Books : Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You (Power Japanese Series) (Kodansha's Children's Classics)
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 495
EAN: 9784770028020
ISBN: 4770028024
Label: Kodansha International
Manufacturer: Kodansha International
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 144
Publication Date: March 01, 2002
Publisher: Kodansha International
Sales Rank: 26929
Studio: Kodansha International
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Product Description:
Making Sense of Japanese is the fruit of one foolhardy American's thirty-year struggle to learn and teach the Language of the Infinite. Previously known as Gone Fishin', this book has brought Jay Rubin more feedback than any of his literary translations or scholarly tomes, "even if," he says, "you discount the hate mail from spin-casters and the stray gill-netter."
To convey his conviction that "the Japanese language is not vague," Rubin has dared to explain how some of the most challenging Japanese grammatical forms work in terms of everyday English. Reached recently at a recuperative center in the hills north of Kyoto, Rubin declared, "I'm still pretty sure that Japanese is not vague. Or at least, it's not as vague as it used to be. Probably."
The notorious "subjectless sentence" of Japanese comes under close scrutiny in Part One. A sentence can't be a sentence without a subject, so even in cases where the subject seems to be lost or hiding, the author provides the tools to help you find it. Some attention is paid as well to the rest of the sentence, known technically to grammarians as "the rest of the sentence."
Part Two tackles a number of expressions that have baffled students of Japanese over the decades, and concludes with Rubin's patented technique of analyzing upside-down Japanese sentences right-side up, which, he claims, is "far more restful" than the traditional way, inside-out.
"The scholar," according to the great Japanese novelist Soseki Natsume, is "one who specializes in making the comprehensible incomprehensible." Despite his best scholarly efforts, Rubin seems to have done just the opposite.
Previously published in the Power Japanese series under the same title and originally as Gone Fishin' in the same series.
Average Rating: 
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Well written with just enough humor to keep you reading further while learning more and more aobut the Japanese language.
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Seen too many books about how to learn a language that were aimed at foreign exchange students? This book helps you learn to make sense of the Japanese language by also mentioning Japanese culture.
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I've been studying Japanese on and off for quite a couple of years now, and this book addressed many of my concerns and confusions that I had when studying the language. The author made the "subjectless sentence" so much easier to comprehend and understand that it will become extremely useful when intermediate to advance Japanese learners are trying to read literature materials.
Some may complain that the Japanese are writen in Romaji in this book, but the amount of Japanese examples are quite minimal (yet sufficient), so it didn't bother me much in this particular book.
I would definately recommend this book to everyone who is studying Japanese. It may not make much sense to beginners, but it would, eventually, be a lot of help when they become intermediate/advanced students of the language.
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I picked this up some time ago, and let it lie in the 'incoming' stack for far too long.
I now consider this to be one of the best pocket-sized books on Japanese.
In particular, the coverage of 'pronouns', as well as 'wa vs. ga' is the best I have read anywhere.
If you have ever paused while deciding whether to say or in a particular situation, buy this book and wonder no more.
If you have read a textbook that called Japanese 'vague', sell it and use the money to buy this.
Rating:  -
This book had many interesting and useful information, however, as for ease of use, I found it to be too chaotic. It may help to put it into another format.
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