Making Sense of Japanese
Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You Jay Rubin
Publisher: Kodansha International (JPN)
ISBN: 4770028024
Edition: Paperback; 2002-05-01
Summary:
Making Sense of Japanese is the fruit of one foolhardy American's
thirty-year struggle to learn and teach the Language of the Infinite.
Previously known as Gone Fishin', this book has brought Jay Rubin
more feedback than any of his literary translations or scholarly
tomes, "even if," he says, "you discount the hate mail from
spin-casters and the stray gill-netter." To convey his conviction
that "the Japanese language is not vague," Rubin has dared to explain
how some of the most challenging Japanese grammatical forms work in
terms of everyday English. Reached recently at a recuperative center
in the hills north of Kyoto, Rubin declared, "I'm still pretty sure
that Japanese is not vague. Or at least, it's not as vague as it used
to be. Probably." The notorious "subjectless sentence" of Japanese
comes under close scrutiny in Part One. A sentence can't be a
sentence without a subject, so even in cases where the subject seems
to be lost or hiding, the author provides the tools to help you find
it. Some attention is paid as well to the rest of the sentence, known
technically to grammarians as "the rest of the sentence." Part Two
tackles a number of expressions that have baffled students of
Japanese over the decades, and concludes with Rubin's patented
technique of analyzing upside-down Japanese sentences right-side up,
which, he claims, is "far more restful" than the traditional way,
inside-out. "The scholar," according to the great Japanese novelist
Soseki Natsume, is "one who specializes in making the comprehensible
incomprehensible." Despite his best scholarly efforts, Rubin seems to
have done just the opposite. Previously published in the Power
Japanese series under the same title and originally as Gone Fishin'
in the same series.
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