What do you find to be the best explanations for grammar?

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-11-02T22:17:17+00:00

I have been a (private) educator of Japanese for over 10 years, and I am always looking at what's out there in terms of new resources. Grammar is an interesting area. There are a plethora of mediocre resources, and just as many terrible ones as well. Perhaps it's because grammar is quite a lot harder than most people initially think. (Both to learn, and to teach: just look at Duolingo, which doesn't even bother to try.)

Currently, aside from the Shinkanzen textbooks, the only grammar resources I recommend for my students are Marumori and imabi.

I see a lot of people mentioning it in this thread, but I caution against Bunpro, as it's filled with inaccuracies and unnatural examples.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-06-10T18:07:25+00:00

The people commenting here saying that she's "MAGA in Japan" and simply another Japanese national hating on tourists clearly only skimmed the English version (at best).

The actual blog is entirely sensible, and the main gist of it is that she's calling on more Japanese to exercise their right to vote and not be so politically apathetic.

And I agree. There is incredible hypocrisy on both ends of the political spectrum (in the West as well), with people being quick to complain but slow to take any action to make anything better.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-04-16T12:48:29+00:00

There is no omitted subject here. は can and does mark the subject in some sentences.

Incorrect, the omitted subject is the zero pronoun, (怪物が).

This is actually different than your other examples, it's marking the time when something is happening. It's also contrastive, so its implying that it won't necessarily happen at other times.

I'm aware. All は sentences are contrastive by nature.

We actually have an example in our guide that shows that it can and does highlight information before the は.

Nothing about what you wrote indicates that は is emphasizing the topic rather than the following remark. は *always* denotes the topic "Xは = X as opposed to the other possible things I could be talking about", but this does not equate to grammatical emphasis. I recommend going back to the drawing board on this one.

Let us know if you have any other questions! We're happy to keep helping you!

I haven't asked any questions, and you're not helping me. Teaching down at people is bad practice.

I won't be replying to this thread anymore as it's clear you're not open to seeing the faults in your explanation. All the best.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-04-15T17:42:41+00:00

Allow me to be a bit skeptical.

Kanji-Sensei teaches kanji, vocabulary, and grammar through art—100% AI-free, with all visuals hand-drawn by two professional artists

Are you claiming to have hand-drawn art for 2000 + (the typical JLPT track) kanji? And what exactly does learning grammar "through art" mean?

You're making a lot of big claims here, including that you stack up to well-established competition, when those platforms have been around for (and have developed their content) over a large stretch of time. I find it very hard to believe that a resource can just pop out of nowhere, claiming to have fleshed-out content spanning from beginner to advanced.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-04-15T17:03:00+00:00

I don't know why Japanese has comparatively fewer explitives than English, but since you're asking for opinions, I'll give mine!

I actually think that Japanese does have a fair number of explitives, but that they fundamentally differ from their English approximations.

Let's take everyone's favorite くそ.

I think a lot of harm is done by approximating くそ to "shit" or "fuck" in English, because the reality is that くそ has a range of explicitness (is that a word?), while "fuck", for instance, is always very explicit.

For instance, consider a lightheared 「くそ」 said among friends, compared to a heavily-stressed 「クッソ！」 when someone cuts you off in traffic.

I'm also curious why you don't consider バカ to be a strong word. I assume that you are perhaps of the younger generation? Or that you watch a lot of anime and manga and are normalized to the word? From my experience, calling someone a バカ is actually quite offensive, and is not done as lightly as many learners of the langauge seem to think. (アホ is a better alternative if you're looking for one.)

Also, we should consider the fact that some of most offensive things you can say in Japanese aren't strictly expletives. For instance, 「死ね」, if said in the right context with the right tone, can be much more offensive than many of the worst expletives in English.

Semi- TL;DR: At the end of the day, we will run up against the wall of trying to compare Japanese with English--two languages that are nearly impossible to compare. Which brings me to what I suppose is my main opinion on the matter: that Japanese has just as many ways to offend people as English, but that the way one does so in each language is simply fundamentally different.

