Community's Opinion on whats the best way to learn grammar? Have you Used LingoDeer? Can you share you experience with LingoDeer?

What I’ve used in my Japanese learning journey so far:
(my crude attempt at using a table as a timeline)

Start — —> Present
6 months 9 9 6 1 year 1
Human Japanese Human JP 2 Lang-8 Wanikani Wanikani Wanikani
Memrise *Genki *Genki 2 Tobira Tobira Kamesame
Write characters Write characters Inflluent (steam) Study abroad Old JLPT N2 tests
*トッピクによる総合演習

(*) Used these textbooks and/or workbooks in a college course

This doesn’t count playing some video games (pokemon, stardew valley) in Japanese, looking up random words I think of in English, looking up words I hear on TV shows, reading any sign/poster I saw in Japan and looking up the kanji, looking up grammar points I don’t understand, etc.

I think I’ve progressed tremendous amounts through each section I have above so hopefully this will be helpful to you or someone.

I actually really like Japanese Ammo, mostly because she usually covers a bunch of different points in one video depending on the examples she gives, and she’s very clear about what form is used with what types of person. I find it never boring, and even though it’s hard to get in depth with any grammar point through video alone, it does a great job introducing me or strengthening my understanding of different forms that I can then recognize more easily in the wild.

As far as in depth go, I’ve been using the “Readings” tab of Bunpro, and just exploring one grammar point at a time through all available resources, taking notes/making a summary as I go. I find many resources are complementary, so rather than use one for all points, I go to all for each point. :slight_smile:

I should mention those four books, which I love and don’t use enough for lack of time:

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The cult will grow! Glad to hear it! :smile:

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  1. I like Tae Kim’s guide as a reference for looking things up, but I use other things for studying and learning.

  2. This is the main one I use for grammar. I’m heavily invested in WK right now, so I don’t have the time to put into BP that it deserves, but I find it useful to just quickly review grammar items and then let the SRS do it’s thing. I’ll start out with something like 60% accuracy and then just keep doing them until I get that up to 90% and then start a new set of lessons. I’m up to N4 right now and it’s been paying off quite a bit.

  3. LingoDeer I didn’t find very useful. I gave it a good go and paid for 2 months in advance to try it out, but at the time I’d tried it I’d already been doing WK and BP for a good month and I tested out of like 80% of the Japanese 1 and 2 sets. The lessons were ok, but, again, at that point they were really just teaching me vocab and I was already getting a lot of that through WK.

  4. I’m trying out BunPo now, but I think it has many of the same problems for me as LingoDeer. Plus, I prefer the fact that BP makes you type in the answers rather than the more gamified way BunPo/LingoDeer/DuoLingo do it.

  5. I had a look through the Genki textbooks, and I had kind of the same problem as LingoDeer: I was already getting a lot of it through WK and BP. Plus, learning Japanese is something I’m doing for enjoyment in my spare time, and the fact that it looks like, and is, a textbook puts me off a bit.

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To clarify that a bit, I can’t stress enough how good WK and BP were for me. I could test out of a lot of the content because I knew enough to infer the meaning from the example sentences and having multiple choice or “order the words” types of questions was a bit too easy.

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I started Bunpro and did their extended readings that they’ve curated from around the internet.

Where is this extended reading section?

Thanks for your opinion about LingoDeer.
I’ve used LingoDeer once 2 years ago since the Japanese 1 was free. The vocab indeed wasn’t as great as WK but it helped me to understand how the expressions and phrases are built.
After I had finished it, the app recommended to purchase Japanese 2 but I was kinda unsure.

Maybe I won’t continue using after that.

The thing about LingoDeer is I viewed it as a pocket sized interactive text book for learning grammar initially.

Genki doesn’t wake you up in the morning to drill you on what you’ve learned either, you’ve got to take the initiative.

I studied the textbook-like about section at the beginning of every chapter, then did the lesson. Over the next few days, I used the review section to review said lesson. The review section is highly customizable. I set mine to English sentences, and forced myself to recall the Japanese. It worked great. Periodically, as I went through the whole app this way, I’d review random older chapters.

After I finished the program I opened Genki as a sort of review and understood every bit of it.

So yeah, I’d say it’s all in how you use it.

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Not at a computer right now to take screenshots, but when you’re looking at a grammar point (either in lessons or just their page in general) there should be three tabs that read: Meaning, Examples, Reading.
Click on the reading one and most grammar points have links to several curated explanations that usually go into pretty good detail. Some even have information comparing and contrasting similar grammar points, or videos explaining the grammar in Japanese. Over time you’ll find which resources are your favorites and that becomes handy for streamlining your studies.

Just started with Bunpro, it’s incredible and definitely the best Grammar resource available for me.

I used LingoDeer Japanese 1, and it was good, but I find Bunpro better.

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Cure Dolly has made all the difference in my understanding that you can’t learn Japanese grammar through the lenses of English grammar. Once I quit trying to apply English concepts to Japanese, suddenly the grammar is sooo much easier. Once I got that concept, I can almost always get the grammar correct, at least the grammar that I know at my level.

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I agree with this so much. Cure Dolly might come off really weird at the start (CG girl robot sensei), but of all resources Ive tried, she’s the only one that had explained が usage so effectively (and this means so much because がaffects all japanese sentence structure).

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Something nice about Japanese the Manga Way is that in addition to the natural English translations, it also had more literal translations, so you could get a better feel for what the Japanese is doing.

So I just subscribed to Lingodeer, but I don’t think I’m going to use it for Japanese. More like Mandarin (you can change to use traditional hanzi in the app but unfortunately not on desktop).

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