Only the first DJG has romaji though, in the other two they switched to furigana.
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Guess Iâll throw in my two cents as well.
I had the same issue when I started off with BunPro. I think my main issue was I wanted to go too fast. I would just read one or two of the links in the readings tab. Eventually I got way too overwhelmed and had to reset my BunPro reviews.
Now I have a new method for adding new items to my BunPro reviews. I found when I come accross a wall of text I tend to try to speed read it and donât really understand it. I started going through the begginer grammer playlist on the âJapanese Ammo with Misaâ youtube channel. That really helped to slow me down and actually understand the grammer point I was trying to get. I also will go through the other readings listed on BunPro to better understand them now that I get the topic. The readings tend to cement the concept more into my brain. Only after doing all this and I feel good about understanding the grammer point do I add the grammer point to my reviews on BunPro. I essentially just use BunPro to get the grammer point into my long term memory.
This method takes me about 30 minutes to an hour to do depending on the topic but itâs been working well for me.
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You might like the book Japanese the Manga Way.
I enjoyed reading it back in the day. Maybe i need reread it since i learn much more japanese and understanding, at least i believe so.
If you like it, there also Japanese in Mangaland that had several book and there, i think? old journal with those.
I read it too and remember it was very similar feel to it. Although much harder, due to more advanced level japanese or maybe some other factors, donât remember. Didnât finished btw.
Probably need to. I donât think i can rely just on bunpro.
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Wow, thatâs just not right. I believe the Dictionary series is +2100 pages total versus ~+700 page for the HandbookâŠhow could it compare? No regrets on getting both but it gets expensive and if money is tight, the Dictionary series is my vote. Last I checked, jp amazon was ~25% cheaper for the Handbook so may be best bought while in Japan and take home.
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Going off the indices alone, the Handbook has hundreds more entries than all three DJGs combined.
Also I think I may have got really burned on the price of the Handbook owing to Australia Tax and whatnot. 
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Though Iâm sure it needs no additional praise, I feel the need to rep the Holy Bibleâą (occasionally referred to as âA Dictionary of Japanese Grammarâ). It is nothing short of a godsent. Setting aside all of the reasons already mentioned, I think my favorite part about the Bible is that itâs practical in real contexts. I can read a book or play a game with it right at my side and whenever thereâs something I donât understand grammatically, I can thumb to the exact area because itâs a dictionary, not a textbook or a web resource. And of course, the level of depth of each grammar point covered is unparalled in comparision to any other resources I know about. Honestly I havenât used BunPro in a while because I legitimately do not feel the need to; DJG covers my needs because I use it âin the wildâ, so SRS isnât needed as much, especially since grammar points are fewer and occur more often than any individual vocab.
So yeah. Moral of the story is read the Bible.
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Since you guys reminded me of the DJG and that I wanted to look into it again, I want to mention this deck too, maybe someone finds it useful. There is even a template that you can use to randomize the example sentences:
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Nice to know Iâm not the only one that canât stand the voice filter on cure dolly but likes the teaching style. Setting the speed to 1.75 or 2 + having some light background music made it much easier to follow the videos. Might have to go back if it gets too fast, but better than not watching at all.
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I bought the eBook and honestly didnât really find it that helpful. While it was great to have it in text form, a lot, and I mean almost all of it, is covered in her videos in much greater depth. Itâs obvious that the book was released way before she hit her stride on the video content.
I would still recommend you buy it, since the content is still really good (Iâm on my 3rd read or so), but donât expect anything thatâs not in the video series already.
Also, I looooove Cure Dolly First time I really âgotâ Japanese grammar.
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I liked the Handbook better actually. Itâs exactly that what I was looking for at the time, a quick reference (and a very good one for that matter). Something to quickly review upon finding a new gramatical structure while reading for example.
The DJGs series in contrast would be used more to read and embed myself with all the knowledge about one specific point, which felt more like sitting and studying grammar; progressively that was something I just wouldnât aim to anymore, so it started collecting dust on my shelf; after a while most grammar would just be like any other unknown vocab and mostly keep reading more would help me fix the idea, since I could put more related context on my own. A basic and quick explanation with the main differences regarding similar gramatical structures pointed out was all I needed for the get go.
Some points will have a separate entry on the Handbook, easy to find even if you donât now about the main concept behind it (the entry might refer you to the main pont after a brief line), but will be only mentioned in the DJG series as been an almost identical thing related to a bigger concept (so there was no way find them if you donât already know about the main idea behind, which usually took me some time to realize upon some extra searching). This point was really problematic for me, since I didnât learn grammar in a particular order, just searched upon bumping with new stuff, specially when reading native content which wonât have any consideration regarding JLPT order of difficulty.
