Japanese Language Learning Reviews

Japanese Verbs and Essentials of Grammar by Rita Lampkin

Score:
5 / 10
Pros:
coverage of most every topic of basic and intermediate Japanese grammar; lots of examples; good index and table of contents; if you come to this book looking for examples to clarify a specific construction, you’ll find what you’re looking for

Cons:
specific words and endings are listed with examples, without much indication of how this fits into overall grammar; all romaji, no Japanese script; the lengthy, extra vocabulary sections feel out of place; difficult to get a grasp on the book’s underlying goal

Rita Lampkin’s Japanese Verbs and Essentials of Grammar strives to present a comprehensive, searchable reference grammar book for beginning and intermediate students learning Japanese. About fifty pages of the book deal with Japanese verbs, while another seventy pages introduce other grammar points (“essentials of grammar”), like particles, noun expressions and adjectives.

In general, chapters present a specific topic (like the verb desu) in one to five pages. Most of those pages are filled with lists of important words (like key particles) or endings (like Base 1 Endings, used in forming negative verbs). Each important term will then list a short explanation and a couple Japanese examples. The particle kara, for instance, tells that it’s a “direction indicator: from. Follows an origin, source or beginnning point.” Then, there are examples of kara in use, like “?saka kara kimashita. He came from Osaka.”

Certain sections, like chapters on verbs and numerical classifiers, also give word forms in tables for visual understanding of patterns. As this is purely a grammar reference, there are no practice exercises or teacher-style lessons explaining various parts of grammar.

The book ends with themed vocabulary sections typical of what you might expect from a college textbook or Japanese travel phrasebook, but less attractive. You can find words or phrases about, say, shopping and education, but this feels oddly out of place.

This list of all hiragana and katakana, as well as the informative but formulaic four-page intro to kanji can hardly count as a real introduction to the Japanese script. What’s more, this is the only Japanese writing in the book, since all the examples in the actual body of the book are Romanized for English eyes. Fortunately, a good index saves the back of the book from being entirely third-rate material.

Japanese Verbs and Essentials of Grammar does cover quite a bit of elementary and intermediate Japanese grammar, but its tactics aren’t quite right. Listing forms followed by explanations and examples makes it hard to learn anything systematically here. Instead, we’re challenged to search for specific words or endings we’d like to learn about, which keeps students from really mastering the underlying substance of grammar.

If you can keep this as one of your reference books and come back to it when you need examples and a quick explanation of a specific Japanese construction, you’ll be able to make use of it. Otherwise, there are better ways to get a feel for how Japanese grammar work,s and friendlier, more detailed guides to learn specific aspects of Japanese grammar.