This book summarises a lot of elementary grammar. It covers most of JLPT level 4 and some of Level 3.

Japanese Step by Step, is essentially a grammar reference with lots of examples and logical explanations. To my mind, the explanations about how the grammar works (and often why) are better than those of all the language books I own. I wish I had a Japanese-Step-by-Step-type explanation of the intermediate and advanced grammar I am studying now.

For example, when explaining the phrase ka-mo-shiremasen, other textbooks simply list the phrase and say "this means X". They don't break it up and make the much clearer observation that it's made up of 3 parts:

1. kamo - meaning 'whether or not'
2. shireru - to become known, and then
3. negation of shireru

The author intersperses this logic with a paragraph of explanation and concepts are clearly laid out. I have definitely learned a lot from this book.

But it has more uses than just the grammar explanations. When I kept coming back to this book, it was also for the example sentences, the reading practice, and because there are translations alongside every sentence - I like to hide the kana sentence, and try translating on my own. See the excerpt from page 162 below:

It's worth noting that the romaji characters in capitals, denote that a syllable is spoken with a higher intonation. This can be useful to those who speak Japanese with a robotic monotone - which is natural for most English speakers to do.

The book is organised into sentence patterns. In fact, it's not designed simply as a reference: it is meant to be a building block approach based on sentence patterns, so the book gets progressively more advanced from beginning to end. Although, I think this is probably impossible to precisely define, and you will find reasonably basic grammar toward the end of the book. Nevertheless, once you start reading a particular section, if your background knowledge is up to it, you may find yourself fascinated into reading the next few pages and learning quite a lot. I like this style because I can get a feel for some grammar even though I haven't really got it yet.

Probably the most significant uniqueness and strength of the book, however, is the conjugation charts. I have never seen the rules for 'Te Form' so beautifully and logically presented in a flow diagram. Even if your brain doesn't work this way all the time, it's the best way I've seen to lay out these rules.

There's also lots of tables and vocabulary lists for things like adverbs and Time Definitions. For example there's a section on future and past terms such as last week, the week-after-next, this morning , 2 hours from now, 2 hours ago and so on. Organised in a logical way such that moving left along the table, contains words that are chronologically before the right-side. In this way, it's more than a reference - you don't just use it too look up 'te-wa-ike-masen', it contains patterns, comparitive explanations and vocabulary lists - and of course, examples. There's even a section of Greetings and Simple Expressions and a complete list of kanji radicals in the Appendix.

I found it useful for grammar or words that I needed to express in conversation, but hadn't learnt yet, or as a second explanation of something I thought I knew. In particular, I liked the coverage of certain tricky particles. There's a section on Time and Place definitions in the book, that goes through all of the ones I needed. It's well written, and the example sentences give you a lot to work on.

The author does use Romaji throughout the book, which is a major turn-off for many serious students (myself included) but the romaji is always placed underneath Kana (ie standard japanese text with Kanji interspersed with Hiragana as required) so I never saw this as much of a problem.

JLPT Level 4 Outlook

The downside, from a JLPT Study Page point of view, is that it's not a comprehensive reference for use with the JLPT Level 4 exam. Nor is it meant to be. The main purpose of the book, is to get communicating as soon as possible, in as many scenarios as possible. This means superflous grammar that's in the Level 4 exam, is not present. And I think JLPT exams are somewhat famous for including non-essential content.

In fact, it's not a book that one would use as their only grammar reference, in any case. I found that it didn't contain some less significant grammar that can't be summed into neat categories. For example, if you wanted to look up the meaning of など or や as used in this sentence (from a Level 4 exam)「さいふや　かぎなどが　ある。」- then you will be left wanting. While major grammar is covered, I could not find any help on either of these little critters.

At a guess, I would say about 10-20% of the grammar needed for Level 4, isn't there. Although, there's about the same amount again, that is there, that is Level 3. The other issue is, sometimes the grammar you're looking for is there but you might not be able to find it - see the example below.

I'd like to give specific examples here, since this would be a most important issue for the readers of this review. I took the 2003 Level 4 exam, looked up some sentences from the grammar section and checked Japanese Step by Step for the grammar. Most of the grammar was covered but here's a few I couldn't find:

• {一ヶ月に　いっかい}　びょういんへ行く - this '1 time (once) per month' grammar pattern was not covered
• かぞくから　てがみを　もらった - while there's a section entitled on giving and receiving , it's buried in honorifics and I couldn't find an example exactly the same as this
• それから - in the section Conjunctions - but did you know it was a conjunction?
• いすが　一つしか　ない - shika, usually translated as nothing but, was not covered