Acknowledgements

This book wasn't written 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 improves 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 remain a nice source of conversation concerning Japanese and other matters 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; Edmund Dickinson, Sarah Wiebe, Cynthia Ng, Andreas Wallin, Raymond Calla, Maarten van der Heijden, Giulio Agostini, Ayako Sasaki and others.

This book was written in several phases, using several programs. The first full-content version was written in plain text using the Textpad 4.73 (http://www.textpad.com) text editor. I used a plain text editor mainly because it's the easiest way to scratch and re-add stuff without having to spend hours on getting it all to look stylish again. The second phase was to wrap this plain text content in XML, in the form of a DocBook. Initially I had intended on wrapping it using a stand-off mark up system, so that the content itself would still be easily editable, but after discovering the free XMLmind XML Editor (http://www.xmlmind.com) standard edition, I let go of this idea, as this was essentially a DocBook editor which allows editing as if you're working in a normal word processing program. The reason I went with DocBook, but more specifically with XML in general, is that XML has a special conversion language written for it, XSL, which lets you turn XML data into literally anything. In my case, I wrote a script to convert DocBook XML to WordprocessingML, a version of XML that Microsoft Word (http://www.microsoft.com/office) writes and reads, so that I could do the final styling in a program that would let me see what my pages actually looked like, before converting to PDF form using Adobe's Acrobat PDF building tools (http://www.adobe.com/products/acrobat).

All in, the writing of this book took less time than it took to actually mark up, convert, proof and stylise. I must admit being quite pleased with the result, and I will be quite happy to hear from anyone who has any questions or comments in regards to either the content, or the process of writing it.