The Way lies in practice, and this book provides both the material and the method of practice to allow maximum speed in learning everyday Japanese speech.The book gets right to the point, without lengthy grammar lessons, linguistic theory, or other complicated nonsense. As the title says, this book will help you "Speak Japanese Today." You will not be able to teach Japanese, write in Japanese, or be able to communicate in an eloquent fashion, but you will know enough material well enough to handle everyday situations.Thus, this book's optimal audience is anyone who needs a crash-course in Japanese: a student, tourist, or businessman.To those who want an in-depth study of Japanese, this book can only serve as a somewhat inadequate introduction - but then, in-depth study is not this book's purpose at all.