I have been looking for a way to practice Japanese grammar. I have tried Bunpro and Marumori, I don’t think digital learning is for me, I need to write it out and practice it repeatedly.
I have the Genki textbooks, Genki workbooks and the Nihongo So-matome N5/N4 books. But I was wondering if any of you had any other recommendations for grammar workbooks were I can answer questions and do drills.
Japanese classes
I go to a Japanese class but I think my teachers mainly use it to practice their English, which is fine with me but I am not progressing. Its community run class and they are not actual teachers, but it is free and I get invited to lots of community events, so its worth going just for that. I will ask one of them to mark my work and hopefully I can start progressing again.
You’d think living in Japan would be helpful, but in reality I have stagnated so hard. It’s actually embarrassing.
If you find yourself near a bookstore you could take a look and see if “Try!” fits your taste. It has some exercises but only multiple choice… Otherwise N5 and N4 are still pretty low so the amount of pure drill books isn’t as high I think.
That doesn’t necessarily exclude digital resources. I use Bunpro a lot and regularly write out grammar points and example sentences for practice. And the built-in SRS and Cram features greatly assist with the “repeatedly” part of studying.
There are many benefits to using digital learning materials: you can listen to things, look stuff up faster, etc. But I’m not trying to convince you to use them. Maybe you could be a bit more precise about what you imagine the textbook you’re looking for to be like. Because IMO, “answer questions and do drills” is kind of all of them.
I personally have used the 新完全マスター series, which is nice because it splits things into 漢字、語彙、文法、読解、聴解, so you naturally get to revisit the same kanji, vocab, and grammar structures in different contexts and through different types of input.
I have to say for me, grammar clicked when I did grammar plus reading. Genki was plenty to get started, and then I actually learned most of my grammar along the way from the glosses and grammar guides on Satori Reader. In other words, instead of more workbooks - encounter the grammar in the wild
Do you know Learn Natively? You can find books by ‘level’ there. I thought it was most useful at the beginning of my reading journey.
I did graded readers → Satori → WK book clubs (a level ~14 manga was the best transition from Satori I’d say)
@downtimes Thank you! I will ‘Try!’ it out (bad pun, I’m sorry.)
@vouchou Hmmm… I think you’re right. Digital resources are incredibly useful, so I shouldn’t exclude them entirely. I plan to continue using SRS features since they’ve really helped with my kanji, but I will start including writing challenges using new grammar points.
I am not entirely sure exactly what I want out of a textbook, my main goal is making the grammar stick. I feel like I really need to engage my brain to achieve that. According to the VARK learning styles, I lean towards the reading/writing approach, which is why I prefer a physical workbook. I just don’t get the same results from typing or clicking.
I’ll also try out the 新完全マスター series! Thank you so much for the suggestion!
@mitrac That’s the goal, I have read a few books on Satori and brought a couple of mangas. I’m finding it hard to get into them. Sometimes I open them up and find them overwhelming, they are probably way above my level. I will look into Learn Natively and see if I can find something more my level. Thank you!
If you are mainly studying from textbooks, then manga might indeed be hard for you, because they almost exclusively contain direct speech with all its shortenings, slang and half-sentences, which textbooks don’t prepare you for at all. You might have an easier time trying to read stories in that case? There are also graded readers which restrict the language to beginner-level grammar and vocab - that helped me a lot when I started reading. The Absolute Beginner Book Club here in the forums is also a good place to read easy books together and ask questions. Happy reading!
(bad pun, I’m sorry.)