Japanese Grammar [Paperback]

The main part of the text is a section showing different conjugations of verbs, all complete with example sentences. Verb conjugations include plain and proper forms, gerund, some conditional and imperative forms, honorific, and maybe a couple others. Actually I have yet to study some of the verb forms but there is a nice section showing in a chart form about 10 verbs with different conjugations.

Near the end of the book you get various little sections which cover topics such as counting numbers, calendar dates, suffixes for counting items, helpful Japanese phrases, and some others too; I can't remember all of them. At the end of the book is a glossary of different words that were used in the book. A very good overall resource...

So why the 3 star rating? The answer is simple. All romaji and absolutely no Japanese script. Actually I take that back. At the beginning of the book there are 3 or 4 pages explaining what a kanji is and where it is from. You will see the kanji for mountain, person, and Japan. Included in this 3 or 4 pages is a chart of both the katakana and the hiragana. After this point you will see no Japanese script at all.... very annoying. If you despise romaji, do not get this book. Otherwise you can do like I do, you can write all example sentences and words in Japanese (there is usually some white space) and then proceed to cross out all romaji so you do not have to read it; then you will also have some practice with writing.
This book would have earned 5 stars had it been written in Japanese characters. Still, I would recommend this book to all beginner and intermediate students as a basic overview of grammar and verbs. Oh yeah, the price is right too:)

The author includes separate chapters on all the parts of speech, nouns, pronouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, and so on, and most of the book is taken up by those aspects of the grammar.

At the back of the book there is a Special Topics section. These include chapters or sections on Numbers, Telling Time, Classifiers, Days, Months, Seasons, and the Weather, Family Relationships, Useful Phrases, Borrowed Words (mainly from Chinese), Synonyms, Antonyms, Short and Long Vowels, Double Consonants, Same Pronunciation but Different Meaning (for 25 words), Different Pitch, Different Meaning (for 16 words), and a 250-word vocabulary list at the very back.

The beginning of the book has chapters on pronunciation and phonetics, word order, and the Japanese writing system. The font is color-coded for certain things, which some people may find easier on the eye. I sort of wish language books, like the 501 Verbs books that are so well-known, wouldn't do this, but it's probably okay for most people.

Japanese has one great advantage over the typical Indo-European language in that it has almost 100% regular verbs. There are only two that are irregular. (Turkish is one of the few languages I've seen with no irregular verbs). It lacks many of the tenses European and other languages have, and it lacks a true future tense. There is no case system such as in German, Russian, Latin, and Greek.

However, it makes up for that in the complexity of its modal verbs or mood constructions, which signify conditionality, probability, unrcentainty, or the attitude of the speaker toward the subject. And the particle system, which serves diverse functions, from modifying the meanings of verbs to marking the subject or topic of a sentence, is also something very foreign to Indo-European language speakers, and is perhaps the most distinguishing feature of the language.

Another odd aspect of Japanese that is very different from most languages is that adjectives actually belong to verbs rather than nouns and are inflected to agree with them.

A small grammar like this can't give you everything you need to know about these topics, but this little grammar is still a nice, compact resource, and as I said, the price is right. I you get a book on the particle system, such as A Dictionary of Japanese Particles, by Sue A. Kawashima, which treats 100 of the most important particles, you should be in pretty good shape.