Full disclosure: I wouldn’t have been able to answer any of those off of the top of my head 
I had to read the explanations again. Which is why I like this thread already…
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I did the same exact thing!!
I’m glad I’m not the only one then! And thank you your explanations are helping a lot. 
I’m glad it’s good review! I’m having a good time with this thread and I feel like it’s making the process a lot easier so I hope it helps others as well 
Thank you to everyone for helping me out so fast already <3
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If you keep posting questions, I’ll happily review the grammar points / questions myself and try to help out. The review will be good for me as well.
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Looking at my picture again, it’s funny, I just finally understood why I kept failing question 1.8 at that time.
学校を休んで遊んでいる( ) 友達のお母さんに見られた。
a. ところで b. ところに c. ところを
It’s because I didn’t know that で could be the て-form of だ, so this kind of sentence confused me a lot.
Edit: except I read too fast it’s just plain て-form… Maybe it’s time to do kanzen master again lol
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That alone was such a huge きらめき moment for me when I finally figured it out. It seems like such an easy thing to teach but in my experience nobody does.
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I sometimes have this “But I should be required to understand, not just do pattern matching!” moment, but by now I’ve come to believe that grammar is much more about pattern matching than understanding anyway…
The “gaming” feeling may come in when I work by excluding impossible options, because that way I still don’t know what is correct, I only know what is not. But this is more the issue of multiple choice, I guess.
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Hello everyone! I just went through the final exercises for 1 and 2 and did surprisingly well. I only missed two! Now it’s time to move on to ３課文法!
So right off the bat the first grammar point is giving me trouble:
くらいだ・ぐらいだ・くらい・ぐらい・ほどだ・ほど
It having like, 6 different ways to say it doesn’t make a good impression right off the bat. 
I’m having trouble understanding the meaning behind this one. After reading all the examples I’m completely lost on the meaning. Here are some of them:
この店のパンはおいしい。毎日食べたいくらいだ。
よう子さんの腕は折れそうなくらい細い。
かそをさすほどではないが、少し雨が降っている。
突然たっていられないほどのいたみをせなかに感じた。
I’ll kinda go through what I think the meaning is behind each one.
- This shop’s bread is delicious! I want to eat it everyday! (I think くらい here is maybe just emphasis that they could eat it every single day?)
- Youko-san’s are so thin they look like they could break!
So based off these first two I thought it had something to do with like exaggerations.
- Even though there are no umbrellas, it’s raining a little bit. (I honestly have no idea what this one is trying to say.)
- If I don’t stand up suddenly I feel no back pain. (A complete loss for this one as well.)
Yeah I’m just lost on this one. The meanings I inferred from 1 and 2 don’t seem to fit the rest of the examples. And I’m not even sure what it is they are trying to say. Even reading the explanations I’m not getting it.
OK, let’s see how far we can get together
- you got pretty much right! Literally it would be “the bread is delicious to the extent that I want to eat it every day.”
- I also agree with your understanding.
3:
かさをさす - to open an umbrella (to hold up an umbrella) - (also, please be careful with typos)
ほど - to that extent
ではない - it is not
が、少し雨が降っている。- but a bit of rain fell.
So something like “It rained a little, but not so much that I needed to open my umbrella.”
4:
突然 - suddenly
たっていられない - cannot stand (potential)
ほど - to the extent
のいたみ - pain
をせなかに感じた。- I felt in the back.
“Suddenly my back hurt so much that I could not stand any more.”
The fourth one could also be an exaggeration, which seems to be used frequently in Japanese together with ほど (I once had an entire lesson where my teacher and I tried to come up with fun exaggerations like 血が凍るほどびっくりしました。- I was so shocked that the blood froze in my veins. You get the idea )
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That’s basically how I memorized ほど too, thanks to exaggeration.
死ぬほど笑った
I laughed to the point / to the extent of dying.
The stuff on the left of ほど actually never happen, it’s just a comparison.
So for example in 突然たっていられないほどのいたみをせなかに感じた we actually don’t know if the person couldn’t stand up anymore after feeling that pain They are just describing the pain with a comparison, it was a “can’t stand anymore” kind of pain.
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Thank you for the reply.
I don’t know how that typo got in because I noticed I typed it wrong went back and changed it and still mistyped I guess 
Okay thank you for breaking it down for me. I think the issue I was having was trying to organize it like an English sentence which is why I wasn’t able to understand the meaning.
So Is ほど and くらい always exaggerating something? I like the sentences you guys made
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As @Arzar33 mentioned, I believe comparison is the main idea here. You can of course use exaggeration in comparative sentences, which helps make them more colorful and easier to memorize, though it’s not necessary. We do this all the time in English, through similes and metaphors. Some English examples:
• I ate so much that I felt like I was going to explode.
• It’s raining cats and dogs.
