A Guide to Japanese Grammar: A Japanese approach to learning Japanese grammar 1st Edition, Kindle Edition

I purchased the blue book version, printed in 2014, and it is smaller than the orange one (2012). It is easy to carry around in my purse around Tokyo. I've been studying using this textbook in Tokyo parks, restaurants, coffee shops, on the densha (JR train), while walking....It has a wax-like coated cover (which is great given that Japan rains a lot) and gives it a nice, soft feel on the hands. I just wish there was a kindle formatted version too. Please, Mr. Kim, onegaishimasu.Personally, my core set for learning Japanese, the cream-of-the-crop best items, is as follows:1. Genki I and II, including the workbooks, 2nd edition - the textbook for UCLA Japanese classes. Absolute gem of a book. This is your go-to "traditional" textbook.2. Heisig's Remembering the Kanji - Remember 2000 kanji in 2 months? Yes. It's amazing.3. Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar (my cliff notes) - Great refresher for stuff you learned. This book is like the golden notebook that you stole from that A+ student in your college Japanese class.4. "Japanese" app by Renzo Inc. from the Apple Store. Includes wwwjdic dictionary, all conjugations for every word (volitional, transitive, past, present, polite form, etc.) , a built in flashcard builder, kanji stroke order videos for all kanji, and more from this sweet app. Absolute must purchase. This is like a super-dictionary. Don't have an iPhone? Buy an iPod Touch 5th gen. and get this app. It is worth buying an iPod Touch just for this app.-------------------------------------------------------------------------------Optional study supplementals which are great for learning Japanese:s1. White Rabbit Press - Kanji Flashcards 1, 2, 3 - best Japanese flashcards around with all the Joyou Kanji.s2. NihonShock's Cheat Sheet Pack - 10 laminated colorful notes of all the vital Japanese grammars3. Anki - a flashcard program that lets you download shared cards created by other users & allows you to make your own flashcards on the computer.

Tai Kim reduces all grammatical explanations to the most informal. He leads off with da for State of Being : Kore wa hon da. In increasing order of formality, one could use de aru, desu, or de arimasu. For a question, he just uses intonation: Kore was hon? For verbs, he uses the infinitive form, taberu, not tabemasu.Tai Kim gives explanations of all the basic grammatical forms with this informal usage. It makes the whole process more simple, concise, and logical. For example, fairly early on he uses verbs in a subordinate clause: Jon ga tabeta gohan oishi? (Was the meal that Jon ate tasty?) This construction requires the informal form.After Tai Kim finishes the grammatical basis, then he goes on to show how it can be modified with more polite forms. After all, people don’t actually say Kore wa hon da unless they are implying that you must be awfully stupid not to recognize that it is a book. People actually say Kore wa hon desu. And people don’t usually say Asa gohan taberu, rather Asa gohan tabemasu. Tai Kim only goes on to the more polite forms, though, after he has completed a thorough grounding in Japanese grammar.Genki starts out with desu and tabemasu. It must do this because it must get the students practicing in actual spoken Japanese immediately. It doesn’t have the luxury of giving a complete grammatical summary in the impolite form. This leads to some future complications, where changing back and forth in politeness levels is required, like with the subordinate clause case above.For self-study or review, I find Tai Kim to be the most logical and easiest to understand. For classroom use, it is wholly inappropriate and Genki is the right choice.

I've studied Japanese in classes, using various texts and methods, Rosetta Stone, and used Japanese daily while living in Japan, but this guide is something that I always come back to for a refresher. In my opinion, this is the best way, book study-wise, to learn Japanese. It explains Japanese in a way that makes far more sense that most grammar books teach it to you, and it prepares you to be ready with much more natural Japanese from the get-go. I also think it's a far more effective way of building your grammar.I remember reading this guide when it was just on the website, even before there was an app or PDFs for it, and it's still so useful to me now. I just had the PDF forever, not checking the website any longer, so I was not aware the book existed, and I was actually going to print out the PDF, but it would have been a costly undertaking ($40+). While this guide is definitely worth the cost of conventional textbooks, even, imagine my relief to find it for a very reasonable $18.Don't think twice about getting this guide. And if you don't want to pay for it, just use the app or the PDF on your computer/tablet. But for me it's worth it in printed form. And thank you, Tae Kim, for all your hard work in creating such a valuable resource for Japanese language learners.

