I don’t think its the right question to ask per say. Does it work for youor not? If not its 100% ok.
As for me, she does wonders for me, but can be a clickbaity too much
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Cure Dolly teaches an English Audience and your wife isn’t English. Most Native speakers don’t understand how their language works cause they don’t have to. as the saying goes “You don’t have to know how a clock works in order to tell the time”. I’m interested to know did your wife explain why it sounds unnatural?
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I’d argue that this isn’t accurate; most native speakers of any language learn grammatical rules and syntax as children and have this reinforced through their teenage years. By the time somebody reaches adulthood they’ve had a lot of experience of what correct structure looks like. Granted, this isn’t universal, there are always people who have trouble with things, but to say that “most” native speakers don’t understand how their language works is a gross over-simplification and over-exaggeration.
Those who don’t understand the basics of their language are likely to be the exception, not the rule.
That’s true, but I’d still argue that as a native speaker, you don’t need to understand grammar. My native tongue is German, and while I did learn all those pesky grammar rules in school, I forgot most of them because (as paradoxical as that may sound) I never used them. Being immersed in German all the time and using it daily, your native language comes to you naturally. I could easily tell you why one sentence structure is (or rather, feels) correct while another one doesn’t, but I couldn’t explain to you the rules as to why that is.
Maybe we’re talking about different kinds of grammar (I guess basic and advanced grammar might behave differently in this regard?).
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I’ll put it another way::
Through your entire life you learn what sounds right, even if you don’t understand the advanced grammatical reasoning behind it. If you hear a grammatical element in the wrong order or the wrong one being used in the wrong place, it is very obvious to you.
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I learnt Yoruba to fluency with 0% grammar. Language is not math.
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I also do not wish to digress from the main topic. I found Cure Dolly useful because their explanation helped me as a Native English speaker. I think that it’s important to remember that. Subjective… Absolutely.
“You don’t have to know how a clock works in order to tell the time”
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True. The most apt comparison is music; discordance is audible.
I can listen to a piece of music, not knowing anything about composition, and still hear when a non-standard scoring is used.
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“Grammar” as taught in schools to native speakers is usually a combination of:
- trying to teach a ‘standard/prestige’ dialect to students whose native dialect is different
- teaching formal written forms of the language which aren’t part of everyday spoken language – particularly when the written language has deviated significantly from the spoken (eg French passé simple, pre-1900s written Japanese)
- some teaching of nonsense rules like ‘never split infinitives in English’
As you say, for many people these aren’t really of much practical use, depending on what your later life is like. Different education systems may put greater or lesser emphasis on them. Further, they’re not really related to what is taught to students of the language as a foreign language under the heading of “grammar” or indeed to what a linguist would call “grammar”.
My personal opinion is that languages are generally regular in a lot of ways, and so you can observe them and build up rules and theories about how they work. For a lot of second-language-learners, learning these rules explicitly is helpful in building up a scaffolding that helps them get to grips with the language and start using it more quickly. Eventually you get good enough that you don’t need to think about the rules, in the same way that once you’ve built a house you don’t need the scaffolding any more.
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I would disagree here. Most native speakers will know something sounds unnatural, but lack the ability to express exactly why. Perhaps they can if they haven’t been out of school for long, but remember that Japan has an aging population.
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Just reading through this thread… wow, a lot went down here. I came looking for opinions on one particular teaching of Cure Dolly’s, but it seems that it never quite came up–not exactly, anyway.
The thing that’s been bothering me is her claim that Japanese “doesn’t have a passive.” I can only assume that this is related to her insistence that Japanese doesn’t have conjugation (which actually was discussed in this thread). Personally, I’m inclined to call the various endings of Godan verbs “conjugations” of a sort already, and calling れる a separate “helper verb” doesn’t really change that. But ironically, in splitting れる off as a helper verb, Cure Dolly ends up giving the Japanese sentence structure more of a resemblance to the English passive, which definitely does exist. English forms its passive by using a helper verb (usually “to be,” but you could argue that “to get” also qualifies) and a modified form of the base verb (known as the participle), and that closely mirrors Cure Dolly’s model of a modified Godan verb and れる as a helper verb. So in my eyes, Japanese definitely does have a “passive,” and the fact that many Japanese verbs are innately “passive” without modification doesn’t change that.
