Japanese Phrasebook Reviews

• A great phrasebook but with a couple of serious errors

  
  By A3ILJKUR90VGPJ on 2000-11-20
  The sheer amount of 'stuff' that is crammed into this little phrasebook makes this the best Japanese phrasebook I've ever seen! There's just so much covered in this book, it'll be a while before a beginning student of Japanese outgrows it.

  However... there are a small number of serious mistakes in the book. Not many but enough for me not to give this book 5 stars.

  Here's an example in which you can use simple grade 2 math logic to figure out that its wrong:

  ichi = 1; jyu = 10; ichi man = 10,000; jyu man = 1,000,000

  (Excuse me? 10000 x 10 is not a million!)
  
  

• Japanese Made Easy

  
  By on 2000-05-04
  I found this book very useful and easy to understand. I would recommend this book to people who have had no background in the language and those who have studied but have forgotten some of it. This book is very practical and may inspire to want to learn more Japanese!
  
  

• sloppy formatting and too many errors

  
  By A2GA46VO4Q5GNL on 2004-04-30
  This book has the right idea: a pocket-sized book with a good variety of useful everyday phrases, organized by subject. However, there are enough flat-out mistakes to be pretty annoying. Also, the English and Japanese did not line up perfectly on the page which, in combination with the the print being quite small, made it difficult to figure out which defintion went where (perhaps this is not a problem with all these books but it was with mine). But most annoying are the errors and typos.
  
  

• A must buy

  
  By A2M7FQ9BY3SQSC on 2005-10-06
  I found this very easy to understand, as did my husband who had no prior knowledge of the Japanese language. I read it many times before our trip, in order to remember important basic words.
  We referred to it many times during our trip, and it was very usefull. I would suggest everyone purchase it.
  Its small size is also great, easy to put in a pocket, backpack or handbag.
  
  

• Useful but Somewhat Disorganized

  
  By A32GM4CMVDSZPS on 2002-09-27
  I used this book extensively while in Japan. It contains the most commonly useful phrases and a bare-bones grammar section, but the organization of the material could be better.
  The format is "back-pocket" handy with a durable binding so it won't fall apart...unlike other phrase books I have used.
  
  
• Useful inspite of itself.
  By AHSUJS0YG5S6Y on 2004-09-01
  I bought this on my first flight back from Japan after taking my first semester in Japanese. I thought that it supplied a ton of useful auxillary vocabulary to run with at the level of grammar I was capable of using. The book also has many slight mistakes, even I, a first year student, was able to pick out. It's got a few cute but dumb, potentially racist but we'll say ignorant drawings included. But so few that it cues one in as to how cheaply produced this probably was. I give it three stars though because I learned it forward and backward and broke it out numerous times to meet my needs in bars and train stations (never in restaurants for some reasons). And, to get me comic leverage in many conversations where I was not privy to the Japanese side of the chatter.
  
  
• I was able to communicate!!!
  By A3RA7VQMK4ON5D on 2006-11-10
  I feel this book is not only usefull for comunication with other people during my travel but also very well prepare to be user friendly. It was exellent in my trip to Japan have it with me.
  
  
• Very good in the beginning, but after that, it's ok
  By A3RR489DNZZ2T7 on 2007-02-14
  Just like I said. The first part of this phrasebook helps you understand grammar, small phrases, and many words, but after that it just tells you a lot of the things like sentences and more questions and answers.
  
  I recommend this if you are travelling, but if you are just trying to learn the language, I would not recommend it because it's hard to remember all of the questions, answers, and phrases it contains from about the 1/4 to the end of the book.
  
  But it was really good in explaining grammar, pronouns, and many other things. So buy it if you want.
  
  
• Great for travel
  By A1H88L8X6HM1BQ on 2008-01-05
  This book was invaluable to us in Japan. The size made it easy to carry around and it had all of the basic words and phrases that we needed to communicate. (We did supplement with a English-Japanese dictionary for some words, so that's why I've given it 4 stars instead of 5.)
  
  The English was spelled out to make it easier to pronounce the Japanese words. In cases when I butchered the pronounciation and was not understood, I could show the book to someone who would read the Kanji symbols to see what I was trying to say.
  
  The book was organized in a way that made it easy to find the phrase you were looking for. I bookmarked frequently used pages so I could access them even quicker. This was definitely a great reference for traveling to Japan.
  
  
• This book is great! ( MY review) I'm a skitzo and so am I!
  By on 2002-02-03
  this book is wonderful! It's perfect for a traveler or someone who just wants to learn Japanese. It gives you uncompleted sentences like "I like-" or "I have a-" and then provides you with words in the English-Japanese dictionary in the back. It also has things listed by categories like "student life" and "request and complaints". In the back there is also a Japanese-English dictionary. This awesome book also contains the Hiranga and Katakana alphabets. I highly recommend this book to anyone who's even bothered to read my reveiw.
  
  

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