Hey there,
I was wondering if there are any interesting books about Japanese language, which are not textbooks and take a more essaylike approach. I really enjoyed the book “Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don’t Tell You” by Jay Rubin, exactly because it takes a lighthearted look at some of the more difficult parts of the language and tries to explain them thoroughly with interesting examples and analogies.
Do any of you know of any other interesting books that take a similar approach?
1 comment
Depends on what exactly you want the book to be about. History of the language, overview of the language, it’s phonology, sociolinguistics?
Essay-like is quite a broad definition too. Not a textbook as in scientific or as in playful/easy-to-understand manner?
Because I can’t find anything to recommend with the latter definition, but I could recommend these two books for anyone who wants to not only know Japanese, but also know about it, and understand it on a different level than someone who just does it because they want to speak it.
On history of the language: Bjarke Frellesvig “A History of the Japanese Language” (2010). Great book that goes from Man’yogana and Old Japanese up to what we have right now. Essential if you want to flex on your Japanese friends by knowing more about the language than they do, and also make them not want to speak with you for a while.
A great overview of the language would be “Japanese Linguistics” (2019) by Mark Irwin and Matthew Zisk. Relatively compact for a book with such name, but it is a perfect introduction without too much emphasis on prior knowledge. Has a lot of different topics, even including a bit of social aspect, language contact, dialects and language eductation.