This is a recommendation a bit off the beaten path, but I would say that maybe the JLPT Sensei N3 grammar e-book might be a really good solution for what you’re searching for. There are 300+ pages of grammar explanations, information about exceptions/synonyms, and plenty of uncomplicated example sentences where you can see the grammar used in a straightforward manner. There aren’t any practice problems, but that’s what you can use your Shin Kanzen Master book for Good luck!
So I had a look through the preview of this textbook and I think if you’re using it as part of a language school class it should be fine; you can supplement it with some of the free online resources. Why do I think that?
in the class you’ll hopefully get extra explanation and examples from the teacher, beyond what’s in the book
at the N3 level it’s good to start getting used to explanations of Japanese grammar in Japanese
many N3 and up grammar points are just simpler and less in need of long explanations
when you find something confusing, doing a web search for “だろう grammar” or whatever will bring up multiple resources, so you can find the one that seems clearest
The shinkanzen books also tend to be quite short on explanation.
If you want books with grammar explanations in English, my personal recommendations:
The Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, and its Intermediate and Advanced sequel volumes. These are the most detailed and comprehensive I know of; they don’t cover every possible “grammar point” but they get the important ones and what they do cover gets a lot of coverage per point, which I think is a good tradeoff. There’s a forum book club that went through Basic last year and is about to start Intermediate.
A Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for Teachers and Learners, aka 日本語文型辞典 (link is to the Tofugu review). I actually have the original Japanese-only version of this, but I am assuming the coverage is similar; the review has screenshots. This isn’t as in depth as the DoBJG etc, but it has wider coverage, so I tended to use it as my secondary reference. You could alternatively just use web resources like bunpro instead of this one. Also available in Korean, Thai, Vietnamese, Chinese and Japanese versions.
So it depends on your budget – I really do recommend the Dictionary series, especially if you like a paper reference book, but if money is tight then you’ll be fine with the textbook and free online resources. If you have a Japanese book buying habit like me you can supplement with 日本語文型辞典.
To give a bit more context, my school, depending on the teacher of the day spends anywhere between 15 minutes to 1 hour on grammar each day. Sometimes, had I not prepped before class i would have had a difficult time following the new grammar introduced each day because we were rushing through a lot of things.This is why i feel i need a book with detailed eng explanations.
I was using Nihongoal (youtube channel) along with the books to prep for N4.however for n3 the Nihongoal channel continues using minna no nihongo. Would anyone here know a channel which follows the textbook i will be using?should i also give minna no nihongo intermediate level a try?
Not that specific book, but it looks like a traditional style “learn kanji by rote writing out, in an order that’s more biased to usage, not particularly trying to sort by component usage”, and I think most of these books are largely “show you the stroke order and provide spaces to practice the characters”. In a language school you’ll want the writing practice.
If you’re trying to also do “SRS with mnemonics” style kanji learning (eg WaniKani, RTK) I suspect you’ll find they don’t synergize very well, but there’s not a lot to be done about that. An SRS+mnemonics system that is more flexible about kanji order (i.e. not WK) would help; otherwise you’re likely to find that the kanji you’re asked to learn for class don’t overlap much with the ones the SRS is doing until you’ve got a long way into both.
I like the explanations in Try. It’s more grammar-focused whereas the quartet books are well-rounded.
We’re also using Shin Kanzen Master series for Vocab, but my friend gave me the one for grammar to help with N3 prep. I found the explanations in there really minimal, but the practice questions for useful to testing my understanding.
Ya spot on.they teach us kanji the same way elementary school kids in japan are taught kanji.repetition. I spoke to some of my teachers as to why they dont explain the radicals to us before we learn the kanji but they couldnt given me an answer
SKM N3 with “A Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for Teachers and Learners”. The second is a grammar dictionary which I think will be useful even up to N1.
Yup, my school uses Minna no Nihongo (volumes 1 and 2) for beginner levels up through N4. I started midway through volume 2 and finished it within two months (I’ve studied Japanese previously for several years, so it was brushing up on basics).
General concensus in my class is we all like Quartet and the other textbooks much more than MNN as they teach more realistic conversation patterns and grammar. No one talks like the characters in MNN in real life. (We’re a school that focuses on conversation.)
It’s the same team as the Genki textbook authors, so if you’ve used Genki in the past, that may be why it feels familiar
