While I’m not super crazy about studying grammar I’m trying to think of a way that isn’t just one side grammar, other side English meaning. So here’s the idea:
I was thinking like one side of the card be a prompt and I have to answer with the grammar
I’m not sure what I could put on the back. I want it to be open ended. So maybe I should just put the English meaning on the back or some example sentences. What are your ideas?
I’ve been going through a Nihongo Kyoshi grammar deck I found recently and maybe the way they format it could be helpful? The front side will present 3 random sentences from 15~ example sentences with the grammar point at top. Then the back side gives an explanation of the grammar point along with all of the example sentences.
I don’t remember the definitions verbatim but I usually pass a card if I can understand its meaning/usage in the example sentences.
Example of front:
Example of back:
Seconding the above post, I feel that example sentences would be an absolute must when making a grammar deck, so that you can see each grammar construction in context. Multiple sentences would probably also be good when a grammar construction can have more than one meaning/usage.
That’s probably the approach I’d use if I ever made a deck based on my grammar resources, like for example Cure Dolly. She provides a lot of sample sentences in her lessons that make good candidates to include in cards.
I’m a bit uncertain about the value of grammar flash cards. Definitely for more common, foundational grammar (roughly, pre-N1) I think it appears so often anyway that there’s no need to take the time to SRS it. I did SRS some N1 grammar as part of JLPT prep, and the approach I used there was cloze-deletion cards in Anki, so the prompt was a sentence with a chunk cut out plus an English hint of the thing to fill in. But this I think only works if you do it for a limited number of cards, otherwise there are too many possibilities for the phrase to fill in. I also think it works best for the kind of time-bound purpose like test prep, because after a while you start to remember the required grammar item just from the example sentence, without going through the ‘meaning → grammar’ step you’re supposedly drilling.
On the back of the cards I put the filled in sentence, plus a brief English summary of any important non-obvious things. Because I only did this for grammar I had already learned outside the SRS, I only needed hints to remind me of that sort of thing, not a complete explanation.
I think an argument could be made that actual grammar is only N4/N5 and anything after that is idiomatic.
I know exactly what you mean, and yes, I’m using “grammar” in the usual Japanese-as-a-second-language extended sense which covers a lot of things that could be classified as idiom, vocabulary, common sentence patterns, etc. But from a technical point of view, the fact that 〜ず is N2 is a counterexample to your thesis 
Fair point. 
Although with Japanese, I’ve found that exceptions are the only exception to the exception rule. 
This topic was automatically closed 365 days after the last reply. New replies are no longer allowed.
