Using Japanese: A Guide to Contemporary Usage (review)

Japanese has the eighth largest number of speakers in the world, with the native population of Japan comprising more than 125 million people. Japanese is well known for its myriad of forms marking politeness—verbs can take polite, honorific, humble, and familiar forms. For modern English speakers, navigating these levels of politeness can be tricky, as interest in formal speech and writing in Western societies has declined throughout the twentieth century.

McClure’s contemporary guide to Japanese usage is both timely and highly insightful, providing needed practical advice. The first section deals with syntactic and phonological aspects of Japanese, showing the range of expressions available to express degrees of meaning, even in the neutral form. Some insightful examples of actual dialogue are presented to highlight various complexities, such as word choice being affected by the gender of participants in a conversation. For native English speakers, strategies for communicating apologies and honorifics are reviewed in detail. Regional variation in Japanese dialects is also presented, as speakers often express regional pride through both intonation and vocabulary.

In the second section, native word meanings and formation, as well as the effect of word borrowing, are discussed. Japanese words can have Japanese, Chinese, or ‘foreign’ origins, each variety having its own grammar. Word formations are particularly important for correct homonym usage, and the role of furigana symbols in guiding pronunciation is elucidated through examples. Almost one third of the book is devoted to word usage, and this is certainly not excessive given its central role in constructing contextually appropriate language.

The third section is concerned with individual grammatical elements and their nuances, covering the particles wa, mo, no, de, and to. This section includes discussions of topic marking and topic changing, direct and indirect objects, locations, limits, and idioms. The difficult area of omissions is handled masterfully.

The final section examines how language is used in various social rituals, including greetings, condolences, and congratulations. Students will find it helpful to review the material presented in the first three sections in the context of various social customs.

The combination of strictly grammatical aspects of Japanese along with examples of usage in these different contexts makes M’s book a valuable resource for intermediate and advanced speakers of Japanese.