This is a carefully structured, practical book for learning colloquial spoken Japanese. Each lesson presents a few of the most common features of the language in sentences which are short, easy, and immediately useful. The first thirteen lessons show you there is a lot that can be said with just a word or two. The later lessons introduce more variety and explain a few of the fine points. The sentences reflect how the Japanese language is really spoken. They are short but colloquial, abrupt but not rude. Each lesson contains first a number a number of Japanese phrases followed by material for practice. These are short conversations mad up entirely of the phrases you have learned in the lesson (or in preceding lessons). After the lessons, there is a basic vocabulary of some common Japanese words and their English equivalents. The Japanese verbs are presented both in the polite present (–mas') and the plain resent (–u or –ru). At the end of the book there are indexes of Japanese hiragana and katakana. Key highlights of this book are: • 30 short, easy–to–follow lessons with practical exercises • A Japanese–English dictionary of over 3, 000 most commonly used words • Writing charts of the hiragana and katakana Japanese syllabaries.
