JpPlaza.com - 13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese | Ebooks

13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese has been especially designed for students who want a book with more variety and more character than bland orthodox textbooks can provide. It offers the opportunity to learn Japanese highly effectively, while also enjoying the learning process. With 13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese you can have your cake and eat it! Since the book teaches fluency-maximizing techniques rather than specific grammar points, it can be read with advantage by both beginner and advanced students.

13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese has been designed to help students make the transition from the tame world of the language textbook to the ruthless jungle of real-life Japanese. It teaches new strategies for thinking, speaking and memorizing Japanese quickly, efficiently and independently. Although many different areas of the language are covered, the strategies (or “secrets”) have all been selected for one and the same reason. They work. Every single secret guarantees a sudden and dramatic improvement in students’ powers of expression.

In 13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese information that it would take several years’ residence in Japan to encounter at random has been selected and sorted to enable students to learn the maximum quantity with the minimum of effort. Quantity, however, is not everything. There is no merit in students knowing masses of vocabulary if they cannot use it. Ultimately the ability to manipulate knowledge is more important than the ability to accumulate it. This book therefore teaches students how to preset their “mind-filters” so they can remember more words and expressions, and then go on to combine them more freely to extract maximum mileage from whatever they know.

13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese is a very diverse book with material ranging from manga and kids’ jokes, through readable telephone numbers and statistics, onto slang and the language of romance. Since it uses aspects of pop culture and everyday life to teach language points, students who use this book are alerted to the fact that very significant language-learning opportunities can be found in everyday things and events. This book transforms the study paradigm from one of passive reliance on a teacher in the classroom, to a pro-active awareness of how to get out there and teach yourself.

13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese is lavishly illustrated. The illustrations, however, are there for a reason. First they make the book attractive and fun to read. Second they work to stimulate the imagination and, through the imagination, the memory. They turn the book into a kind of virtual universe in which students do not perform exercises merely for exercises’ sake, but use Japanese to describe or react to what they actually see-as they will have to in the real world.

Used correctly, 13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese will give a dramatic boost to students’ Japanese, turning them into perpetual motion machines of know ledge-acquisition and knowledge-processing. It will also provide them with the mental and verbal props they need for true self-expression in Japanese. It will teach students how to say what they want to say in the way they want to say it.

All the “secrets” follow the same basic format. An English introduction explains the thrust of the chapter. This is followed by the main lesson, then the quiz. Each “secret” concludes with the answers to the quiz, and a vocabulary list. All words and sentences are given in Japanese, in romanized Japanese and in English. There are comprehensive glossaries at the end of the book.

(Source: 13 Secrets for Speaking Fluent Japanese)