I was hanging out with a Japanese friend of mine last night and he showed me a TOEFL prep book he got from his university back in Japan. I flipped through it and was pretty impressed by the vast array of English expressions present in the book and their Japanese equivalents.

The format of the book is:

English expression | Japanese equivalent
Example sentence in English | Example sentence in Japanese

So it struck me that it would work for both sides to learn these useful expressions hence I borrowed it off him and am going to work through typing it up into an Anki deck. The book covers a whopping 850 expressions which are really the nuts and bolts of how we tend to glue ideas together with these little phrases. It also comes with a cd that covers the first 2/3 of the book (I think) but I haven't looked at that yet.

Has anyone else got this book and wants to help out? This may take me a while but at any rate I have to get it done before he goes back to Japan in a month.

I plan on uploading it to the shared decks once i'm done.

isn't this what the ALC sentences pretty much are already? look at them here: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid43560

Hashiriya Wrote:isn't this what the ALC sentences pretty much are already? look at them here: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...0#pid43560

6000? Honestly? This is simple stuff like "at all costs, to be accustomed to, by accident, to be willing to do, let alone, to look into, on the other hand, to take up, to the point, at any moment, at large, back and forth, to be sick of, to be second to none" and so on and so forth. It's the simple stuff that makes language flow. I personally couldn't pick it all out of that gigantic pool of ALC material.

When you realize how important these phrases are in English it makes perfect sense to know them in Japanese.

The Japanese is likely a 直訳 of the English, not an equivalent natural expression, so be careful.

Ex:
"Nice to meet you" 直訳 = あなたに会えてよかった。
"Nice to meet you" natural expression = はじめまして。

Studying translations or using study material backwards is, in general, not a good idea.

Jarvik7 Wrote:The Japanese is likely a 直訳 of the English, not an equivalent natural expression, so be careful.

Ex:
"Nice to meet you" 直訳 = あなたに会えてよかった。
"Nice to meet you" natural expression = はじめまして。

Studying translations or using study material backwards is, in general, not a good idea.

If anything I think they've gone from Japanese > English. I know quite a few of the expressions in here and they look spot on to me so i'm quite happy to use this material. Besides i'm not studying it for the sentences more for the clarity it will bring knowing what all of those fiddly things mean.

No matter what study materials you use, every time you will find that 80% of it is usually spot on and 20% always sounds either too wooden, old fashioned or a bit odd for some reason or other. I'm happy to pick up ~600 correct expressions. You're brain will always figure out which to keep and which to chuck with enough exposure. 心配するな。

mezbup Wrote:Has anyone else got this book and wants to help out? This may take me a while but at any rate I have to get it done before he goes back to Japan in a month.

I plan on uploading it to the shared decks once i'm done.

I haven't got the book, but I'm definitely interested in seeing the contents now.

Any chance you could give a few examples here, please?