Rating: 
Summary: If Japanese were a programming language...
Review: ...this would be the programmer's tech manual.JAPANESE STEP BY STEP was written by a former IBM engineer. He applied tech-manual principles to the organization and presentation of the inner workings of the Japanese language. The author makes heavy use of logic flow charts to show how Japanese verbs are conjugated, and how present, negative, past and past-negative tenses are developed. He also presents five basic sentence patterns to be used as building blocks for more complex and compound sentences. And, the roman-alphabet representations of Japanese use CAPITAL letters to show the raised pitch accent. Although the book uses Japanese characters above the roman text (romaji), it uses the 2000+-character KANJI with no furigana (small hiragana characters to show the `reading' of the kanji characters.) I'd like to be able to cover up the romaji and read just the Japanese characters, but the lack of furigana forces dependence on the romaji. Another thing I found frustrating is having to flip back and forth through the book to figure out how a particular verb conjugates. This could have been solved if the author had either provided an appendix with all the verb conjugation flow charts, or (better yet,) provided an additional set of charts showing how to conjugate each type of verb into all the possible conjugations. This book is NOT the only book on Japanese you'll ever need. But it's a useful addition to the Japanese-language student's arsenal of reference works. It presents information in a different way, which may be just what you need to get from confusion to increased understanding.
Rating:
Summary: If Japanese were a programming language...
Review: ...this would be the programmer's tech manual. JAPANESE STEP BY STEP was written by a former IBM engineer. He applied tech-manual principles to the organization and presentation of the inner workings of the Japanese language. The author makes heavy use of logic flow charts to show how Japanese verbs are conjugated, and how present, negative, past and past-negative tenses are developed. He also presents five basic sentence patterns to be used as building blocks for more complex and compound sentences. And, the roman-alphabet representations of Japanese use CAPITAL letters to show the raised pitch accent. Although the book uses Japanese characters above the roman text (romaji), it uses the 2000+-character KANJI with no furigana (small hiragana characters to show the 'reading' of the kanji characters.) I'd like to be able to cover up the romaji and read just the Japanese characters, but the lack of furigana forces dependence on the romaji. Another thing I found frustrating is having to flip back and forth through the book to figure out how a particular verb conjugates. This could have been solved if the author had either provided an appendix with all the verb conjugation flow charts, or (better yet,) provided an additional set of charts showing how to conjugate each type of verb into all the possible conjugations. This book is NOT the only book on Japanese you'll ever need. But it's a useful addition to the Japanese-language student's arsenal of reference works. It presents information in a different way, which may be just what you need to get from confusion to increased understanding.
Rating:
Summary: Almost the perfect study companion
Review: As a number of people have already noted that this is more an adjunct to a "regular" Japanese language text than a text in its own right, so I won't dwell on that point. Suffice to say that using this book along with another text will give a "heads up" on what is to come.
This book takes the approach of presenting the skeletal structure of the language and in doing so it covers a lot of material in a short space. I really like this approach as it removes some of the frustration that can arise from having the language revealed slowly over the course of many chapters in a regular text. This can also help to get a better overview by allowing you to see connections that might be a little obscured by the "drip-feed" approach taken by most texts.
However, there are some weaknesses. Firstly, the text could do a lot more to explain the logic of the language. As an example, various uses (though not all) of the "te" form are covered, but there is no explanation of why the te form is used in those cases; there is no explanation of the underlying similarity to all those uses. The only overall explanation of the form is to note that it is sometimes like the present participle in English. It would be so much more helpful to note the similarities between the "te" form and "de" (which had been covered in a previous chapter). In virtually every section of the book there are similar insights that could have been given.
Secondly, there is some inconsistency with the presentation of kanji and kana. Now, I'm not a "romaaji-phobe" like many people these days, but having been given the impression that kanji and kana will be used throughout, it is a let down to find some items rendered only in romaaji.
Finally, the later parts of the book have a rushed feel to them, one gets the impression that it may have been cropped to meet space restrictions.
In short it is a very worthy, but not quite perfect attempt at an outline of the language. I would love to see an updated version that addressed some of the points above, as well as one or two errors and questionable generalisations- in two volumes if neccesary. With a little more work it could be a classic work.
Rating: 
Summary: An excellent first step
Review: Explicitly explains the different forms of verbs and sentence structures. Does not go to far into particles but explains the appropriate uses for "wa and ga". Excellent in vocabulary and kanji usage and reading. The pitch accents marked by CAPS let the reader know how to pronounce each word correctly. This is the best book I have ever needed. The perfect guide to Japanese. The flowcharts are especially helpful and are compatible to people that work in the field of computers. I have learned many kanji from reading this book. The excercises are thorough.
Rating:
Summary: Simple and right to the point
Review: Explicitly explains the different forms of verbs and sentence structures. Does not go to far into particles but explains the appropriate uses for "wa and ga". Excellent in vocabulary and kanji usage and reading. The pitch accents marked by CAPS let the reader know how to pronounce each word correctly. This is the best book I have ever needed. The perfect guide to Japanese. The flowcharts are especially helpful and are compatible to people that work in the field of computers. I have learned many kanji from reading this book. The excercises are thorough.