With that said, however, I personally have found many of Cure Dolly’s other explanations to be very useful. Some of them have also been brought up in this thread, namely:
Every complete sentence has a subject (the thing that DOES or IS), and that subject is always marked with が, but the subject can be omitted when it is clear from context.
For me, this has actually been a very helpful way to approach sentences, especially when dealing with the infamous は / が distinction. The main advantage of Cure Dolly’s model (at least in my eyes) is that it reduces the functionality of が to something very simple and clear. Before, I had a rather nebulous understanding of が as being some sort of “focus marker,” and I was still struggling to figure out when and where to use it. Cure Dolly’s model says, “It’s the subject, end of story–but if you’re going to include it, it needs to be for a good reason.” This actually ends up being very similar to the conundrum presented by Spanish, a language that I’m more advanced in. In Spanish, it’s obvious that pronouns like “yo” and “tú” are subject pronouns, but since verb conjugations usually make them redundant, you only include them when you have some special reason to–like, say, putting emphasis on them. It’s almost like they become some sort of “focus marker”… except no one calls them that, because that’s just one possible result that can be achieved with them, not their base function. Perhaps to someone who’s never learned a language that drops subject pronouns, this model would be less useful, but for me, it felt a lot clearer than the more traditional ones.
(There was also one poster who said that in their native language, they would instead “start with a mess of parts” and only pick out the ones that were needed. I’m no mind reader, but to me, that process doesn’t sound meaningfully different. You’d still have to give consideration to the same list of parts in order to determine which ones are needed, so you’d still end up pruning off unnecessary ones in much the same manner.)
他動詞 and 自動詞 do not correspond perfectly to “transitive” and “intransitive.”
This is another teaching of Cure Dolly’s that I’ve actually found to be quite helpful. However, all my attempts to find out what the Japanese themselves think about this have only led to discussions where someone says that 他動詞 really is just “transitive verb” and 自動詞 is just “intransitive verb.” Yet despite this apparent “debunking,” I still find it worthwhile to sometimes classify verbs as “self-move” and “other-move” rather than just “transitive” or “intransitive.” Why? Because it supports Cure Dolly’s larger model of Japanese verb pairs such as 開く and 開ける, a model which also helps relieve some of the pain of memorization. Not all of these pairs are actually transitive-intransitive pairs, but in my experience thus far, the exceptions could still be called “self-move/other-move.” Take 預ける and 預かる, for example. 預ける means “to entrust; to put in someone else’s care.” It’s a transitive verb, and the thing that you are transferring to someone else is the direct object. Now, according to Cure Dolly’s model, 預かる ends in “-aru,” so it should be “self-move”–but we find that this verb is also transitive. It means “to take care of,” and the thing that you are taking care of is the direct object. Apparently, Cure Dolly’s convenient little rule of “-aru = self-move” has failed us–but if you use a looser definition of “self-move,” as opposed to just “intransitive,” then the rule still holds. Both verbs indicate that the object is being taken care of, but 預ける indicates that someone else is to take care of it, while 預かる indicates that you yourself will take care of it. So even if Cure Dolly was incorrect about how Japanese people define 他動詞 and 自動詞, I still find her grammatical model worth using.
を always marks the direct object–no exceptions.
