I started with grammar a few weeks ago, i usually read two or three lessons per day from Maggie sensei and its really a great site, it is very easy to understand, i also like that she uses colors to differentiate words and she Also tells you japanese cultural customs or ideas.
I’m asking you guys because I wanted to find out what reddit think of this site and most of them didn’t like it, (what the hell?)
Ps: Sorry for the broken english
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Not sure if this is very constructive, but I also hate the colors. And formatting. And romaji
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Ah, Reddit hates everything. I like Maggie Sensei’s site just fine, even with the romaji - she does fantastically good deep dives on grammar points.
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I like that she gives you tons of examples to help clarify things, and I think the explanations are usually good. But I find the formatting really hard to follow - it’s a small thing but the fact that everything is double spaced makes it harder to visually see where one example ends and another begins. I wish that that her examples where grouped together in single spaced paragraphs, with spacing in between.
But yeah… I realize that is pretty nit-picky! I just think that formatting should be more or less invisible - it should help rather than hinder what you are doing. And I said, I have have found her explanations useful on multiple occasions to clarify things. It’s just not my first source of information
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What other sources do you use?
I would use it just for check tips, Maggie website has a lot for nuance information, but the design is, well, really difficult for reading. Although she has some grammar points that i’ve not encoutered in other websites!
Are you from Chile? there’s a dessert called Panqueque in Chile
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I don’t understand the romaji hate in this case, sometimes I see a kanji or a word that I can’t read and read the romaji part, if it was in hiragana only it will be kinda confusing, maybe thats just me
Working through genki ii at the moment as my main learning resources - I also have the dictionary of Japanese grammar which I use to clarify things. And then Japanesepod101 for listening practice. I will mention that none of these are free resources… for free resources, Tai Kim is fairly decent.
That being said, if the formatting isn’t bothering you then keep using Maggie Sensei. Her material is good, and what gets in the way of my learning might not get in the way of yours. For example, I also use Cure Dolly videos because I think that her explanations are excellent but they suffer from… serious presentation issues. I watch with subtitles on, which makes the voice more bearable. And just skip through all the “Japanese is the greatest language on earth/textbooks are the work of the devil” parts… So yeah YMMV.
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The actual content is great. It’s just the presentation which makes me want to claw my eyes out.
There’s always so much information on the page, and yet there are no headings, anchor points, nothing to help you navigate, scan, scroll.
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Yea, I like the way she explains things in a easy way, at first I had problems with the layout but I don’t mind anymore
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I also think it’s really great that she gives so many examples. It’s just that I’m rarely reading a full page through; usually I’m looking something up and need to find a specific piece of information. In those circumstances it’s incredibly hard to find the bit you’re interested in on the page!
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I actually installed a browser extension to disable gifs just so I could use her website without getting a headache. The colors and formatting are still terrible though.
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The formatting may not be extremely clear, but I find that she actually does break her articles into sections (at the least, some of them). There were sections for the ば article anyhow. I think her usual style is to use two types of separators/section indicators:
- Asterisks (literally just ** or ****)
- Number with like 1), 4) and so on
As for the colours, I don’t understand what’s causing everyone issues. The impression I get from everyone’s comments is that the colours are garish/glaring, but I find that they help me to find everything, separate romaji from hiragana and kanji and so on. However, I’m just saying that to share my experience: I’m sure there’s more to it than just nitpicking, seeing as so many people feel the same way. Also, I have slight colour vision issues, so it’s possible that it’s turned out to be a blessing (for once) that I can’t see everything exactly the same way everyone else does, because nothing about the colours jars my vision. (Still, I’m surprised that a slight difference can cause such a huge difference in reactions.)
In any case, I’m usually there for the content, which I quite like, but it’s rarely something I read like a book: I just go to her site whenever I want detailed explanation of a grammar point or structure. I don’t use it much otherwise.
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I’ve followed Maggie-Sensei for a while now. Actually, she passed away a few years ago. Her owner writes all of the content.
The owner is also a famous J-vlogger on YouTube. Maybe you’ve heard of Gimmeabreakman or Gimmeaflakeman before? He’s a little rough and opinionated, but has good content nonetheless.
Personally, I’ve relied on the website in the past to help explain grammar nuances and details that you just can’t find from textbooks and that native speakers just can’t out into words. And like most of the people I’m seeing here, I am also not a fan of the formatting. I just think he could’ve written the articles a little more professionally.
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Sure, of course she does. The problem is the lack of headers. I can’t easily scan a page to jump to a section (or indeed get a sense of what the section is about before just reading it) without headers; contents tables wouldn’t go amiss either, given the sheer amount of content on most pages. She uses indentation and numbers to indicate the architecture of the page, which is very hard to see.
I can’t even begin to imagine how hard it would be to find anything on a page if you were using a screen reader (well, I can, and it’s not great!).
That’s what makes it so bad though! Usually I’m just looking for a specific aspect of a particular grammar point, and it takes forever to locate on the page. I don’t want to have to read the whole thing.
Wait, Maggie is the doggo? I thought Maggie was the human teacher
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No, Maggie was the dog… The owner is a man. LOL
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Nah, that’s why the introductions are always written from the POV of the dog in the picture (whether it’s a guest doggo or the OG maggie)
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The owner/writer or Maggie-Sensei is named Victor and he’s a 外国人 living and teaching English in Japan.
Here’s his main YouTube channel: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC5Ure7omY1nU5bozq7qVAww
(Peep Maggie-sensei in his channel art)
He also teaches Japanese on Youtube from time to time on a separate channel called “Japanese for Morons”: https://www.youtube.com/user/japaneseformorons
He run a few other channels as well. Interesting guy. Can be either really funny or really offensive. Lol
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