All About Particles (Power Japanese)

Rating:
Summary: Excellent!
Review: I love this book! It was just what I needed. My friend in Chiba sent me this book, and it's valuble to a beginner! Just as was stated in the book, particles tend to be a pain when trying to understand a simple statement. Good examples. This book helped clear things up for me...

Rating:
Summary: A valuable reference
Review: This book is an excellent reference for the student of Japanese, and especially for those who do any kind of Japanese-to-English translation. Particles are the most difficult aspect of Japanese to understand, and arguably one of the most important. This book sets itself the task of taking common particles in modern Japanese and explaining to the reader what they do in a sentence, with examples and elementary as well as advanced usages. It accomplishes this task, in my opinion, very well. It's one of the books I keep by my side as I do translation work; All About Particles is more helpful to me than my dictionaries in cases where a particle is confusing me (rightfully so; one can't expect a dictionary to fully explain all particles in such limited space).

Rating:
Summary: A valuable reference
Review: This book is an excellent reference for the student of Japanese, and especially for those who do any kind of Japanese-to-English translation. Particles are the most difficult aspect of Japanese to understand, and arguably one of the most important. This book sets itself the task of taking common particles in modern Japanese and explaining to the reader what they do in a sentence, with examples and elementary as well as advanced usages. It accomplishes this task, in my opinion, very well. It's one of the books I keep by my side as I do translation work; All About Particles is more helpful to me than my dictionaries in cases where a particle is confusing me (rightfully so; one can't expect a dictionary to fully explain all particles in such limited space).

Rating:
Summary: Useful but...
Review: This book is good for beginning and intermediate students for reviewing the usage of particles. It's organized and easy to use, and covers the most basic particles and the most common usages as well as more obscure particles and usages. The main drawback to this book is that unlike others in the Power Japanese series, the sample sentences are dull and not memorable. Of course, this does makes them more accessable to elementary students.