Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #18616 in Books
• Published on: 2008-07-01
• Original language: English, Japanese
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 260 pages

Customer Reviews

Excellent Resource
I highly recommend this little gem of a book, it contains many phrases which can help even a child to get through Japan. It contains alot of other information too! Buy it! buy it now! :)

handy for everyday use in japan
I have basic knowledge of written and spoken Japanese and found this book very helpfull in getting by in day to day things. I lent it to my brother when he visited me in tokyo and he coulnd't have gotten by without it. As most of the Japanese's English is abominable you really need a small pocket dictionary or a phrase book.
Size makes this particular book very handy. I would have liked some more young persons words and catchy phrases.

Poor indexing and unbalanced coverage
Having used this in Japan for a couple months, I find this phrasebook fairly useless. We don't even bother carrying it around anymore.

The indexing is poor: meaning that you cannot easily find what you are looking for.

The coverage is unbalanced: why does it spend so much space on phrases for talking to the opposite sex? If you need a phrasebook to ask someone to marry you, then you have a problem! Yet the coverage of useful phrases, food items, etc, is quite weak, with many useless things included and the basics missed out.

The romanization scheme used is non-standard, making it annoying to use in conjunction with other books.