An indispensable reference for students of Japanese at all levels, as well as anyone seeking to brush up on the language. Providing clear, jargon-free explanations of how Japanese grammar works and offering hundreds of example sentences, it is an essential handbook for self-study or for the classroom and should be a valued resource for years to come. The book is divided into two parts. Part 1 gives a comprehensive overview of Japanese grammar, including the parts of speech, sentence word order, verbs, polite language (keigo), counters, and other facets of everyday language. Part 2 is a dictionary of usage, and explains and illustrates the correct uses of hundreds of Japanese suffixes, prefixes, grammatical words, and phrases. The two parts are closely coordinated through cross-referencing. Each entry includes example sentences given in both Japanese orthography (kana/kanji) and romanized form, with the English equivalents. The introduction to the grammar overview summarises the fundamental differences between the English and Japanese grammar. Appendices offer extensive words lists for adjectival nouns, nouns formed from verbs, counters, and other categories.
Masahiro Tanimori is Associate Professor of Japanese education at Tottori University in Japan. He is the author of
Handbook of Japanese Grammar (Tuttle, 1994) and vice editor of
New Edition of General Japanese (Xinbian Zonghe Riyu, China Astronautic Publishing House, 2011), and is a member of the Society for Teaching Japanese as a Foreign Language. He lives in Awajo, Japan.
Eriko Sato is Associate Professor of Japanese and translation studies at the State of University of New York at Stony Brook, where she is also the Director of the Japanese Teacher Education Program. She has authored and co-authored over a dozen books, including
Japanese Stories for Language Learners, and
Learning Japanese Kanji.She has also authored or co-authored
Contemporary Japanese, Japanese Demystified, Japanese for Dummies, Complete Japanese Grammar, Japanese Phrases for Dummies, and
My First Japanese Kanji Book.