Rating:
Summary: Simple and right to the point
Review: Explicitly explains the different forms of verbs and sentence structures. Does not go to far into particles but explains the appropriate uses for "wa and ga". Excellent in vocabulary and kanji usage and reading. The pitch accents marked by CAPS let the reader know how to pronounce each word correctly. This is the best book I have ever needed. The perfect guide to Japanese. The flowcharts are especially helpful and are compatible to people that work in the field of computers. I have learned many kanji from reading this book. The excercises are thorough.
Rating:
Summary: An excellent first step
Review: I had been gradually absorbing japanese for a few years from such sources as anime, and old samurai films. Six months ago, I decided to take the plunge and devote some time to learning Japanese, so I picked up this book. I was immediately impressed with the organization, and lucidity of the material.
Before, I was totally mystified by the Kanji. I thought I'd never be able to understand " all of that crazy chickenscratch", as I sometimes (jokingly) put it. I tought that I could get by understanding the Kana, or maybe just the Romaji. I was totally put off by the different readings of the Kanji. Now, I understand more kanji than kana (granted, I'm still pretty much the equivalent of a slow-witted japanese kindergartener). This book erased most of my initial apprehension over the subject.
The grammatical structure is handled, in my opinion, in the proper way. For the first few chapters, the reader is presented with a somewhat simplistic view, which must be learned by rote. As the reader progresses in the book, some of the earlier schemas are expanded, and elaborated, leaving the reader with an ever increasingly profound grasp on the language. The presentation and progression is in a logical order, allowing those with a scientist's (like me) or engineer's brain quick access to the language.
This is, of course, not to say that one can attain a complete mastery of the language by reading this one book. As I alluded in the title of this review, this is merely a good first step. It never pretends to be anything more. If one studies from this book with discipline and diligence, one should not have trouble making oneself understood in japanese.
Rating:
Summary: innovative
Review: I was really surprised that any book could be considered 'innovative'. However, this book explains Japanese in a way I had not seen before. I have been studying Japanese for a number of years and this book has really helped me understand the way Japanese sentences are constructed.
I think this is the best book I have ever seen for learning Japanese.
Rating:
Summary: Very clear and well-presented
Review: People will debate whether Japanese language books are better off written in Hiragana or Romaji. This book is primarily in Romaji (with accompanying Kanji/Furigana) and that's the smart move. This book is aiming to get you speaking as soon as possible. I think the practice of reading and writing Hiragana/Kanji can be done in other ways and with other books.
I really like the approach this book takes to getting you right in there. There are tons of examples and so the book has a good flow. The reader isn't apt to get bogged down on one page or a particular idea. In a lot of books, you are left to figure out the language e.g. "...so I guess this is how you would say that, etc.". Nishi's book tells you exactly what you are learning and so you really feel like you have a birds-eye view of the language. I cannot tell you how reassuring that is.
I teach English here in Japan and even after hundreds and hundreds of lessons, I am still discovering the best approaches to help my students. Learning languages is still an 'art' (and may always be) but this book gives a real sense of direction and makes you feel like you have a solid start.
Rating:
Summary: This book delivers the goods.
Review: Read this book first before wasting your money on other books. I just finished my first read through of this book. It was amazing. I learned more about how the Japanese language is structured in a few days than I have from other books in months.
Many students of Japanese just need basic information at the beginning in order to be productive in their studies.
Gene Nishi gets straight to the point, starting with the basic sentence structure, adding more information as the book progresses. And since everything complex is made up of simple things, you can start to see how a complicated Japanese sentence can be analyzed and understood. After reading through this book, I could get the "gist" of basic to intermediate Japanese sentences even though my vocabulary is yet not up to snuff. I could just tell that "someone gave something to someone else at such and such time", for example. While that may sound trivial, my abilities will only increase as I engage in Japanese conversation and read the Japanese papers, because the blanks will be filled in from the context, just like any other language acquisition process. The point is, I now know where the blanks are,thanks to this book!
Gene Nishi also does an excellent job of targeting this book to a particular audience: adult professionals who need to conversate with Japanese adult professionals(although this book would work for any student). Right now, I do not need to know all of the embellishments and ornaments in everyday Japanese language. I don't have the time. I just need to be able to have relatively educated conversations with a native speaker. This book has all of the tools to enable me to get the solid foundation needed to achieve that goal. He describes the different classes of adjectives, verbs and some of the more common particles(wa, ga, ni, de, no) in a clearer manner than anywhere else. Gene also said that learning the 1006 Kanji taught to Japanese grade schoolers would cover 90% of those used by newspapers. That was quite a relief! I had heard there were 20000 of them! If I learn 3 a day, I'm on my way. See how this book reduces some of the complications? Finally, Nishi's organization of this book makes a lot of sense. He starts from simple examples and works up to more complicated ones.
A few notes, while this book is an excellent start, once you finish it, to get the deepest understanding you will need to look at other books for the following reasons:
1. Understanding the Japanese language from a linguistic perspective. A few of Gene's descriptions do not match what I've learned elsewhere(for example, the Japanese characters or "Mora" are not divisible! You should not think of the particle "no" as a combination of the n sound and the o sound. To the Japanese, the particle "no" is one indivisible unit.)
2. Mastering the Kana
3. Learning Kanji
4. Understanding the tonal structure of spoken Japanese
5. Doing exercises! This is not an exercise oriented book. The books by Eleanor Jorden are the best in that area. I plan on going that route after mastering this book.
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