Review of Japanese: A Comprehensive Grammar by Gerald B. Mathias

I considered the strengths of the book to be (not necessarily in strength order) its 19 pages of indexes (one an English one for "How to say ... (e.g. "you")?" questions, the other grammatical, for "What does ... mean?" questions; I estimated that each has about 1500 entries), its frequent comparisons of forms that would seem similar in meaning and/or form at first glance, its use almost entirely of real examples (the Linguist-List reviewer had mixed feelings, objecting to the fact that the sources were not identified), and explanations that on the whole range from clear to "right on." The translations of the examples are usually colloquial, matching the "flavor" of the original.

It looks far better organized, I thought, than it really is. Putting "Nationality" (is this really grammar?) between "nara" and "ne" as one of the 255 main entries strikes me odd. What are the chances that someone wanting to know how to say "French" would grab a grammar book and turn to the "N"s? (Myanmar isn't there, by the way.) (I just cut out four lines of further examples--this is after all a trivial point.) Each main entry is immediately followed by a general explanation and a list of subcategories so that one can perhaps go directly to the part that will help the most (good), but there are cases of overdoing the subdivision (14 subcategories for "ga [case particle]"), duplication (there's a "ga"/"wa" comparison elswhere, and there is a section on replacing "o" with "wa" under "te aru," although the topic is adequately covered under "wa," and other similar redundancies). Not all the translations are correct, and they may not have had adequate attention from a NS of English. I brought up some of these NG in this NG when I was writing the review: "... from tomorrow," "... an island nation alike," "I worry" for "ki-ni natte," and "the dollar is high" for "endaka da."

A few of the explanations don't come even close to "right on." In one of the subcategories of main entry "Noun," we learn only that "Person nouns" are "N indicative of a person"! Someone wanting to check on "to ieba" after Hirofumi Nagamura brought it up in a response to one of my dumber posts would learn that it is "used when one thinks of something." That's it! The "mae" and "ato" sections do not bother to point out the logic of their use after non-past and past forms respectively. I found the grammar categories sometimes strange, and the morphological analysis somewhat lacking, with a few minor errors.

I always find it hard to estimate how complete something like this is, to guess what might be missing. One thing I noted was that if one wanted to know how to say "more" in Japanese, he (or maybe she?) would be directed to five different areas by the English index. Anyone wanting to know how to say "less" is out of luck.

The first edition of such a book is bound to have lots of typos (I think we found some 200 in _The Complete Guide to Everyday Kanji_), but I always like to find as many as I can as an ego-salving exercise. I mentioned 13 in my review (I had to stay under the word limit ^_^), none of them really serious; perhaps the worst is "(See 138)" to get additional information about something mentioned in topic 138.

I summed up my review by saying that I would want the book available in my college bookstore, and might recomment it to a certain type of student. I would never have used such a thing myself when I was studying Japanese, but who knows?--maybe that's part of the reason I never learned it well.

☆ See all reviews by Gerald B. Mathias.