Daydreaming Diaries

Japanese (Lonely Planet Phrasebook) - also available in German Lonely Planet (Sprachfuehrer Japanisch) - is a small but quite useful and actually the best Japanese phrase book I ever bought - and believe I tried a lot of things for my Japanese studies.

On the first pages you find some general information about Japan, Japanese cities, its money, etc followed by daily conversational sentences like "Good morning", "Where is the toilet", etc.

The sentences and words written down in this phrase book are available in Kana-Romanji-Translation, so you're not just thrown in at the deep like like by using some dictionaries, which actually are quite useful or at least would be useful if there were some Romanji part, because the Romanji part is the part, which is missing in most dictionaries for beginners.

Well, by using this book you don't have to worry about this since it is a phrase book is has to be consisting of Romanji as well.

The different sentences, expressions and words are subordinated in different categories and sub categories, which makes studying and looking for a specific expression quite easy. There are categories like "at the doctor","shopping", "flirt", "at the bank", etc. with a lot of expressions and some extra information at the bottom of some pages. There are also some "Slang" notes at the bottom of some pages, for example on the "flirt" or "going out" page you can find some slang language at the bottom, but I recommend not to study slang language, when you're planing a trip to Japan, because you won't need it.

Another point is that this book is very small and cheap, so everyone is able to buy it since is doesn't cost a huge bunch of money and furthermore you can carry it with you whenever you want in your bag, in your pocket, etc.

 (Dictionary at the end of the book - English)

(daily conversations at the first page - German)

Personal final conclusion of Lonely Planet - Japanese Phrasebook:

It's cheap, it's handy,it's useful, it includes a lot of information about Japan, Japanese language, its pronunciation, etc. Therefore I recommend this book to everyone, who's planning a trip to Japan and wants speak at least a few sentences in Japanese, to people, who want to get started with Japanese language studies since it includes useful phrases and Kana tables and to people, who already studied or are studying Japanese, but want to refresh their daily conversational skills, if they still don't feel sure about this.