Acknowledgements
This book, or any of its precursors, wasn’t wriĴen in one go - many people
contributed in some way or other to making sure that this book got turned
from just a thought into something real. Foremost my teachers at Leiden
University, Mr. M. Kunimori and Mr. N. Oya have contributed to me
enjoying learning the language greatly, much more than I would have had
I merely kept on studying the language at home. Their comments while
teaching, sometimes related to the language, and sometimes going off on
completely random tangents, have enriched my experience of the language
in such a way that has made it fun and something to play with rather than
to formally study. I owe them gratitude.
Secondly, many people from the online community helped me in
learning how to phrase myself so that explanations were understandable,
and corrected me when I got things wrong - something that definitely im-
proves anyone’s skill at anything by reinforcing that some things shouldn’t
be what you thought them to be. Many of these were from the #nihongo
IRC channel on the irchighway network, and while some have since moved
on, others have stuck around and it remains a nice source of conversation
concerning Japanese and other maĴers to this day.
My special thanks go out to those people that have helped proof
the book or part of its content in either the old or new incarnation; Ed-
mund Dickinson, Sarah Wiebe, Cynthia Ng, Andreas Wallin, Raymond
Calla, Maarten van der Heijden, Giulio Agostini, Ayako Sasaki, Manu and
many unnamed others.
This book was wriĴen in several phases, using several programs.
The first full-content version was based on the original ”An Introduction
to Japanese Syntax, Grammar and Language” wriĴen in 2005, which was
wriĴen in plain text using Textpad, after which it got turned into DocBook
XML using XMLmind XML Editor. This was then converted to Wordpro-
cessingML using a custom script, and final styling was done in Microsoft
Word, before converting that to PDF form using Adobe’s Acrobat PDF
building tools.
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