Product Description

A complete reference guide to modern Japanese grammar, this fills many gaps left by previous textbooks. Grammar points are put in context by examples from a range of Japanese media. Arranged alphabetically, includes detailed index of terms.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #6104204 in Books
• Published on: 2001-02-05
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Library Binding
• 656 pages

Review
... this reference grammar comes into its own as an extremely valuable and usable source of information, complementing many textbooks, and filling the gaps which they unavoidably leave. - Forum for Modern Language

Japanese: a comprehensive grammar will certainly be appearing on my new reading lists. - Royal Asiatic Society

The approach taken in this book is data-driven, and the breadth of the structure patterns found in the data is quite remarkable. Moreover, as mentioned in the preface, the data revealed some gaps between the pedagogical or prescriptive grammar and the actual use of the language ... There is no doubt that the authenticity and the richness of the examples make this book a fine addition to the existing list of books on Japanese grammar. - Linguist List, September 2001

About the Author
Stefan Kaiser is Professor at the Institute of Literature and Linguistics, University of Tsukuba, Japan.
Yasuko Ichikawa is Professor at the International Center University of Tokyo.
Noriko Kobayashi is Associate Professor at the Institute of Literature and Linguistics, University of Tsukuba.
Hilofumi Yamamoto is Assistant Professor at the Institute of Literature and Linguistics, University of Tsukuba.

Customer Reviews

Comprehensive is right.
This book covers lots of little known (or poorly covered) grammar points in Japanese, which is where most of the value lies in it. I didn't like the fact that the level of the grammar point being covered verses the level of the example sentences used to demonstrate that point were at different levels. It seemed to me that many of the grammar points being covered were at the intermediate level, while the example sentences contained many words of political and business nature (falling squarely at the advanced level). This is a VERY AWKWARD way to learn the grammar point.

That was my gripe. Now on to the praise.

What I found most valuable about this book is that it clarifies the meaning of grammar points which aren't covered in other books. It also explains many words that have a wide number of uses. A dictionary couldn't possibly explain these types of terms, and these terms are beyond the scope of many other books.

If you're serious about learning Japanese, I suggest you get A LOT OF BOOKS ON JAPANESE. At a minimum you should start with a dictionary, a verb guide, a book of sentence patterns and a few textbooks. Once you learn how to conjugate Japanese verbs, know sentence patterns and have a good vocabulary then this book will be the next step for you.

This is overall a good book because it chooses to cover a limited (255 to be precise) number of points throughly.

Linguists, you'd better rethink; communicators, buy now!
In some of the previous reviews, this book has been harshly critisized. I believe this is all due to the unique style this grammar adopts, that is, listing sentence patterns from A to Z rather than describing each grammatical idea meticulously.
To linguists, this style seems unusual and even worthless; it lacks the detailed descriptions of grammatical ideas. There's nothing (or little at all) like the verbs of Japanese are such and such, the notion of "topic" is such and such or the like, although it contains decent categorization of verbs.
To communicators, that is, students, teachers, and even native speakers (me!) this book serves as a wonderful reference, for instance, when you want to know how to use the discourse marker "demo" or the complex particle "kara-wa" in a proper context.
Perhaps a few drawbacks include the oddity of some example sentenses which is hard to judge "natural" or at least "idiomatic." According to the introduction, examples were extracted from newspaper articles. They are acceptable by and large, but I presume the authors failed to pick out odd ones from the corpus data (the web?) they utilized.
In conclusion, I recommend practical user of my mother tongue perchase this grammer. This may leave much to be desired linguistically but do benefit "lay people" in need of information about proper usage.

As good as useless due to complete lack of structure
When it comes to grammars, a carefully designed structure is very
helpful to the advanced student trying to check up on things they
already sort of know and to fill in gaps in their knowledge; it's
completely indispensable for the student (especially the autodidact)
at a somewhat earlier stage of study who needs to get an overview of
what there is to learn and how different topics relate.

So then, how should a comprehensive grammar be structured? This
question is especially difficult in the case of a grammar written in
English for a language such as Japanese whose grammatical categories
are often not strictly comparable to those of English. For instance,
what should be done with the Japanese words that correspond to English
adjectives? Many of them share some (though not all) properties with
what we'd call verbs. Others have (some) properties in common with
nouns. Yet others straddle both categories. How should sections on
these topics be divided? A tough problem, requiring lots of thought
and experimentation and compromise and pedagogical experience and
feedback from readers of drafts etc. etc.

Unfortunately, the compilers of this grammar have apparently decided
to spare themselves all this hard work and simply throw a bunch of
information at us without as good as no structure to speak of. The
actual "organizational" principle of the book is an "alphabetical
order" of grammar. Whatever that means. Many of the entries are just
Japanese words and morphemes. OK. But many others are grammatical
terms as heterogeneous as the following:

"Conjoining by comma";
"Morphology";
"Nationality";
"Sentence types";
"Spontaneous sentences" [??];
"Vocabulary" [!!]

Want to know about the past tense? Sorry, no entry on that. You can
of course go to the index in the back and find 7 different pointers to
"past (tense)". But these pointers don't give any indication of what
they relate to: verbal tense? adjectival tense? sequence of tenses
with "tara"? the use of the past form "hoshikatta" of the word
"hoshii"??? (yes, that's what the index pointer to page 486 is about).
So it's back to: flip flip flip... Honestly, I really believe a more
useful set-up would be a completely unstructured heap of stuff which
was electronically searchable.

What the compilers of course could've and should've done would be:
compromise on some division of topics, put "past tense" sections in
chapters on verbs or adjectives or whatever, and provide ample
cross-referencing. An example of this strategy in action is "Master
the Basics" Japanese grammar by Akiyama & Akiyama (ISBN
0-8120-9046-2): a less ambitious undertaking and not my favorite book,
but at least some thought went into the structure.

This is all such a shame, since it's not as if the compilers of
*Comprehensive Japanese Grammar* are a lazy bunch. It's packed with
lots of examples for every topic, many of them real ones culled
unedited from newspapers etc. A huge amount of effort obviously went
into this, only to be essentially wasted since no one bothered to
organize the results.

One has to ask further, why would the authours bother to release an
alphabetically "organized" Japanese grammar when a one already exists
in Makino & Tsuitsui's *Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar* (ISBN
4-7890-0299-3)? That one at least has some (albeit
frustration-tainted) usefulness, since what it really is is a
dictionary of Japanese "grammatical words" and morphemes, with basics
of word order, morphology (like formation of past tense), etc. put in
a separate, organized 50+ page section instead of being littered
throughout the entries. (*Comprehensive Japanese Grammar* does indeed
cover more material than *Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar*, but
for that very reason it needs MORE structure rather than less.)

Lastly, an open question as to why this alphabetic (non)organizational
principle seems to keep reappearing in Japanese grammars. One wonders
if there isn't some notion that the "exotic" character of Japanese
makes it inherently untameable by the careful organization found (for
example) elsewhere in the Routledge comprehensive and essential
grammar series. But then how exactly does Routledge's grammar of
Chinese (ISBN: 0415135354), also spoken way out there in the
"mysterious East", pull off a reasonable division into chapters on
"verbs", "nouns", etc.? Is it the complex morphology of Japanese that
makes it untameable? But then why does Routledge's Finnish grammar
(ISBN: 0415207053) manage to tame that language's even more complex
(and equally non-Indo-European) morphology? Please.

IN SUMMARY: bought this book, hated it, sold it, found other better
ones (see above). I advise skipping steps 1--3.