Foreword
Confronted with the necessity of teaching the Japanese language to men in the armed forces in a minimum period of time, and yet interested in giving a basic, practical training, I have prepared this little manual—the result of my experiences with several different types of classes in Military Japanese in the past few years. I do not claim that this manual is a complete language text in any respect. Its object is to teach the essentials of conversational Japanese in the simplest form. I do not expect the students who complete this volume to attain any mastery of expert interpretation, such as would be needed for intelligence work, and so forth. Such training must be acquired by other means, and by both extensive and intensive study.
This manual is intended for those who are primarily interested in acquiring the ability to speak and to understand simple, practical colloquial Japanese. The primary purposes for which the manual is intended are to enable the student: (1) To question prisoners of war and to understand their answers; (2) To question Japanese civilians and to understand their answers; (3) To understand and to employ simple military commands; (4) To identify some simple written Japanese.
The manual is divided into three parts: (1) the language lessons. (2) helpful material for interpretation and translation, and (3) the English-Japanese dictionary of military terms. Part One consists of seventeen chapters of language lessons, of which the first fifteen are devoted to the study of the type sentences. The grammatical structure introduced in the sentences progresses from simple to complex. The last two chapters serve as review of the type sentences useful in questioning prisoners and civilians. Part Two needs no further explanation. Part Three contains approximately 1400 words, either used in the lessons or likely to be particularly useful for military purposes.
As the lessons had to be condensed into only seventeen chapters while still covering as many type sentences as possible, there is some occasional deviation from idiomatic usage. This was necessary in order to standardize the grammatical structure so that students would not be burdened with memorizing varied forms of expression. In the English translation they will find many artificial constructions. These have been used purposely in order to make the Japanese idiomatic expressions more understandable.
