Hey folks! I am new to japanese learning and am looking forward to it. For begginers I know Taekim’s guide and genki 1 are great, but I am not sure what to do after that for grammar? I know Bunpro is great of maintaining my knowledge of grammar rules, but I don’t know any place to learn more advanced/intermediate grammar
I’m a big proponent of the Dictionary of (Basic/Intermediate/Advanced) Japanese Grammar.
I agree with that. I really preferred the more Tae Kim-style grammar explanations plus examples, vs. actual textbooks with dialogues, exercises, vocab lists and kanji you’re supposed to learn all mixed in.
I personally tried to use Genki and Tobira myself, and really didn’t like them at all (though I’m sure they’re fine for others.)
Tae Kim and Japanese the Manga Way were much more to my liking, and the various Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar are a good continuation after that, since they cover so much (though I haven’t personally gotten around to getting the Advanced one yet.)
I am also in the group of Dictionary of Japanese Grammar. I just don’t think anything else is anywhere near as thorough as the dictionary. I also find it to be much more practically when reading texts as if you need to brush up on a grammar point or check an alternate meaning, it’s organized in the dictionary so you can go right to it. The only advantage I can see in the textbook approach is that the grammar progression is structured so you won’t be learning random advanced grammar while still not having the basics down, but honestly this hasn’t given me any problems really.
I’m surprised people can learn new grammar successfully from these grammar dictionaries. Without some structure telling me which grammar points to focus on, I’d drown in the sea of grammar.
I manage based on pure necessity. It’s kind of surprising how much the ‘base set’ of grammar accounts for in normal usage, so once you get the basics down you really can just learn grammar as you encounter it. Usually I find that new grammar can kind of turn into a rabbit hole in exploring similar points, so just studying from necessity has been surprisingly productive in that way.
I second what everyone else has been saying about the Dictionary of OO Grammar! And on top of that I would recommend the Nihonshock cheat-sheets available on Amazon. They are extremely well organised and petty comprehensive covering basic grammar, numbers, advanced verbs and grammar, onomatopoeia, spoken Japanese, keigo and kanji. On their own they probably aren’t too much use unless you have some knowledge of Japanese already but put them together with a grammar dictionary and you’ve got a decent starting point for what to study next as well as more in depth explanations provided by the grammar dictionary. It’s also a godsend when you need to quickly look up how to conjugate something and can’t quite remember the formulation of it.
+1 for the Dictionary of […] Japanese Grammar, or other, similar grammar dictionaries. I also feel a lot like @Loafer about learning by necessity. I like to read manga (or rather, try to ), so whenever I encounter a grammar construction that I don’t understand, I’ll look it up. I feel that the grammar I learned that way sticks better than when trying to explicitly learn grammar with ‘artificial’ examples.
For me, after getting the basics from Tae Kim/Japanese the Manga Way, just reading through the dictionaries then reviewing along with the order Bunpro presents grammar has worked well enough for me. I do agree that at the beginning having a holistic, structured approach is important.
I dug into my budget to buy the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar last week. All these replies to OP saying praising the resource are making me feel much more confident about my purchase
I am another user of Tae Kim’s guide but also watch YouTube’s Japanese Pod 101, they tend to explain grammar pretty well. If you are also looking to test on conjugated forms, I actually just downloaded Japanese Conjugation City for Android and definitely recommend! You can select which conjugation form you want to test on and on which JLPT level you are.
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