The first impression of Ichioku-nin no Eibunpo is the weight the moment you pick it up. A5 format, 688 pages, list price ¥1,980 (incl. tax). A long-seller that has kept selling since its release in September 2011, its subtitle is 'An English Grammar for Speaking, Offered to All Japanese People'.

The authors are Hiroto Onishi and Paul McVay. The book rebuilds the grammar knowledge you learned at school into a tool for speaking. It spends every one of its pages on that single point.

Looking at the Specs. Six Parts, 19 Chapters — the Order Is the Instruction Manual

The structure runs from Chapter 0, 'How to Walk Through English Grammar', to Chapter 18. It is divided into six parts (PARTs): PART 1 is the skeleton of English sentences, PART 2 modification, PART 3 free elements, PART 4 rearrangement, PART 5 time expressions, and PART 6 the flow of sentences.

That this order is, just as it is, 'the procedure by which your mouth assembles a sentence' is the heart of this book. The items are rearranged not by difficulty and not in dictionary order, but in the order of the work of making a sentence.

Its difference from school grammar lies in the axis of its explanations. School grammar was grammar for reading and for exams, with a chapter for each item and memorising classifications at its centre. This book answers, every time, 'why does it take that form?'

Why an article attaches there, why an auxiliary verb comes in that position — it explains these from the awareness of a native speaker choosing that form, uses illustrations heavily, and avoids grammatical terminology itself as far as possible. It is easier to use if you think of it not as taking stock of knowledge, but as a book that replaces your feel for the language.

Two Ways to Use It: The Parts You Read Through, and the Parts You Look Up Like a Dictionary

If you try to read all 688 pages from the start, you will usually stall somewhere in PART 2. The trick to using it is to divide the labour: limit what you read cover to cover to Chapter 0 and PART 1 (Chapters 1 and 2) only.

This is the heart of the book. Once you grasp the feel of placing a subject and a verb and adding explanation behind them, the remaining chapters only need to be read when necessary. Even at a pace of one chapter a day, the read-through part is done in three days.

Use the remaining chapters as a dictionary. When, while writing or speaking English, you get stuck on 'wait, which one was it?', open just that chapter. The table of contents is cut finely, item by item, so it is easy to look things up, and the index can also be downloaded from the Toshin Books official page.

Buy it not as a book to finish reading, but as a book to keep on your desk and keep looking things up in for years, and the weakness of 688 pages turns, just as it is, into the strength of how much it covers.

What this book is trying to build is less grammar knowledge itself than a feel for word order. In English, the order you place things in becomes the meaning, just as it is. The book's chapters follow that order too, so there is a trick to how you read it. Do not settle for just following the example sentences with your eyes.

Read them aloud, and the feel of placement — 'because I put it in this position, it takes this meaning' — enters your body. What follows about the audio is about the tools for doing that.

The Audio Is Sold Separately: Combining It with the CD Book

One thing to know before you buy: this book does not come with a CD. The audio for the example sentences is heard on the separately sold Ichioku-nin no Eibunpo CD Book (¥1,650, incl. tax). It re-records all of the key example sentences shown in large frames in the main book, and collects that audio on 2 CDs, about 2 hours 14 minutes.

Each example sentence plays twice, and the second time it plays quietly, from the right earphone only. It is designed to make it easy to read along, and absorbing the example sentences into your body through reading aloud and recitation is the standard way of using it that the authors intend.

Before you move on to reading aloud, getting the sound of the example sentences firmly into your ears makes a difference in efficiency. A grammar book's example sentences are short, so they pair well with close listening that repeats a section again and again.

Rehear, a listening practice app made by the team behind this magazine, is an app for importing audio from materials you own and listening closely to it. You can also import the CD Book's audio, listen repeatedly to only the example sentences you stall on, and then say them aloud. No hard sell: if you want one tool for the stage before reading aloud, give it a try.

The Biggest Enemy Is Thickness: How Not to Let It Decorate a Shelf

The point where people give up on this book is not the difficulty of its contents but its thickness. Give the 688 pages a cover-to-cover deadline and it will usually become a shelf decoration in about three weeks. There are three countermeasures. Do not set a deadline for finishing it. Leave sticky notes in the chapters you looked up, so the 'traces of use' stay visible.

And leave it out on your desk, not on a bookshelf. The better a book is as a dictionary, the more its frequency of use is decided by the distance to opening it.

It suits adult learners who went through school grammar but cannot assemble a sentence when it comes to actually speaking. For someone completely new to grammar it is heavy, so the sister book Ichioku-nin no Eikaiwa is the lighter entrance. For those who want to measure their ability with exercises, there is also a separate Ichioku-nin no Eibunpo Mondaishu: Daigaku Nyushi Taisaku-hen.

If you buy, decide how you will use it first. Even together, this book at ¥1,980 and the CD Book at ¥1,650 come to ¥3,630 (both incl. tax), and a grammar book is a tool you keep looking up in for a long time, so you are less likely to misjudge the price if you divide it by how many years you will use it.

Buy it via Ichioku-nin no Eibunpo (print edition) and, for the audio, Ichioku-nin no Eibunpo CD Book.