Abreviated terms and even some colloquial points will be in the Handbook and not in the DJG series also, again some of those would be logical and you could easily link them to a main idea once you are aware of the relation to a main gramatical structure, again not my case by then.
All in all I can really vouch for the Handbook to be a great reference book. For me the DJG series had other merits which I wasnât specially interested in.
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Thanks for taking the time to counterpoint my points! I wish I could like this post five times! 
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Ah, youâre right; somehow I half forgot about the appendices!
And I didnât mean to say the books were bad. To the contrary, I actively refrain from getting dragged into debates about learning material, especially if I dislike them⊠but Iâll make an exception because you were nice to my linguistic-minded self on the other thread, so I thought you might appreciate some uninvited friendly advice, from someone whoâs studied much of the same thing before.
Iâll keep it brief, I promise. Problem for me with the Dictionary is that it lacks structure, so when you look something up, itâs hard to connect it to the bigger picture. And you definitely want that bigger picture because it improves your guessing power (or at least your ability to know when you donât know 
). Where present, the grammatical analysis is sometimes a bit unconvincing to me, so I advise caution.
Examples of what I mean (a bit technical, read at your peril)
- Somehow in the the DIJG ăŠăŻ is just explained as âetymologically Vte + wa (topic marker)â, with no mention that 㯠carries, as it often does, a conditional flavour. But the entry for ă«ăăŠăŻ in DBJG says 㯠means âifâ, and you can find similar info scattered around other expressions that end in ăŻ. You need to look up the entry for ă° to read âba is, in fact, the origin of the topic marker waâ. However, as is, the wording is awkward, since in modern Japanese ă° clearly attaches to a very specific inflected stem, whereas 㯠attaches to pretty much anything, so itâs difficult to see how from a special conjugation you end up with such a general-purpose particle.
- The authors seem to reject/ignore the analysis of ăă as a dummy/quasi-existential verb. Whether we subscribe to it or not, it canât be denied that it leads to very useful heuristics, e.g., the observation that ă㊠can be substituted for ă«, ăŠ, or ă«ăŠ(=ă§) quite freely in writing, so that you find plenty of ă«ăăŠăŻ=ă§ăŻ, ă«ăăŠă=ă§ă (almost), ăȘăăăŠ=ăȘă㧠(ă§=ăăŠ) or ăȘă㊠(ăŠ=ăăŠ), etc. Instead of that, the volumes labouriously try to connect it back to ă«ăă (âto make into/decideâ) for every entry, or failing that donât provide any grammatical analysis at all.
- In the more advanced parts, there is a clear tendency to avoid mentioning the literary/classical language, even when something like half of the entries are actually directly derived from it, which again leads to some questionable choices. Thereâs the all too common issue of calling the -(o)u form âvolitionalâ everywhere even when it clearly has a conjectural meaning that has nothing to do with volition, and in the same vein, the book is adamant that ă§ăă, ăšăŻèšă, etc. are imperatives that somehow acquire a concessive meaning, while IMHO the analysis that those come from a reduction of the literary concessive -(e)do (which is, by nature, concessive) ăăă©, ăăă© makes a lot more sense (and provides better heuristics, in any case). (The latter analysis does have the problem that you then need to postulate that somehow purely imperative forms such as ăă came to borrow that concessive meaning from their sister form.) EDIT: Note, to clarify, the imperative analysis is standard in traditional Japanese grammars at least for ă§ăă, but I dislike it.
- The usage notes seem to become less reliable in the advanced volume, in general. E.g., I mentioned in another thread that the treatment of AăăšæăăšB doesnât feel quite right to me; the DAJG says non-past A necessitates an emotive predicate in B, but you easily find examples of non-past A followed by descriptive B meaning ânot only A but (also) Bâ. A miscellaneous example occurs in the ăăăš entry where it says at the very end that ăšă cannot attach to ăŸă; yet Iâm pretty sure there are examples of that in litterature and on the InternetâŠ
Anyway, the point is I find the grammatical explanations lackluster at times, neither making a particularly strong point, nor providing useful heuristics⊠Again, it doesnât mean I hate the books.
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I know Iâve been doing too much grammar work when I can follow all of your points without looking it up lol
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Thats good to know about the book, thanks!
