Basic Connections: Making Your Japanese Flow (Power Japanese Series) (Kodansha's Children's Classics)
PrefaceThe purpose of this book is to provide helpful information about Japanese expressions and usages that facilitate the flow of ideas and thought in written and spoken Japanese.During my thirty-year teaching career, I have seen a great variety of mistakes, many of which were the result of cultural differences or differences in the way that second-language learners and native speakers of Japanese conceptualize language. The book attempts to help students become aware of these differences in conceptualization and to provide them with the linguistic tools to overcome these differences, thereby allowing their ideas to flow more naturally. The book focuses on those grammatical items, idiomatic expressions, and set phrases that have proven to be the most problematic to my students.The patterns are presented with examples, and tips are provided throughout the text to highlight particularly important points. A few exercises are also included to allow students an opportunity to experiment with what they have learned.Note that F refers to patterns that are predominantly feminine and M to those predominantly masculine.I would like to thank the Center of Japanese Studies at the University of Hawai'i for the Japanese Studies Summer Grant (1994) which supported this project. I would also like to thank Greg Nishihara and Sarina Chugani for their hours of computer work and to express appreciation to family and friends for their encouragement and moral support. Very special thanks go to my teachers, Dr. Shiro Hattori and Prof. Fumiko Koide, and to my father, who gave me the opportunity to study and teach abroad and without whom none of this would have been possible. Finally, I would like to express my sincere gratitude to Mr. Michael Brase and Mr. Shigeyoshi Suzuki of Kodansha International, Ltd.; without their help, this publication would not have been possible.