Hey,
Just got a book that I think others might be interested in:
Compared to DBJG (the closest other thing to this that I know of):
this is a lot bigger. Has 3000 entries with many entries for spoken only constructions.
this book is at a higher level than DBJG. This book is described as being written at an “intermediate level”. Most entries give a fairly brief explanation of the construction, nuances, and then example sentences. There are not the long text passages describing the “basic” constructions. There is also less explicit help concerning formation(though it does tell you how the constructions are formed).
Lots of example sentences
says it contains all grammar covered through N1 and beyond
about $45
Since there is no preview on amazon I will recreate an entry to give you a sense of what it’s like:
「てのこと」
「V - てのこと」
{3 example sentences}
The form X は Y てのことだ means that X has or will become possible because condition Y has been satisfied. Emphasizes a necessary condition. Although used in conversation, not particularly informal in tone.
All in all, if you are a person who is pretty solid on basic grammar, this book is seems like it might be easier to use while reading and translating that the DxJG series. The example sentences seem less artificial.
I’ve been raving about this book since I found about it earlier this year. Some people wonder how this could be better than the already great DOJG series. And to be fair is just different. Much more straight to the point and overall I think it handles to cover more concepts.
I’ve seen this happen for contractions and conversational terms, usually harder to find in the DOJG series.
Since you actually have the English version of the book, would you mind answering a couple of questions?
Are the example sentences given in romaji, or just kana/kanji (w/furigana)? The romaji is probably my biggest gripe with DBJP, I find it very hard to ignore.
How many pages is the book? Since Japanese publishers don’t seem to offer ebooks, I’ve been sending my Japanese grammar books to a book scanning service so that I can have them on my iPad when I travel, but the price is based on page count and amazon doesn’t seem to list it.
It has 760 pages.
No romaji in the example sentences. Kanji with furigana.
It has double column of text in every page, so it manages to fit a huge amount of content (basically what the DOJG series does in three volumes) in a single book.
I don’t think it would go well with using it as the first study tool. I feel like these kinda of stuff go well after you actually learn the concept somewhere else. It allows you to get extra info from it and have a more complete image of what you learned.
Hum, readable enough. The stuff I don’t understand is mostly because I haven’t learned the vocab/grammar yet, so it’s just a matter of time, I’d guess?
Funny that you mention that. Yesterday I was trying to explain to a JP friend how 天ぷら actually came from the Portuguese cuisine and that it was the Portuguese navigators that shared the recipe with the Japanese. This is where I ended up
If you are just staring to learn grammar you want a textbook of some kind.
Tae Kim’s grammar book is popular, free, online…
The genki 1 and genki 2 textbooks are very popular as well.
This resource (Handbook of Japanese grammar patterns) and books like DBJG (Dictionary of basic japanese grammar), are like dictionaries. When you encounter a grammar construction you can’t understand you can look it up.
So I would get Tae kim first. and then additionally either one of the dictionaries. For a beginner I might recommend DBJG if for no other reason that the essays at the beginning. There is alot of great info on sentence structure (in general).
