A Guide to Japanese Grammar: A Japanese approach to learning Japanese grammar by Mr Tae K Kim (PDF)

Description

NOTE: The website (www.guidetojapanese.org) has the SAME content for free. This book is for those who prefer to have a physical copy. My guide to Japanese grammar has been helping people learn Japanese as it’s really spoken in Japan for many years. If you find yourself frustrated that you can’t understand Japanese movies or books despite having taken Japanese classes, then this book is for you. It will help you finally understand those pesky particles and break down grammatical concepts that will allow you to comprehend anything from simple to very complex sentences. You will also learn Japanese that’s spoken by real people including casual speech patterns and slang, stuff that’s often left out in most textbooks. Don’t take my word for it, just check out my website and order this book to have it handy wherever you go.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐This is a much better book for self-learning than other textbooks. The problem with Genki and others is that they’re written for a classroom setting (hence all the group/partner exercises) or with a dedicated tutor. Therefore, grammar nuances aren’t readily available in the book but in “A Guide to Japanese Grammar”, Tae Kim anticipates and explains common questions that arise for beginner learners.The order of how grammar is introduced is different than other textbooks/classes which I think is better for beginner learners. Tae Kim starts off with explaining the very basic building blocks of grammar, which is more “plain” and “informal”, and then gradually introduces the complexities of formality. Other textbooks start you off with learning sentences in “polite form” and then breaks it down until you learn the “plain form.” I found this very confusing when I first learned Japanese and I wish more books/classes ordered it like Tae Kim instead.The book is focused on grammar and does require understanding hiragana/katakana and some basic kanji. Personally, I’m okay with that because you get much more grammar material and it’s much easier to reference back, which was another issue I had with Genki. All in all, it’s $20 for an amazing resource so just buy it!!

⭐New thought:After I have completed this book, I can tell the most important reason why I recommend it.The book shines new lights. For example, usually Te-form is treated as a “separated” conjugation, but the author of this book divides Te-form into smaller elements: the stems of verbs, and the suffixes. Therefore, almost all conjugations could be derived from the more basic units. Once you master what the stems of verbs are, you could easily conjugate verbs to Te-form, Ta-form and so forth. For me, it is much more methodic than treating each conjugation form as a separated one. It is helpful to construct the impression that all conjugations actually have connections, therefor avoid confusions.Previous thoughts:I have GENKI books and another Japanese grammar book, but I still bought this one.As described, the book is a printout for who prefer having a physical one (or dead trees) in hands. It was printed once I placed order, considering the cost of printing and binding and shipping, I think it is dirty cheap and totally disagree someone giving 3 stars because it is “just press” of free content from the author’s website, especially the description has already clearly indicated that.I like the book because it doesn’t have ignoring Roma phonetic notions for whole sentences. I have browsed several Japanese grammar books, and really don’t like their clumsy phonetic notions. If someone even doesn’t want to grasp Hiragana, why bothers to learn grammar?By the way, in addition to assumption that potential readers have already mastered Hiragana, the author would expect they have know the most common Kanji, at least, learning. Otherwise, you may find it is a kind of challenge to begin with the “Basic Grammar”.The book is organized in a clear structure of “grounding up”, I agree it may make more sense than learning simple expressions first. I’m trying to master a language, not just go to Japan and order some dishes in a Japanese restaurant. Well, the GENKI books begin with a scenario of two students meeting each other, and most books teach this way, but I want to change the point of view, as the author stated, to the point of view of Japanese, because many Japanese expressions don’t have direct counterparts in English. I also think that introducing masu-form expressions first is wired in other books, I do want to learn dictionary form of verbs first, then advance to conjugations.Since I have learned some, I mainly take this book as a quick reference easy to shuffle and write down notes, yeah, there are a lot of blank spaces in pages because of layout design. Oh, one more thing, the font size of the book I have suddenly becomes smaller from page 37 (section 3.4 Adjectives). Although I don’t care about this issue, I hope the author could modify. And, I prefer to have a wider line space.Anyway, I really appreciate Tae Kim composed such a useful book.

⭐Assuming we are fluent in Japanese, do we need to read a grammar book? Probably not. Since I am a beginner in learning Japanese, I need to. I have been trying to learn Japanese for a long time. I have taken an introductory class, gone through some learning apps, watched some online video tutorials, and traveled to Tokyo. I felt that I would have never been able to understand some basics of Japanese grammar if I didn’t get this book. I am grateful to the author for this great work. I would recommend this book to friends who are also learning Japanese. Five stars!

⭐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 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.

⭐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.

⭐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

⭐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)

⭐I had the PDF, but I work better with a physical copy. I love it, also love the size, it’s perfect for someone like me who like to highlight, add notes in the margins and generally use books to the max.

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