Excellent New Book Found

[Fantt]

I just picked up An Innovative Approach to Speaking and Reading Japanese at Borders the other night. I'm pretty impressed so far. I bought the book, because after thumbing through it I got the impression that it was a no nonsense book on figuring out how to create Japanese sentences. After getting home and really looking through it I think I'm correct.

Gene Nishi is/was an engineer for IBM and he wrote this book after spending a good deal of time teaching other IBM engineers how to speak Japanese in a relatively short time. The fact that Mr. Nishi is an engineer really shines through in this book - it's full of tables and flow charts showing how to construct Japanese sentences. It is very reminescent of a programming book.

That said, this may not be the book for everyone. It's pretty technical and he leaves practice and excersizes up to the reader. But kamisama knows I have plenty of other books for that. This book is about ramping up to speed in the shortest possible time. I think it will help me do just that.

Also, note that Mr Nishi spends very little time at all on the "reading" part of learning Japanese. All of his sentences are written in Japanese (kanji and kana) with romaji alongside. This book is not going to aid in your Kana learning/practice.

Still, for anyone who wants to get straight to the meat of learning Japanese, this is an excellent book, and it's a lot cheaper than many others. I'm glad to see that the reviewers on Amazon agree with me.

[Sy-l]

Nice review im considering getting this soon.

[Scrivener]

They have quite a few pages on Amazon. The stuff on intonation is interesting. It is all true, of course, but it's so subtle it's hard to pick up from a book. Probably by the time you can understand it, you can already do it. But it doesn't hurt to have it of course.

[Fantt]

Originally Posted by Scrivener

They have quite a few pages on Amazon. The stuff on intonation is interesting. It is all true, of course, but it's so subtle it's hard to pick up from a book. Probably by the time you can understand it, you can already do it. But it doesn't hurt to have it of course.

That's how I feel. I'm not too focused on the intonation right now - I'm just trying to build a vocabulary. The primary value of the book is the laying out of the Japanese sentence structure in a technical, engineerish fashion. I'm finally learning things that I've wondered about for a while.

The only complaint that I have right now is that the book is so thick with technical details - it's easy to miss something important because it's buried in with all kinds of other details. Not too big a deal since I may be using this book for quite a while. I also wish it didn't have an romaji.