All students of Japanese, whether they have studied physics or not, know the word "particle," and they realize that particles, like English prepositions, require a special effort to master. Thus the high evaluation of the previous edition of this small handbook, which provides all the information students need in a scant 128 pages, was not surprising.

All About Particles covers 69 particles, the most common ones along with the less frequent. The particles are shown to have some 200 usages-sufficient to keep most students hard at work for a good many years. The book can be approached as a textbook and studied religiously from beginning to end. It is as a reference book, however, that All About Particles shines: light enough to carry around, slim enough to fit into the corner of a shoulder bag, concise enough to take one quickly to the crux of the matter, it combines the best of several worlds and is priced to be affordable.

No wonder, then, that All About Particles, in its previous incarnation as a part of the Power Japanese series, sold over 40,000 copies worldwide. Wherever students of Japanese congregate, there is bound to be a copy of All About Particles around.

About the Author:Naoko Chino is a lecturer at Sophia University, Tokyo, and author of Japanese Verbs at a Glance and A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Sentence Patterns.