Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You

It wasn't worth it.

This was a DNF at approximately 75%. Approximately, because I ended up skipping the last 1/3 of Part 1, and skimmed through Part 2 – essentially looking for “The Good Parts, Abridged” – before getting fed up.

I read the 2012 reprint, which appears to be an unaltered reprint of the 1998 edition. The book relies on romaji (some scarce scatterings of kana and kanji), which fell out of favor between those two dates; along with the preface it indicates that this text has remained unchanged for a quarter of a century. While that in itself doesn’t ruin a book, it directly explains the three things that led to my DNF.

First, however, I’d like to highlight the parts that stood out to me in a positive way:

A) The ほど explainer for the “so much X that Y” usage is solid. It goes on longer than it needs to, but you can’t say it isn’t thorough (and the repetition may be a plus for some).

B) The section regarding あがる, くれる, and もらう (and their associated forms) goes into some interesting nuances and details that hadn’t come across my radar yet. If I had to reread some part of this book again in the future, for whatever reason, it would be this section.

C) Convincing me that I dodged a bullet by never getting around to reading James Clavell.

...That’s about it.

Now for the parts that led to me dropping the book, starting with the mildest:

1. It’s dated. It’s not just the romaji issue; the pop culture references Rubin relies on as touchstones don’t resonate anymore. Fortunately, the section on ほど works fine without familarity with Johnny Carson or the late-night TV show he helmed for years, but at the same time it’s a bit galling to see Rubin wax on for several pages about Carson and his sidekick after namedropping All About Particles without so much as a mention of the author - Naoko Chino. (Who, incidentally, is a woman – a detail I’ll return to in point 3.) Steve Allen and James Clavell aren’t remotely household names anymore, and the latter’s presence here stands out in an “Oh wow that’s racist” way. Which, to be clear, was Rubin calling out fetishization and exoticization of the Japanese language (and, to a lesser extent, culture), using a then-popular author as an example of said behavior. Unfortunately, he wanders into his own bad takes on the language, people, and culture later.

2. Most of this information is already available elsewhere. Going back to the ほど example, I’d already gotten a handle on that from (condensed, granted) coverage in All About Particles (Naoko Chino) and The Handbook of Japanese Verbs (Taeko Kamiya). は vs. が is a notorious struggle, with countless pixels dedicated to explaining or arguing over it all over the internet; I found Rubin’s diatribe more or less useless, with several moments leaving me questioning whether he was even correct in some of his claims. (Put more simply, I’d want to double check some of them with a linguistics scholar first.) The S-O-V order of Japanese is less daunting if you already know or have studied another language with the same order. (Rubin himself does not seem aware that Japanese is not remotely unique in this regard; if he is, and is trying to poke fun at it, he has already undermined his delivery at multiple points prior).

3. Even taking into account when it was written, the recurrent racism and sexism cross a line. If giving the benefit of the doubt and presuming satire, the failure mode of satire is endorsement, and I can’t tell whether most of his “humor” is even meant to be satirical in the first place. The Kanji rant is appalling, and not in a Swiftian way. “This Language Works Backwards” reads as reveling in his own ignorance of linguistics (as well as casually racist); the good news is that many learners probably already have come across the “start from the end” approach he touts elsewhere, without the awful packaging. (I did, for one; many of the places I saw it mentioned cited Rubin as the source.) The misogyny that seeps through is probably real, given the era (I’m not counting the eyebrow-raising “co-ed” reference, since that probably was the correct term in his own college years); the omission of Naoko Chino’s name when mentioning her book comes across as part of a pattern. His contempt for linguistics and the professionals in that field is a recurrent theme, and again comes across as genuine rather than “ironic” or whatever people call it these days. The whole book has such an unpleasant Schroedinger’s Jerk tone to it that I could not finish: I skimmed for what I could find of use, then bailed.

Not recommended: some might find it useful, but read at your own risk.