While I have found Tae Kim's website to be an excellent resource for learning Japanese, I was nonetheless rather disappointed with this book. Almost no effort has been made to adapt the online material to the rather different medium of the printed textbook.The typography is relatively low quality; pages often start or end with a single line (widows and orphans), and headers are sometimes at the end page before their content. These problems are relatively simple to fix, so their presence makes me think they hadn't even been considered.There are also several lines in the book which still assume the text is on a website, asking the reader to "hover" over words to see their pronunciation. I would expect this sort of thing to be caught by even the most basic proof reading.But perhaps most notably of all, there is no index in this book. On the website, one can simply search for material, but here there is no such option. This is a basic feature I would expect of any textbook, and it's omission here is obvious and detrimental.Perhaps I'm being unfair. Fixing all these problems properly would take significant effort, and possibly significant investment in the assistance of a publisher. Nonetheless, I feel that I should point out these flaws, so that people understand what they are paying for.In short: This is a nicely bound print out of Tae Kim's website, and nothing more.

When I reached page 30 in the book, I noticed that under the section of a 'Typical casual greeting' on page 30, there was a sentence that mentioned the way that men would use 'da'. There was no mention of how a woman would use 'desu'. Luckily, I have prior knowledge to this and know that I would have to use 'desu' as a woman. However, female readers would either: be expected to know or have to put in the extra effort into searching or, worse still, go to Japan and be viewed as rude/ learned Japanese 'wrong'. I know there is that tourists can be accepted when they make mistakes in Japan, but if you really want to learm correctly, either search or buy more books - that's how I learned.If Tae Kim were to edit this book, this is something to hugely consider.A Guide To Japanese Grammar by Tae Kim is a great book and I recommend it otherwise, just, if you're a woman and want to be able to communicate in Japan, you're going to have to do some research into how you would have to say things, as it is different.

So you have learnt ひらがな and カタカナ now grammar this is something I still to date and may always struggle with. As this is not a work book you can just pick this up give it a read like any other book or take notes, this will help you.It comes with extra explanations and useful information, why 4 stars because when it teaches new words it's at the end, the lay out is a bit strange. But if you have vocabulary behind your back it's ok.MUST be able to read ひらがな and カタカナ before you pick up this book. But it's the first thing you need to learn anyway.I only write this because I see SILLY reviews like can't read it needs more English 😒

I read the user review "Just press Print" here and was cautious about buying this, but for a reasonable price I could continue reading this offline. I felt that I wanted to make notes and flick back and forth, and having a physical copy would help me with this. I haven't been disappointed with my purchase, and I haven't found the issue where one word is left on a page like the previous review suggested, so maybe they have given the book a bit more love since then. There isn't an index but there's a contents page and everything is organised and labelled well. I just remove one star because the quality of the Amazon printed books (CreateSpace) is of sub-par build quality; the cover feels a bit cheap and the pages are a bit wavy, but the quality of the printed text is good. It's larger and thicker than I thought it would be, and is filled with excellent material. A must have for any Japanese language learner.

This book teaches you Japanese by - well - teaching you Japanese!Not by teaching you in the "normal" way of grammar and vocabulary so you can translate English into Japanese, but by explaining how Japanese works, and how sentences are constructed.The possibly frightening thing for beginners is that the writing system is introduced and used in full - Hiragana (for Japanese words), Katakana (for words of foreign origin) and Kanji (the characters of Chinese origin which explain the meaning and origin of all vocabulary) too, right from the beginning.As someone who learnt Japanese from a combination of books, university (UK) and immersion in the language, and has never properly got on top of Kanji, this book is a wonderful tool to make life easier for anyone wanting to really know and understand Japanese.Thoroughly recommended!Noel Howlett(Currently teaching Beginners Japanese with U3A)