Basic Japanese

An introduction to Japanese through authentic, commonly-used sentences.

This best-selling Japanese textbook is a user-friendly guide for beginners designed for use in a classroom or self-study. It adopts a very different approach from other Japanese language books—teaching you the underlying sentence structures and patterns of Japanese along with essential vocabulary and phrases so you can attain basic fluency quickly. The emphasis is on acquiring a working knowledge of simple, everyday Japanese sentences.

This new edition has been thoroughly updated and expanded to reflect the way Japanese is spoken in Japan today. Manga illustrations have been added to each dialogue along with the latest jargon for the internet, social media, cellphones, and IT, and a bidirectional dictionary is included at the back.

Each self-contained lesson presents a simple four-step method:

Step 1: Basic Sentences: Each lesson begins with a few simple sentences. Essential vocabulary and phrases are learned within the context of these sentences. Audio recordings by native speakers are in the free CD-ROM in the book.

Step 2: Communication Notes: A detailed discussion of each sentence follows to assist you in understanding the underlying structure and how to form new sentences based on the same pattern.

Step 3: Everyday Conversations: Authentic dialogues with manga illustrations and native-speaker recordings show you how people communicate naturally in Japan today through simple, everyday interactions.

Step 4: Exercises: Several sets of easy exercises help reinforce your understanding of the key points presented in the lesson and review what you have learned so you can move on to the next lesson.

Samuel E. Martin was a master teacher of the Japanese language and a major force in language learning in the postwar U.S. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees in Oriental languages from the University of California at Berkeley and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University. At Yale he served as chairman of the Department of East and South Asian Languages and Literatures and the Department of Linguistics. He is the author of numerous books and papers on Japanese and Korean, including the definitive A Reference Grammar of Japanese and A Reference Grammar of Korean.

Eriko Sato is lecturer of Japanese and Japanese linguistics and the director of the Pre-College Japanese Program and the Teacher Certification Program for Japanese at the State University of New York at Stony Brook, where she received her Ph.D. in Linguistics in 1996. She authored Japanese for Dummies (Wiley, 2002), Japanese Demystified (McGraw Hill, 2008), and Contemporary Japanese: A Textbook for College Students (Tuttle, 2005), and co-authored My First Japanese Kanji Book (Tuttle, 2009) and Essential Japanese Grammar (Tuttle, 2012).