To be honest, this is something I always took for granted even before watching Cure Dolly’s videos, so seeing some posters claiming the opposite in this thread gave me quite a turn. I most certainly am not advanced enough in Japanese to make any sort of authoritative claim on this topic, but I will say that the one concrete counterexample given, 空を飛ぶ, doesn’t strike me as very convincing. Jisho.org doesn’t call it either 他動詞 or 自動詞, but rather an “expression.” This feels to me like an acknowledgment that it’s not a typical use of the verb 飛ぶ, which is indeed listed as intransitive. But regardless, I could treat the entire phrase 空を飛ぶ as an exception. I could also just assign an alternate definition of “to fly through” to 飛ぶ, and just like that, I would have a transitive verb that could take 空 as a direct object. I have a sneaking suspicion that other examples of を supposedly not marking the direct object might similarly boil down to a choice between broadening the functionality of を or just writing off yet another verb as weird and exceptional. I’m pretty sure that verbs that can flip between transitive and intransitive are nothing new, so personally, I’m still inclined to just throw more verbs into the exception pile, at least for now.
Overall, even if I don’t agree with everything that Cure Dolly says, I’ve still found her videos to be worth watching overall. It does get a bit old hearing her complain about “eihongo” teaching methods for the umpteenth time, but she’s not wrong about there being a lot of bad Japanese courses out there. And ultimately, I appreciate her efforts to form a logical framework to explain things rather than saying, “That’s just the way it is” (a refrain often repeated by native speakers). In a way, I guess it appeals to the same curiosity that aided me in my math classes. You don’t get very far in math with a mantra of “Do X to get Y; don’t ask why.” Language may not be as rigidly logical as math, but I still think there’s some logic to be had, and I appreciate any opportunities to leverage it.
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You said it all, in my opinion she offered another perspective on Japanese that I found very helpful most of the time. But if some of her teaching don’t work with you, just ignore them and use whichever resources you think provide the clearer explanation to help you in the wild! 
I think she said so herself, “Pick what’s valuable to you, ignore the rest”.
I really like how she present some of Japanese pieces and explain the origin and ties up all the usage under one unique main meaning (だって for instance).
She will be missed, I would have hoped, she could contribute further to the Japanese learning sphere
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I think the core of Dolly’s argument is that the topic (は) can be omitted, but her shtick is that the subject (が) is always present, and if it’s not visible, it’s still present as a null particle.
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This use of を to indicate location moved through or departed from applies to a lot of verbs of movement, so I think you’re probably best off thinking of it as a distinct use of を rather than a few set phrases or exceptions. Examples:
公園を散歩する
マミが家を出た (notice here we’re using the intransitive one of a transitive/intransitive pair)
バシャバシャと音をさせてぬかるみの中を行く
千葉を走る特急列車、ローカル線情報をご案内しています
右側を歩くと、前からくる車が見える
階段をダッシュした
(to pick six verbs at random).
Personally I think of this as a second use of を which is not a direct-object marker, because, for example, you can’t recast these to use the passive with the を-marked noun becoming the subject. But however you want to think about them, it is a whole group of verbs that do this in a standard way with the same meaning. The fact you can do this with ダッシュ makes me suspect also that if a new loan-word verb of movement gets coined then を-marking-location is also naturally usable, i.e. that this is an ‘open’ category, not a ‘closed’ category only containing a fixed set of verbs.
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If you can walk the plank, you can fly the sky
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You can also sail the seven seas (before you walk the plank).
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Imagine for a moment the following sentence to be true:
All Japanese sentences are in the active voice.
The primary difference between the active voice and the passive voice is whether the verb is being performed by the subject (active) or to the subject (passive).
Now consider the following:
In a passive sentence, the subject is not doing. But by Cure Dolly’s teaching, for verb sentences, the subject is always the one that is doing.
The Japanese term for the 「(ら)れる」 form is 受け身. 受ける is to receive, and 身 is body. The “receiving body” form.
Consider this line from this Japanese website on grammar:
「笑われる」は、話し手（書き手）が他人の「笑う」という動作を受けるという意味を表しています。
This explains that the person who does 「笑われる」 is receiving the act of 「笑う」 from another party. (In English, we would say “being laughed at”, passive voice, while the Japanese is active voice.)
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The real question is: Is Cure Dolly… Parton?
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I believe she was arrested for impersonating her once, but you won’t find anything about it following Dolly’s pardon.
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and is Koichi Cure Dolly?
or is MissDiss Cure Dolly?
or is Nic Cage Cure Dolly?
how will we ever know?
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