Review of Basic Sentence Patterns by Charles Eicher

This book is by the author the two books I recommend to students most often, "All About Particles" and "Japanese Verbs at a Glance" and this book looks like it is worthy of similar praise. I haven't had much time to examine it, but even if I did, it would be hard for me to evaluate the usefullness of a book targeted at beginners. I can only say that when I find a beginner's book with a few sentence structures that I've never heard of, I better investigate it more thoroughly. So I bought it.

The book, while described as a dictionary, isn't really laid out for dictionary-style lookups, it is a program of instruction in all the basic sentence patterns. It is targeted at beginner to intermediate levels, since it claims to provide all the basic patterns needed to pass the Japanese Language Proficiency Test levels 3 & 4.

The book starts at the absolute beginning, the simplest sentence examples build gradually to more complex forms throughout the book, showing prototype sentences followed by variations that explain the subtleties of each pattern. This is particularly useful towards the later chapters, which go into traditionally troublesome patterns like -tara/-eba/nara, and causative, passive causative etc.

The table of contents shows each structure, which makes it easy to find the chapter you need to study, and is much more useful than the index in the back. The book's typesetting is excellent, with example sentences in bold kanji followed by romaji and an English translation. It comes with an appendix of verb conjugations, which appears to be identical to the appendix in "Japanese Verbs at a Glance." It also has a second appendix with adjective conjugations.

My only possible complaint with this book is the price. Like all Kodansha books printed in Japan, it seems a bit high at $22. But this is fairly typical of all Japanese textbooks, so it still looks like an excellent value for anyone studying at the equivalent of college level 1st through 3rd year classes.

☆ See all reviews by Charles Eicher.