Introduction

We live in a wonderfully global and amazingly diverse society. Exchanging ideas, products, foods, and friendship across national and cultural boundaries is the key to making our lives richer and more meaningful and peaceful. Besides, traveling abroad is a lot of fun and an eye-opening experience. Grabbing your passport and setting off on an adventure is always exciting, but it's even more special when you can communicate with people in a different country in their own language.

If Japanese is the language you want to learn, for whatever reason, Japanese For Dummies, 3rd Edition, can help. It provides substantial learning materials and some of the cultural background behind the language. Now, I'm not saying that you'll be fluent overnight, but you will gain confidence, have fun, and continue to pick up more and more Japanese so that you can carry on a conversation with your Japanese-speaking co-worker, family member, friend, or neighbor.

About This Book

Japanese For Dummies, 3rd Edition, can help you whether you want to get familiar with Japanese because you're planning a trip to this island nation, because you deal with Japanese companies at work, because you want to understand Anime/Manga in Japanese, or because your new neighbor is Japanese and you want to be able to say good morning to him or her. (Try ohayo gozaimasu [oh-hah-yohh goh-zah-ee-mah-soo].) This book provides you with helpful and commonly used Japanese words and phrases on subjects as diverse as shopping, money, food, and sports in self-contained chapters and sections.

Simply turn to the topics that interest you the most, play the online audio examples, and start speaking! That's right, you don't have to go through this book in order. If I think you may want to know information that's contained in a different chapter than the one you're currently reading, I include a handy cross-reference so you can find the additional information when you're ready for it.

I also use a few conventions in this book to help your reading go smoothly:

• In many places throughout this book, Japanese terms appear in two forms: Japanese scripts (like what you would read if you were in Japan) and the Romanized forms of words (which appear in boldface so you can easily find them in the text). The official term for Romanized Japanese is romaji (rohh-mah-jee).
• Pronunciations in parentheses and meanings or English equivalents in another pair of parentheses follow the Japanese terms. Note that meanings and English equivalents appear in italics.
• Verb conjugations (lists that show you the basic forms of a verb) are given in tables in this order: the dictionary form, the negative (nai-) form, the stem form (or the form before the polite suffix -masu), and the te-form. You find Japanese scripts in the first column, romaji in the second column, and pronunciations in the third column. Here's a sample conjugation of the verb taberu (tah-beh-roo) (to eat):

  Japanese Script

  Romaji

  Pronunciation

  ???

  taberu

  tah-beh-roo

  ????

  tabenai

  tah-beh-nah-ee

  ??(??)

  tabe (masu)

  tah-beh (-mah-soo)

  ???

  tabete

  tah-beh-teh

• Keep in mind that Japanese verbs don't conjugate like English verbs. You can't find exact counterparts for English verb forms such as infinitives, gerunds, and participles. In addition, you don't conjugate Japanese verbs in terms of the person and number, so taberu can mean I eat, you eat, he eats, she eats, and they eat. This difference may take a little getting used to, but it should make your verb-learning life a little easier.

To help you remember the most important new words and see the language in context, this book includes some special elements to reinforce the Japanese terms you're studying:

• Talkin' the Talk dialogues: Hearing actual Japanese conversations is the best way to learn Japanese, which is why I include many dialogues under the "Talkin' the Talk" heading in this book. These exchanges show you the Japanese words in romaji, their pronunciations, and the English translations so that you can see how the language is actually used. All Talkin' the Talk dialogues are accompanied by audio recordings so that you can hear and pick up the natural intonation and rhythm that are essential in conversational interactions.
• Words to Know blackboards: Here's where you find key words and phrases from the Talkin' the Talk dialogues.
• Fun & Games activities: Located at the end of chapters, these amusing activities help reinforce the vocabulary you practice in each chapter. You can find the solutions to these activities in Appendix C.

This book also features compact yet convenient mini-dictionaries - both Japanese-English and English-Japanese - in Appendix A. They include only very basic vocabulary words, mainly content words such as nouns, adjectives, adverbs, and verbs. For your convenience, I mark the conjugation class of the verbs: u for u-verbs, ru for ru-verbs, and irr for irregular verbs. Slightly irregular u-verbs are specified as u (irr). In the English-Japanese mini-dictionary, I also designate verbs with (v.) because some English verbs also function as nouns. Last but certainly not least, I mark the type of adjectives: i for i-type adjectives and na for na-type adjectives. A few i-type adjectives with minor irregularities are specified as i (irr).

Speaking of language quirks, you should know that English and Japanese sometimes express the same concept in very different ways. And Japanese has many words and phrases that you can't translate into English at all. In this book, I want you to focus on what is actually said (the content and intended meaning) rather than how it's said. So instead of giving you a literal translation, I give you a nonliteral, natural English translation. For example, the phrase yoroshiku (yoh-roh-shee-koo) can be literally translated as appropriately, but the phrase really means pleased to meet you if you say it when meeting someone new. This book gives the nonliteral, pleased-to-meet-you type translations (sometimes with the more literal translation for reference).

Your exploration of Japanese will also show you different ways of looking at the world of language because Japanese doesn't contain the same type of grammar items as European languages do. For example, Japanese doesn't have equivalents of English articles like a and the. Some verbs in English correspond to adjectives in Japanese. Here's another example: The verb to want is best represented by the Japanese adjective hoshii, so be ready to see some mismatch in the part-of-speech categories. And Japanese doesn't have a singular/plural distinction, such as dog and dogs, either. The information about specificity and numbers is expressed in very different ways. Also, Japanese sometimes has linguistic systems that European languages don't have. For example, Japanese speech styles clearly indicate degrees of respect or familiarity within conversational contexts.

Foolish Assumptions

To write this book, I had to work off of some assumptions about you. I'm thinking that

• You don't know much Japanese, except maybe for a few words like karate and sushi.
• You're not planning on taking a language-proficiency test for Japanese next month, and you're not planning on becoming a professional Japanese translator in the near future. You just want to be able to communicate basic information in Japanese and get to know the Japanese language.
• You don't have time to spend hours and hours memorizing vocabulary and grammar rules.
• You want to have fun in addition to learning Japanese.

Icons Used in This Book

To help you find certain types of information quickly, I've placed some icons throughout the book. Here are the six icons to keep an eye out for:

If you're interested in information and advice about culture and travel, look for these icons. They draw your attention to interesting tidbits about Japan and Japanese culture.

If you understand grammar, you can create an infinite number of sentences, so I use this icon to point out discussions of grammar facts.

To ensure that you don't forget information important to the language, this icon serves as a reminder, just like a string tied around your finger.

This icon highlights suggestions that can make learning Japanese easier.

This icon can keep you from making embarrassing or really foolish mistakes.

Beyond the Book

This book is full of useful information, but you can find even more online! Check out this book's Cheat Sheet, which contains...