Samuel E. Martin was a master teacher of the Japanese language and a major force in language learning in the postwar U.S. He received his undergraduate and master's degrees in Oriental languages from the University of California at Berkeley and his Ph.D. in linguistics from Yale University. At Yale he served as chairman of the Department of East and South Asian Languages and Literatures and the Department of Linguistics. He is the author of numerous books and papers on Japanese and Korean, including the definitive A Reference Grammar of Japanese and A Reference Grammar of Korean.

Eriko Sato received her Ph.D. degree in linguistic from the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She is currently Associate Professor in the Department of Asian and Asian American Studies. She is also the Executive Director of the Japan Center as well as the Founding Director of the Pre-College Japanese Language Program at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. She has written other Japanese titles, including the best-selling Japanese Stories for Language Learners and Japanese for Dummies