Satō - Japanese DeMYSTiFieD

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I am grateful to Karen Young and the other editors and staff at McGraw-Hill for their professional assistance and warm encouragement. Most people think that it would be wonderful if they could speak one or more foreign languages and communicate directly with people in other countries, travel around the world without an interpreter, explore many different cultures, and learn about many different ways of thinking and living.

Our knowledge of foreign languages will definitely widen our horizon and increase our future professional career opportunities. Some people also just enjoy learning foreign languages. There are many differences, but also many similarities among languages. Once you learn one foreign language, the second one will be much easier to learn. Because you are reading the introduction of Japanese Demystified, you must be thinking about studying Japanese, for whatever reason. You may be interested in Japanese traditional, contemporary, or pop culture, for example, karate, cooking, magna, or anime.

You may be a high school or college student who is studying Japanese in a classroom or by yourself. You may be thinking of taking a nationwide Japanese proficiency test to boost your opportunities for college admission or employment. You may be a high school teacher of French who is thinking of teaching both French and Japanese for promotion. You may be already fluent in Chinese and thinking of becoming trilingual to get engaged in a trading business. You may be an employee at an American pharmaceutical company that closely collaborates with Japanese counterpart companies. Or, you may have grandparents and a bunch of cousins in Japan! Japanese Demystified provides you with easy-to-access and easy-to-understand basic grammar explanations ranging from simple sentence structures like A is B to complex sentence structures including passive and causative constructions.

When you have any grammar questions, you can check the table of contents or scan the bold-face headings in the book and just read the relevant section. However, this book can also be used to develop your knowledge of Japanese grammar step-by-step as you develop your Japanese communication skills using other materials because Japanese Demystified is organized based on both linguistic categories and communicative functions. You can use Japanese Demystified as your grammar-building tool, regardless of whether you are studying Japanese in a conversation class, with a tutor, or by yourself.

If you are using this book as a grammar reference book, you can scan the table of contents or the bold-face headings to find the grammar topic you are interested in checking. This book discusses most basic grammar points covered during the first one or two years of college Japanese classrooms in the United States. If you are using this book to build your knowledge of Japanese grammar step by step, you can read each chapter sequentially starting with and doing all the oral/written practices to reinforce the new material presented in the chapter.

This book has a total of twenty chapters divided into four parts. Each chapter begins with the statement of its general objectives and then provides a number of relatively short sections featuring specific grammar/function points like The Question Particle ka and Describing Peoples Appearances. Each section provides an explanation of the given grammar/function point with Japanese examples, as well as some bullets and tables when needed. All the example sentences are written in Japanese orthography, hiragana, katakana, and kanji and are immediately followed by their romanization to help you pronounce them correctly, just in case you are not familiar with some characters. After one or more sections, youll find oral and written practice sections that reinforce the new content in the chapter. Oral practices usually ask you to read the phrases and sentences out loud.

They are intended to strengthen your understanding of the grammar/function point(s), show how they are actually used in authentic and natural utterances in Japanese, and help you become able to use them for communication. The accompanying audio CD provides you with native speakers pronunciation of all the sentences in the Oral Practice sections, so you can learn the authentic pronunciations and appropriate rhythms and intonations. Written practices usually ask you to choose the correct item, fill in the blanks, or write sentences. They are intended to develop and strengthen your ability to form and write Japanese phrases and sentences using the given grammar/function point(s). Each chapter ends with an open-book quiz with ten multiple-choice questions that review the concepts introduced in the chapter. You should try to achieve a score of 80 percent on the chapter-ending quiz before moving on to the next chapter.

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