(if we use the same structure as the previous one, we could say something like “It’s raining so hard that cats and dogs could be falling out of the sky.”)
Some negative examples:
• It wasn’t hot enough to get heat stroke, but it was still really uncomfortable weather.
(Again using the same structure as the above, we could also say it as, “It wasn’t so hot that I got heat stroke, but it was still really uncomfortable weather.”)
• I wasn’t so tired that I couldn’t stay awake, but I still had a hard time concentrating on my test.
In all of these examples, you might notice that I make use of this English grammatical structure:
• … so (adjective) that (s-v-o)
• … not so (adjective) that (s-v-o) …
These can also be changed to
• enough to (verb) OR
• enough that (s-v-o)
In both of those structures, nouns can be inserted between “enough” and “to/that”.
With this in mind, looking at the examples from your textbook again, we could translate as:
この店のパンはおいしい。毎日食べたいくらいだ。
This shops’s bread is so good/tasty/delicious that I want to eat it every day.
よう子さんの腕は折れそうなくらい細い。
Yoko’s arms are so thin that they look like they could break.
かさをさすほどではないが、少し雨が降っている。
It’s not raining enough to open an umbrella, but it’s still raining a little.
(More colloquial: It’s raining a little, but not enough to use an umbrella.)
突然たっていられないほどのいたみをせなかに感じた。
I suddenly felt so much pain in my back that (it seemed like/I thought that) I couldn’t stand up.
Or maybe more natural:
My back suddenly hurt so much that I felt like I couldn’t stand up.
Sorry if this is too grammar-y of an explanation, but I hope it helps
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Thank you for the reply, I appreciate it.
Messages like these are really helpful and are great for getting a better understand of the grammar points.
ありがとうございます <3
Also I went through all the exercises and the rest of Chapter 3 tonight without any trouble! The first grammar point was the only one that tripped me up this time thankfully.
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Hello everyone! Tonight I’m working through ４課文法 and had a couple of questions.
First, for one of the example sentences:
この絵、社長に頼まれてかいたんですか
Short question but I’m not exactly sure what the かいたん part is…
Tried running it through ichi.moe and a dictionary but can’t find what it is.
Also is it just me or are the exercises getting a lot easier 
Anyway, I only got two wrong this time:
旧製品は長い間よく売れているのに対して、この新製品は（b）
a. あした発売になる b. あまり人気がない c. すぐに売り切れた
I answered B. Any help on this would be appreciated! EDIT: Yeah so the correct answer is B while I wrote C! Sorry
わたし夜（c）かわりに朝早く起きて勉強しています。
a.遅く帰る b.眠くなる c.早く寝る
I answered A here. I can see why C is the answer but I don’t see why A can’t work as well.
I hope everyone is having a good day/night!
Well, it’s about an 絵, so presumably it’s 書く (or 描く).
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I think your answer is correct ?
I can’t find any grammatical reason. I think C is probably the “most fitting” because it’s the most straightforward, but A is probably not wrong.
C is simple, without any assumption 早く寝る (and to make up for that) 朝早く起きる. 寝る/起きる.
But to make sense of response A, you have to fill the blank like “I go home late (and because of that I don’t have time to study in the evening) and to make up for it I wake up early and study”, so it’s much less straightforward. Answer C is probably just more natural.
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They list the answer as being C. I went with B.
And okay I can see the reasoning behind the second one. Thank you
It’s B according to the answer sheet.
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Ugh yeah so I mixed it around I’m sorry! I wrote down C while the correct answer is B
C. “Instead of going to bed early at night, I get up early and study.”
(Kinda silly to think about though, because it would mean the person goes to bed late but gets up early, so they get even less sleep, which makes it difficult to study? Are you sure it’s not 遅く寝る？ )
A. “Instead of coming home late, I get up early and study.”
This doesn’t really make sense, unless we assume the reason for coming home late in the first place was due to studying late hours someplace outside the home (school? library? cafe?). Since there’s no context for this, I think it would require a great leap in thinking from the reader to make such an assumption. Unfortunately, there’s no sure way to know the reason for coming home late; there are too many possibilities.
That said, C makes the most sense to me, though I am wondering if there’s a typo …
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B. The old products sold well for a long time. That means they must have been popular / well-liked / etc.
So when you put that (の)に対して in there, you’re making a contrast about this point, even though it’s not explicitly stated:
Although the old products sold well for a long time, the new products aren’t very popular.
= Although the old products sold well for a long time (because they were popular), the new products aren’t very popular (so they’re not selling well).
With this in mind, C doesn’t fit, because it would indicate that the new products are even more popular than the old ones and therefore sold out immediately.
More simply put, with に対して, you’re looking for a positive/negative contrast.
B. popular vs. unpopular (positive vs. negative)
C. popular vs. more popular (both positive)
If I’m wrong about this, anyone please feel free to correct me.
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