I might still buy it for a quick reference guide thatâs easier to look through than videos.
That, or I will actually finish typing out the entire notebook worth of CureDolly YT notes to have my own reference guide⊠A bot can dream.
When rewatching videos, I also grab the precise time stamp where she begins to talk about a certain grammar point, and add that link to the BunPro note section of the corresponding grammar point.
Easiest way to quickly find specific parts of her lessons among videos where she covers multiple things. ^^
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Same here! The grammar section of ENG-JP learning resources often leave me very frustrated.
Thanks to your post iâve discovered Cure Dolly and this channel has rekindled my hopes of getting a grip on Japanese grammar. I like the way the lessons a structured and the overall approach make a lot of sense to me. Cure Dolly is amazing. Strange but amazing.
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The best combination of things. 
That is precisely how I felt. 
Hope she can help you as much as she helped me. Best of luck!
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CureDollyâs theories are quite fascinating, isnât it? It all makes kind of sense, and one wonders why that never appears anywhere else.
For example, a verb describes an action. Not doing something is not an action, but a state â so ââăȘă must be an adjective. Lots of little nuggets like that in those videos.
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I 100% agree with everything youâve said here, even the bits that flew a bit over my head. Thereâs a reason that if DXJG says something that doesnât match what Iâm reading, I just ⊠look elsewhere. The series tends to be extra-literal when grammar just doesnât work like that. 
And I have to say it frustrates me like hell that there arenât many mentions of how grammar structures came to be, because they should be there, especially in the last volume.
I understand that the series is for the average layman whoâs interested in Japanese, but some things they glossed over way too much.
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Let me try to answer just this grammatical part as matter-of-factly as possible. In a practical sense, itâs what we were talking about with @konekush: useful heuristics allow you to guess further. In that respect, ânot doing => state => adjectiveâ isnât very convincing to me. It doesnât seem to let me infer anything other than âăȘă is an adjectiveâ⊠which seems pretty trivial?
Well, as I said, I do not comment on the intangibleâif you like that explanation or that style then good for youâbut since you asked about the grammarâŠ
Trying to infer stuff about negatives; click at your peril...
For starters, the other negative forms arenât like that: literary ă/㏠and Kansai ăžă/ăČă/ă donât quite act like adjectives. If you go even more literary, thereâs ăă that pops up in places and that definitely inflects like a verb since itâs literally ăăă.
Beyond that, how does it generalise? Say youâre learning ăčă âshouldâ and ăŸă âshould notâ. So you think ăčă âOK, so I should doâ it has to be a verb, whereas ăŸă âI should be in the state of not doingâ so it has to be an adjective, in fact, it looks like one, it ends in ă! Except, ăŸă doesnât really inflect in modern Japanese, whereas ăčă sometimes inflect⊠like an old adjective.
Syntactically, in the first place, ăȘă doesnât really turn a verb into an adjective: transitive verbs still mark their object with ă, whereas all normal adjectives take ă. And it doesnât even generalise well to the other big adjective-like suffix ăă, which allows objects marked with ă like a true adjective.
Historically, it doesnât tell us much either. Youâll have to ask yourself why it is that modern Japanese uses ăȘă, an adjective, but for much of its history, the main negative auxiliary was some variant of ă/ăŹ. In fact, we can easily see that the Kansai dialect has evolved differently, and all that happened very recently, so itâs not like itâs some kind of intrinsic âJapanese language logicâ (if even thereâs such a thing).
In truth, the negative conjugations are one of the most inconsistent parts of the whole language IMO. For a while, the literary language was stuck on Heian ăŹ/ăă, Kyoto was developing ăŹ/ăȘăă ïŒăïŒ, and somewhere East you probably had an emerging form of ăȘă.
Anyway, the point is not to bash one particular teaching mnemonic or method. But itâs good to put some perspectives on things⊠plus, someone asked.
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Probably aware, but this grammar point is in DIJG.
Anyone familiar with this book? I recall skimming a while back and would interest linguistic readers.
All great points, I agree with your listed shortcomings but I think the DJG functions as labeled: a book dictionary. Actually BunPro as a grammar dictionary is one of my favorite features (I can search âăăŠâ or english meaning very quickly and see the patterns you mentioned fairly easily) and it will get better as it grows. The content for DJG would need to completely reorganized or create more elaborate appendixes to satisfy a similar approach.
I think grammar-philes are always looking for useful heuristics (I know I am). It manifests a cleaner elegance where there is substitution freedom and more light in the darkâŠah, wonderful!
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