Eriko Sato

This book makes a number of grand claims on the front cover about enabling the dummy reader to master the basics of Japanese grammar in just a couple of hours. Not that I believed it would be so for a moment, but I can verify that it wasn't so. It was good to have the book when visiting Japan all the same, and it did give us the phrases itadakimasu and gochisosama, which a gracious Japanese friend-of-a-friend explained were essentials of good manners at Japanese meals, and which unfailingly brought a smile to the faces of people in cafes and restaurants who had been kind to us. I now have a number of general concepts straight: ka at the end of a sentence indicates that it's a question; the words for numbers vary depending on what you're counting; the verb comes at the end of the sentence. But I'm a long away from being able to say much more than hello (ohayo gozaimasu or konnichowa), thank you (domo, or in shops much more commonly, arigato gozaimasu) and excuse me (sumimasen). My one complaint about the book, as opposed to my own dumminess, is that it spent a lot of the chapter on food telling me how to say things like hamburger, bagel and cream cheese in Japanese, rather than giving me names for the many new edibles that turned up on my plate.… (mehr)