Was the book you saw perhaps this: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546 http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar

Was the book you saw perhaps this: http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4789004546 http://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Basic-Japanese-Grammar/dp/4... That book more than any other helped really solidify my japanese, precisely because it did what you say: it functioned as a foundation reference to the core of the language. As for people with very basic modes of thought that are so different that their expression of logical statements would be different... Logic is logic. Its english grammar is a thin abstraction over its mathematical form, so I would be surprised if non-english-conceived programming languages would be dramatically different (aside from syntactic ordering perhaps). Actually writing that sentence forced me to think of one such way a Japanese-inspired programming language might differ dramatically: since the subject of each verb is often left unstated in conversational japanese, you might have primitives that set the current 'variable context' and then all messages after that yet before the next 'variable context' change would go to that variable. something like: foo(a, b, c){ talk_to(a) bar(b, c) bar would implicitly actually be bar(a,b,c) (or a.bar(b,c) if you prefer). This example seems pointless, but there might be other worthwhile ones.