Japanese Language Learning Reviews

Zakennayo! by Philip Cunningham

Score:
4 / 10
Pros:
dialogues cover real (but rarely polite), believable social situations; the tone and commentary are often funny and over-the-top; has no shame in its coverage of the dirty, gritty aspects of Japanese; focus on conversation and vocab building; tackles a range of seedy topics; cultural notes explain the shady side of Japanese thought (they’re often worth your time even when the dialogues and vocab lists aren’t)

Cons:
the material is too strong for some readers; romaji only (a negative since this book is better for experienced, intermediate students); too advanced for most beginning learners (although the cultural commentary will be worth a read); no index or vocabulary appendix, only somewhat redeemed by reference-friendly table of contents; this book includes plenty slang words & phrases that are now out of date; there seem to be some errors in the text, so verify before taking their word for it; even those phrases that don’t sound odd or outdated will be hard for a gaijin to pull off in real-life contexts; the author fails to differentiate the gender & register of many phrases, which is an extremely important consideration when using your Japanese slang

Zakennayo!: The Real Japanese You Were Never Taught in School dishes out twelve lessons of everything dirty, sexual and mischievous in the Japanese language and culture. Cunningham and his sketch artist, Brandt, engage students who’ve slogged their way through the typical formal Japanese texts with some in-your-face, real, downright inappropriate Japanese.

Each chapter starts out with a cultural note about some grittier aspect of urban Japan and the Japanese language. The focus here is street culture – sex, stereotypes, alcohol and cursing. Then, you’ll take a crack at dialogues and vocabulary lists. The vocab lists match key words in the dialogue. These conversations showcase the uncensored tone of this book, and are relevant to the variety of situations and social scenes where people really use language (life’s dark corners, if you will). Stylized cartoon drawings here and there add to Zakennayo‘s flippantly rude, yet silly, attitude.

Unfortunately, a handful of persistent issues keep Zakennayo! from being a cultural and linguistic tour de force. Japanese speakers will find many phrases awkward or outdated, which means you’ll have to be careful using what you learn here. On top of that, the author doesn’t go far enough to explain 1) how phrases will come off once you say them in Japan and 2) who should say this phrase (young men to young women? old men to older men? – this kind of thing makes a big difference in colloquial Japanese).

Also, for all the examples here, it’s a shame that the book only includes romaji (and without vowel length markings!) That problem struck me as particularly acute, since Zakennayo! is aimed at learners with some formal experience studying Japanese. Why no hiragana, katakana and kanji? Why fail to include even long vowels?

If you’ve immersed yourself in formal, polite Japanese, but want to get an over-the-top taste of Japanese slang and seedy conversation, Zakennayo! might suit you. Between the dialogues and notes, you’re sure to learn a few things here. At its best, it delivers an appealing, informative and shocking view of Japan’s street lingo. At worst, it might come off as trite, less than helpful, and outdated, in which case you’ll wish it resigned to the humor section of your local bookstore.