Product Description

Whether you want to reserve a hotel room, hire a bicycle or ask for a cup of tea – The Rough Guide Japanese Phrasebook will help you all the way. The A-Z English to Japanese and A-Z Japanese to English translations will have you speaking the language even before you arrive. Practice your pronunciation with the 16-pages of additional scenario material; available as downloadable audio files, the scenarios have been recorded by native Japanese speakers and are perfect for either your computer or iPod. This thoroughly-revised phrasebook includes a detailed grammar section and a helpful menu and drinks list reader to ensure you always choose the right dish. It’s customary in Japan to bow and say ‘itadakimas’ before a meal and this phrasebook will help you to fit right in – tanoshi goryokõ o!

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #219743 in Books
• Published on: 2006-04-27
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 304 pages

About the Author
Compiled by Lexus.

Customer Reviews

Great phrase book
An extremely useful book to have in a country where the language is so different from ours and few people speak English.
Well worth the money!

Not bad, but not massively helpful...
I bought this phrasebook because I was going to Japan for a couple of weeks. The introductory section of basic phrases (a couple of pages) was quite useful, but I didn't find the rest of the layout that helpful.

There are a number of scenarios (e.g. asking directions, booking accommodation) but by nature these are obviously scripted and if your conversation goes anywhere outside the boundaries of the one conversation set out on the page, you'll be floundering. It would be much more helpful to set out a basic scenario and then a list of vocabulary associated with that scenario (e.g. variations on the directions you might be given).

After the scenarios is basically a short dictionary of useful words and occasionally phrases associated with those words. Not bad, but again I probably would have organised all these words under themes rather than just alphabetically. Then there's a reasonably useful list of vocabulary for menus.

I flicked through the Lonely Planet phrasebook in a shop after I'd bought my Rough Guide one and wished I had bought that instead - it looked a bit more useful!

Disappointing purchase
In my opinion, this is more a dictionary than it is a phrasebook and there are far better phrasebooks available.

I travelled to Japan recently with a small group of friends and one of them had already bought a phrasebook, so I decided to get this as opposed to my first choice, which was the one that my friend had bought, and I must say that I was very disappointed with it. The scenarios in the front are next to useless and the layout is also quite confusing to navigate (other than being obviously alphabetical). There also seemed to be very few "usable" phrases in this book.

If you're looking for an English to Japanese dictionary, you can't go far wrong with this. On the other hand, if you're looking for a user-friendly Japanese phrasebook, I'd keep looking at some of the other available products.