"Essential Japanese Grammar" is a complete revision of the Handbook of Japanese Grammar (Tuttle Publishing 1994). The book consists of two parts (Part 1 is "Japanese Grammar: An Overview and 2nd part Dictionary of usage"); while the first part has 21 chapters, the second part contains two.
The first thing to say is that this book is reference material. Although the book states that it is an “indispensable reference for students of Japanese at all levels”, if you are a beginner, you probably will not completely understand the example sentences because even if the sentences are translated. The parts of interest are in bold; the word order is different. So if you don’t know what those words mean, you won’t be able to understand the structure of the sentences completely. Apart from that, the book is very useful in conjunction with Japanese language textbooks and wants to understand better the construction of the sentences and the word order.
Now, little more about the first part, which, as mentioned before, consists of 21 chapters:
- Introduction
- Accents
- Adjectival nouns
- Adjectives
- Adverbs
- Auxiliary verbs & Adjectives
- Clauses
- Comparisons
- Conditionals
- Conjoining
- Demonstratives
- Honorifics
- Interrogatives
- Linking verb (da/desu)
- Numbers and Counters
- Particles
- Predicative phrases
- Questions
- Requests
- Verbs
These chapters briefly explain their usage, if there are exceptions, and what those exceptions are. There are several examples with different forms and usage. Still, as I already mentioned, it is quite difficult for a beginner to understand the vocabulary, so I recommend using a trustworthy dictionary to be safe.
The only exceptions are the first and the second chapters. The “Introduction” tells how even if the Japanese language uses more than 2000 Chinese characters in commonly written forms, it is quite different from the Chinese language. How word order and particles in Japanese are different from English, and that the word order in Japanese is generally more flexible; how verb morphology in Japanese is very different from English because Japanese verbs are not conjugated based on number or person but do change based on tense and polarity (whether they are affirmative or negative) as well as what follows them. Another interesting thing about Japanese counters is that they change form based on what you are counting. For example, go-nin no hito means “five people”, and go-hiki no inu means “five dogs”, and as you see, counters are different; for people, nin is used, and for dogs, hiki. In addition, there is a small introduction to Japanese honorifics.
“Accents” tell how high and low-pitched sounds can change the meaning of words. For example, はし(hashi) can mean "chopsticks" if the ha sound is high-pitched and the shi is low-pitched, but it will mean "bridge" if the ha is low-pitched and the shi is high-pitched.
Finally, the second part, the "Dictionary of usage", has two chapters – the first one is not presented as one part since its content is an explanation of the exact usage of 300 adjectives, adjectival nouns, adverbs, etc. And the second part consists of appendices: lists of common adjectival nouns, adjectives, adverbs, counters, verbs and nouns.
Another thing I liked about this book is that its content is arranged in alphabetical order, making it easy to find what you are looking for.
