Added on 08/13/09
Having grasped the rudiments of Japanese grammar, what the student needs next are more words, more phrases, more turns of phrase. In short, more ways to get across the ideas that can be expressed so easily in English but for which the student simply...
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Having grasped the rudiments of Japanese grammar, what the student needs next are more words, more phrases, more turns of phrase. In short, more ways to get across the ideas that can be expressed so easily in English but for which the student simply doesn't have the requisite Japanese vocabulary. One answer to this problem is found in affixes -- nifty little prefixes and suffixes, written with a single kanji, that can be attached to ordinary words to create new ones. They function much like Latin-derived prefixes and suffixes do in English. Just as you can attach "anti-" to almost any noun to create a new one (e.g., anti-American), you can attach its Japanese equivalent in the same way (e.g., han-amerika). Once you know this, you can "anti" and han yourself left and right and, for the most part, be understood. Thus, without going through the laborious process of slowly acquiring these useful affixes through many hours of reading, you can quickly build a larger vocabulary and... See less 
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