Experience the life of a new employee in a traditional Japanese transnational corporation, through listening and conversation exercises. Just like the Japanese work year, ロールプレーで学ぶビジネス日本語 will take you through a whole year of meeting room and water cooler conversations with your boss and colleagues from April to March. The book takes role playing to heart — complete with your work assignment, an IT employee from Vietnam, a map of the corporate branches, and a detailed org chart with your new teammates' names, titles and ages.
Aside from the introduction and glossary, which are translated into English, Chinese and Vietnamese, the 160-page book is written in Japanese, with furigana for vocabulary from JLPT N2 level and above. The book covers the basics, from introducing yourself on your first day of work, answering the phone, and apologizing for mistakes in polite, office-appropriate language, to more casual scenarios, like striking up conversations at the bar during a company happy hour. Each of the fourteen chapter lessons in the book includes model exchanges between multiple people, relevant vocabulary, sentence patterns and a multiple-choice or fill-in-the-blank question quiz.
If you're interested in the book, check out the sneak preview of the first few pages to get a feel for the design and the audio conversations from each lesson. The audio is free online to download. If you're not sure if the level of the book is right for you, you can also check out the table of contents and the audio from the intermediate level version of the book.