"Every student of Japanese-and perhaps more importantly, every teacher of Japanese-should read this small book."

"Is there a dark conspiracy among schools and textbooks to make Japanese seem far more complicated than it really is? Of course not. But there might as well be."

So begins this ground-breaking book that sets out to demonstrate that Japanese is "simple, logical and beautiful" and that most of the apparently "arbitrary rules" that you "just have to learn" can be reduced to simple, easily intuitive patterns if you just understand how the language really...