Teach Yourself Complete Japanese - Book and 2 Audio CDs
432 page Book and 2CDs
Are you looking for a complete course in Japanese which takes you effortlessly from beginner to confident speaker? Whether you are starting from scratch, or are just out of practice, Complete Japanese will guarantee success! Now fully updated to make your language learning experience fun and interactive. You can still rely on the benefits of a top language teacher and our years of teaching experience, but now with added learning features within the course and online. The course is structured in thematic units and the emphasis is placed on communication, so that you effortlessly progress from introducing yourself and dealing with everyday situations, to using the phone and talking about work. By the end of this course, you will be at Level B2 of the Common European Framework for Languages: Can interact with a degree of fluency and spontaneity that makes regular interaction with native speakers quite possible without strain for either party.
Learn effortlessly with a new easy-to-read page design and interactive features:
NOT GOT MUCH TIME?
One, five and ten-minute introductions to key principles to get you started.
AUTHOR INSIGHTS
Lots of instant help with common problems and quick tips for success, based on the author's many years of experience.
GRAMMAR TIPS
Easy-to-follow building blocks to give you a clear understanding.
USEFUL VOCABULARY
Easy to find and learn, to build a solid foundation for speaking.
DIALOGUES
Read and listen to everyday dialogues to help you speak and understand fast.
PRONUNCIATION
Don't sound like a tourist! Perfect your pronunciation before you go.
TEST YOURSELF
Tests in the book and online to keep track of your progress.
EXTEND YOUR KNOWLEDGE
Extra online articles at: www.teachyourself.com to give you a richer understanding of the culture and history of Japan.
TRY THIS
Innovative exercises illustrate what you've learnt and how to use it.
Brand new edition - more lively and up to date .
New audio recording with top Japanese voice-overs.
All three Japanese scripts taught...
...but student can learn spoken language using only roman script.
Cultural information in every unit
Table of Contents:
About the course
Pronunciation guide
Unit 1: How do you do? I’m called Robert Franks
Unit 2: I watch TV everyday
Unit 3: Let’s do some shopping!
Unit 4: Where is the cinema?
Unit 5: That person is famous you know!
Unit 6: How was your trip?
Unit 7: I want to be an astronaut!
Unit 8: I like living a Japanese lifestyle! End of section 1 Review
Unit 9: On Saturdays I get up at about 10 and have a leisurely breakfast
Unit 10: What are you doing at the moment?
Unit 11: Before we drink this wine, let’s drink something like beer!
Unit 12: Let’s have a go at reading katakana!
Unit 13: I have had the experience of living abroad
Unit 14: I’m thinking of going to America next year
Unit 15: Please don’t go into that meeting room
Unit 16: End of Section 2 Review
Unit 17: Intransitive and transitive verb pairs
Unit 18: Modifying nouns
Unit 19: Causative and passive
Unit 20: Conditional
Unit 21: Introduction to honorific language
Unit 22: Review of section 3
About the Author
Helen Gilhooly has lived and worked in Japan, and has a PGCE and an MA in Japanese. She is a university teacher trainer, language materials writer and senior director at a specialist language college in the UK.
About the Japanese Language
Japanese is a language spoken by over 130 million people, in Japan and in Japanese emigrant communities around the world. It is an agglutinative language and is distinguished by a complex system of honorifics reflecting the hierarchical nature of Japanese society, with verb forms and particular vocabulary to indicate the relative status of speaker and listener. The sound inventory of Japanese is relatively small, and has a lexically distinct pitch-accent system.
Japanese vocabulary has been heavily influenced by loans from other languages. A vast number of words were borrowed from Chinese, or created from Chinese models, over a period of at least 1,500 years. Since the late 19th century, Japanese has borrowed a considerable number of words from Indo-European languages, primarily English. Because of the special trade relationship between Japan and first Portugal in the 16th century, and then mainly Holland in the 17th century, Portuguese and Dutch have also been influential. German linguist, Johann Joseph Hoffmann noticed the systematic relationship between Japanese, Mongolian and Manchu language and wrote a book in the 19th century.The Japanese language is written with a combination of three different types of scripts: Chinese characters called kanji, and two syllabic scripts made up of modified Chinese characters, hiragana and katakana . The Latin alphabet, rōmaji , is also often used in modern Japanese, especially for company names and logos, advertising, and when inputting Japanese into a computer. Western style Arabic numerals are generally used for numbers, but traditional Sino-Japanese numerals are also commonplace.
Like Latin-derived words in English, kango words typically are perceived as somewhat formal or academic compared to equivalent Yamato words. Indeed, it is generally fair to say that an English word derived from Latin/French roots typically corresponds to a Sino-Japanese word in Japanese, whereas a simpler Anglo-Saxon word would best be translated by a Yamato equivalent.A much smaller number of words has been borrowed from Korean and Ainu. Japan has also borrowed a number of words from other languages, particularly ones of European extraction, which are called gairaigo. This began with borrowings from Portuguese in the 16th century, followed by borrowing from Dutch during Japan's long isolation of the Edo period. With the Meiji Restoration and the reopening of Japan in the 19th century, borrowing occurred from German, French and English. Currently, words of English origin are the most commonly borrowed.
In the Meiji era, the Japanese also coined many neologisms using Chinese roots and morphology to translate Western concepts. The Chinese and Koreans imported many of these pseudo-Chinese words into Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese via their kanji in the late 19th and early 20th centuries. For example, seiji ("politics"), and kagaku ("chemistry") are words derived from Chinese roots that were first created and used by the Japanese, and only later borrowed into Chinese and other East Asian languages. As a result, Japanese, Chinese, Korean, and Vietnamese share a large common corpus of vocabulary in the same way a large number of Greek- and Latin-derived words are shared among modern European languages, although many academic words formed from such roots were certainly coined by native speakers of other languages, such as English.
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