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Rating: 
Summary: Badly Thought Out
Review: Because this author uses his own original way of transcribing Japanese into Roman characters, this book is, at times, somewhat confusing. For example, normally the hiragana character 'tsu' is written in Romaji as such. The way it is pronounced, there is a very definite combination of 't' and 's'. This book writes it as 'tu.' I fail to see how that makes it more accurate. It makes it LESS accurate. I don't know who he is aiming this book at, but the pronunciation of many of his transcriptions, in everyday spoken Japanese, would clearly be wrong.
Better to buy 'The Complete Japanese Verb Guide,' by the Hiroo Japanese Center. Far more useful.
Rating: 
Summary: Sort of useful
Review: I like it because it describes verb tenses I had never seen before reading this book. However, I have some serious complaints about it. First, it does not give general verb patterns; it just lists 501 verbs. Second, it uses only romaji and no kanji or even kana. Third, as if that weren't bad enough, it uses a system of romanization that is very confusing for Japanese students ("shi" is written "si", "tsu is written "tu", etc.) They say the Japanese think of, for example, t, ch, and ts, as the same sound and so a romanization system should be based on Japanese sounds, but they're forgetting who uses the romanizations! Fourth, they seem to forget that Japanese uses a kana (syllabary), not an alphabet. For example, they separate the stem from the ending in the middle of the syllable. For exapmle, "ik.u" [sic] is divided into "ik-" and "-u" through the use of a period, but in Japanese, it is composed of the kanji for this verb and the hiragana "ku".Other than that, I find it to be a useful reference for conjugation of Japanese verbs, but please note that I had already been studying for six months when I bought it. Had I bought it as a beginner, I would have been very confused.
Rating:
Summary: a wrong idea
Review: the "501 verbs series" is very useful for learning Indo-European langugaes, but certainly not for Japanese; the publisher simply made a wrong decision, as if it were thinking:"we have Russian, German, Italian... why not Japanese?" I wonder if it will publish a certain "501 Chinese Verbs" one day for the sake of completeness.
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