Written by a leading scholar in the field, Classical Japanese: A Grammaris an elegant, comprehensive, and practical guide to classical Japanese. Extensive notes and historical explanations make this volume useful as both a reference for advanced students and a textbook for beginning students. Classical Japanese ( bungo) was used to write Japanese for more thirteen hundred years, until World War II. The volume, which explains how classical Japanese is related to modern Japanese, includes Detailed explanations of basic grammar, including helpful, easy-to-use tables of grammatical forms Annotated excerpts from classical premodern texts, with accompanying grammar and vocabulary notes Exercises and an answer booklet Detailed explanations of honorific expressions Appendixes on sound changes, prefixes, and suffixes, rhetorical techniques, and auxiliary verb combinations