Making Sense of Japanese

I read Jay Rubin’s excellent book on Haruki Murakami, Haruki Murakami and the Music of Words, and thought I ‘d check out his Japanese language book, Japanese Power: Making Sense of Japanese. It was an interesting analysis of Japanese language and how it differs from English from the perspective of a teacher and translator. In particular he is good at explaining what he calls the zero pronoun, Japanese, especially spoken Japanese, often infers the subject of the sentence without using a pronoun, hence the zero pronoun. He hints that the best way to read a Japanese sentence is to look for clues at the beginning of the sentence that will explain where it is going since the verb comes last in Japanese. He humorous writes about tricky aspect of the language. For example he looks at the differences between the particles “wa” and “ga.” “Wa” essentially differentiates the subject or the topic forms other topics, while “ga” emphasizes what comes after it. It was a short thought–provoking book, probably of interest to Japanese language learners only.