Japanese for Dummies

click here for more details, find new or used items	Eriko Sato Our price £9.99 (£19.99) New from £9.42 Used from £5.99 Pages: 408 (Paperback) ISBN: 0764554298 Pub: John Wiley & Sons Pub date: 2002-06-20 Amazon.co.uk Sales Rank: 125508

Reader Reviews:

Not suitable for complete beginners (13/13 people found this helpful)

To echo the other reviews this book is not suitable for learning how to speak Japanese from scratch. For an introduction to speaking Japanese I'd recommend the excellent Talk Japanese book and CDs from the BBC.

I bought this book for an alternative introduction to Japanese and it is different. I have learnt a few things. Be aware that it's written for an American audience (another reason to get the BBC book). There is a lot of information in here but the presentation in terms of learning phrases is lacking. Also, huge chunks of dialogue are not represented on the CD. Don't get it as your first book, consider it for a second.

Useful - but only just (5/6 people found this helpful)

Don't rely on this for your Japanese instruction, but it does make a useful contrast to other Japanese self tutors.

The CD aural exercises are not brilliant - better elsewhere.

Not Good (8/21 people found this helpful)

Avoid at all costs there are much better text and audio courses out there.

Learning Basic Japanese (47/47 people found this helpful)

I originally liked the look of this book because it was separated into clear sections and each chapter looked both interesting and useful.
Another feature of this book that I liked was the fact that it also contained cultural tips and Japanese faux pas - which I thought would be extremely useful, especially for people who wanted to visit Japan.
Once I started to use this book, however, I was a little disappointed. I did find it a useful language tool, but I was diappointed that the CD did not contain all of the converstaion exercises found in the book. I thought that it could have gone into more depth as pronounciation is very important when learning a language, especially with Japanese as it is so different to our own.

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