It starts with the obvious first step – pronunciation. Chapter 1 teaches you all about the different sounds used in Japanese so you can pronounce Japanese words correctly.

Next, in Chapter 2, you will learn the fundamental structure of Japanese sentences, with a clear, easy-to-understand explanation of what particles are and how they work. By learning this right from the beginning, you build a foundation for everything else you will ever learn about Japanese grammar.

Most books and courses skip this vital step, and instead start with specific phrases and sentence patterns, which results in you knowing how to say certain things, but not why each combination of words makes sense.

By giving you a better understanding of how Japanese sentences and particles work from the beginning, 80/20 Japanese helps you avoid the confusion that most Japanese learner’s have to deal with at every turn.

Adding to your understanding of how Japanese functions, Chapter 3 covers the essential cultural understanding you need to speak Japanese effectively. These are easy but important lessons that are applicable every time you use Japanese.

Chapter 4 is like a crash-course in Japanese, introducing a variety of concepts that you can immediately use in real life conversations, including:

• Some new particles
• Essential verb tenses needed to talk about the past, present and future
• How to talk about things you like and want
• How to ask questions
• Many more useful words and expressions

Chapters 5 and 6 teach you all about numbers and expressions of time, respectively, with lots of examples and exercises that teach you how to use them in a sentence correctly.

Chapters 7, 8 and 9 cover the finer points of the major word types – adjectives, nouns, adverbs and verbs. With these chapters, you’ll learn how to correctly use each word type in almost any combination, allowing you to speak and understand Japanese with greater flexibility and precision.

Chapter 10 really takes you to the next level. It teaches you all about noun phrases, which have a wide range of uses and give you the ability to talk about things in far greater detail.

For example, instead of saying something simple such as, “I ate lunch in Shinjuku with my friends”, noun phrases allow you to say things like, “I ate lunch at a new restaurant in Shinjuku with some friends that I met at high school“.

Noun phrases are incredibly powerful, yet fairly simple to put together, especially in Japanese. This chapter covers them in detail.

Chapter 11 is a more detailed look at particles. The lessons in this chapter are not essential to being able to speak Japanese, but they will give you a deeper understanding of how different particles work. This chapter also answers one of the biggest questions that even confuses people who have been studying Japanese for years – the difference between the particles “wa” and “ga”.

By the time you reach Chapter 12, you will have a very good understanding of Japanese. This final chapter simply builds on everything you know by introducing 40 useful expressions, all explained – with examples – in the context of everything learnt throughout the rest of the book.