the tenses European and other languages have, and it lacks a true future tense. There is no case system such as in German, Russian, Latin, and Greek.

However, it makes up for that in the complexity of its modal verbs or mood constructions, which signify conditionality, probability, unrcentainty, or the attitude of the speaker toward the subject. And the particle system, which serves diverse functions, from modifying the meanings of verbs to marking the subject or topic of a sentence, is also something very foreign to Indo-European language speakers, and is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the language.

Another odd aspect of Japanese that is very different from most languages is that adjectives actually belong to verbs rather than nouns and are inflected to agree with them.

A small grammar like this can't give you everything you need to know about these topics, but this little grammar is still a nice, compact resource, and as I said, the price is right. I you get a book on the particle system, such as A Dictionary of Japanese Particles, by Sue A. Kawashima, which treats 100 of the most important particles, you should be in pretty good shape.

Summary of Japanese Grammar (Barron's Grammar)

Japanese Books

• Subjects > Education & Reference > Dictionaries & Thesauruses > Foreign Language > Japanese
• Foreign Languages > Instruction > Japanese