Books >> Reference >> Dictionaries & Thesauruses

Seriously, if you want to learn Kana, this is the book for you. It starts with a good explanation of the why/how/what of these two syllabaries. Then it goes right into hiragana but doesn't overwhelm you. After you've been introduced to enough material, you get a review. (There are tons of reviews and they all cover word examples that are practical to know for cultural or historic events.) Once you've completed hiragana, the book moves on to katakana. The system builds upon itself and the two syllabaries make sense the way they're presented in this book.

I started this book back in XMAS 2003. Three months later, I know both kana syllabaries like the back of my hand.

Best Japanese purchase EVER.

The material is divided in sets of characters (8-10), at the end of each the mini review follows. A good way to study (my suggestion) is to practice writing the characters (preferably in a blank piece fo paper, one sheet per character), do the mini review, make 'flash cards' with the words and the next day do a review of previously studied material and advance to the following set of characters. In that pace I was able to finish the book in about two weeks (I borrowed it from the campus library), but my ability to read and write was very good by the end (a couple of Japanese classmates where quite impressed).

The book definitly does what it claims to do, that is to teach reading and writing the Hiragana and the Katakana. It does not claim to be a grammar, syntax, vocabulary or phrase book and does not deal in any way with such aspects of the language. It has nothing to do at all with the Kanji; nevertheless, it is rather futile attempting to read anything in Japanese without prior solid knowledge of the syallabaries (they are used to show pronounciation of the Kanji at many texts and the common script is always a mixture of Kanji and Kana signs).

If you want a place to start your trip through the actual Japanese language, going beyond romanized scripts and phrase books, this is an exellent place to start.

te evita gastos de excuelas y academias...Y si ya sabes algo de inglés, como fue mi caso, LO MEJORA ENORMEMENTE ! Te da más vocabulario y flexibilidad al hablar !

Are you disinterested or uninterested? When do you say alternately or should it be alternatively? These are words we hear everyday; but they are often confused and misused, even in the mainstream media. Help is at hand. The famous English author Kingsley Amis's last book The King's English will provide professional writers and those who care about their language, expert guidance in the usage of English.

Amis is best known for his novels such as Lucky Jim and the Old Devils, but he was also a skilled observer and commentator on late 20th Century life and language. Amis died in 1995, with this book being published posthumously, two years later.

In this book, he takes us from the classic formalism of old-school academic scholars with their groundings in Latin and Greek, through to the street-wise pop-media of the contemporary world. He bridges the gap between the rigorous, proscribed rules of the original 1926 classic H.W. Fowler's Modern English Usage and the modern, pragmatic world where English is recognised as the global language. Despite being an Englishman, Amis acknowledged the ascendancy and the practical "correctness" of American English.

Amis in his book is very careful not to be too pedantic with his comments. In his entry on the pronunciation of kilometre, he argues against the common practice of stressing the second syllable and therefore making it sound like a device to measure items grouped in thousands. Amis assures us such a device once existed, but he concludes "not many people know that, or would care if they did."

Amis has fun criticising - and gently mocking - fashionable trends in writing, particularly in the field of newspaper journalism. In his entry on headlines, Amis gives examples of sub-editors stringing together three or more nouns to make a headline, such as, SCHOOL COACH CRASH DRAMA. He also criticises the journalistic trick of overloading descriptions in one sentence, which he calls the "gorged-snake construction."

Political abuse of the language is also put under the Amis spotlight. How often do we hear politicians "refuting", when all they are doing is denying, and not proving the falsity of the allegation, which is what the word really means?

The King's English is not an exhaustive guide to language use, but anybody who makes a living from writing or takes other people's writing seriously will want to keep a copy of this book close by their dictionary. Should we be implying or inferring this? Either way, this book is inspirational, amusing as well as instructive.

This book shouldn't REALLY be your usage guide. Used as one, it would leave you feeling befuddled, and perhaps belittled. But it reads a bit like a usage guide, with an alphabetical list of topics for Amis's rants, e.g., "genteelisms," "whom," "get," etc. With insults freely being applied to people who speak in certain ways, however, it is more like a collection of Amis's opinions, to be used in conjunction with a real usage guide (as Amis admits in the introduction).

I am giving this book 5 stars because I am a language pedant, and find this stuff extremely entertaining. I read through it excitedly in one sitting; it's fascinating to me to find out what grammar points irk other language pedants. If you are not a language pedant, however, you may be bored by this book.