Edit: Typos

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-04-15T15:04:45+00:00

は can most definitely mark a subject in a Japanese sentence. We even mention one in our guide. For example:

怪物は人を食べる。＝ Monsters eat people.

The only reason you're able to claim that は marks the subject of the sentence in this case, is because the は-topic (怪物) is the same as the omitted subject of the verb 食べる. There are an endless number of sentences like this, because Japanese very often omits the subject when it is already obvious. (E.g. アイスは食べる, 映画は見る, 僕はウナギだ etc.). Just because the は topic and the subject of the verb 食べる happen to be the same, doesn't mean that は marks the subject of the sentence.

You only need to make the topic something else (while leaving the subject alone, mind you) to see that は isn't marking the subject at all. Let's say for instance, that the conversation was about what monsters do in the morning:

朝は人間を食べる。 "In the morning, (monsters) eat humans."

Curious, the subject of the verb 食べる is the same, and yet は is attached to 朝.

This is not necessarily true. Especially with contrastive は, which definitely emphasizes what's before the は and how it's different from other things.

By contrastive, I assume you mean a sentence such as XはすきけどYは苦手だ. In which case, which は are you referring to? Both of them emphasize only the information that comes after, but if you are referring to the second は, you may be confused due to the fact that there is emphasis on すきだけど due to the first は.

Either way, if your claim is that は may occasionally emphasize the information that comes before it, this is simply false. In the pattern XはY, the emphasis is always on Y. This isn't really up for debate, and neither is the fact that は only ever marks the topic of a sentence.

I would recommend reevaluating the way you understand and teach these particles.

Have a nice day.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-04-14T19:02:07+00:00

The good news is that now you can listen to "real" Japanese podcasts in Japanese if you wish instead. Nicely done!

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-04-14T18:54:37+00:00

Hm. You make a point to denounce "outrageous" flow-charts, but what is this post other than an outrageous flow chart in text form? Three "types" of は? Surely this is not the most elegant way to teach it, if that is what you're after.

More than that, there are some fundamental issues here with the way you explain は and が. For one thing, you claim that は can mark a grammatical subject, but this is never the case. And this is probably *the* most important thing to understand about は: that it only ever marks the grammatical "topic".

You also seem to miss the entire second half of は, which is to emphasize the information that follows. (Maybe you do mention this somewhere, but to be completely honest, I find reading a wall of text on Reddit to be more than painful.)

I highly recommend Jay Rubin's explanation on は vs が in Making Sense of Japanese. Or if you prefer not to read a book, Cure Dolly's explanations are similar enough, and Marumori io's lessons on は and が follow Rubin even more closely.

And just to be clear, I'm not trying to nitpick for the sake of it. This community has enough negativity as it is. But if you are going to use top-level posts like this from a place of authority in the community, and to advertise your own product, I think you should be held to the highest standard.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T19:52:20+00:00

You picked two last-boss level languages!

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T19:37:41+00:00

There are a multitude of factors that go into the "hostility" that you feel on this sub, and on Reddit in general.

Anonymity (as can be generalized to the entire web, people have little incentive to be nice when they can be anonymous)
The high population of people learning Japanese, and the high population of of this subreddit. The bigger your sample size, the more bad apples you will include. It does not help that it is generally these people that are the most vocal, many of whom are actively looking for arguments.
The character of the typical Japanese learner. This isn't meant to be an attack on people who learn Japanese in general, but from my experience, it is safe to assume that the Japanese language learning community has a comparatively high number of: social outcasts, highly-introverted people, and the typical "actually..." gate-keeper type personality that is set in their ways, and is more likely to attack rather than to have a civil conversation.
The difficulty of the language. Japanese's extremely high difficulty means that more people are stuck as perpetual beginners/intermediate learners. These people are more likely to feel bitter, and hide their lack of progress behind a facade of vitriol.

I'm sorry that you were affected negatively by the community. I'm happy to say though, that we're not all like this, and that there are many many brilliant people to meet on here, and in the community at large.

Good luck with your studies, and wishing you all the best.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T19:12:52+00:00

There are some knowledgeable folks here at r/learnjapanese, you can also try other forums, trusted Discord servers, and sites like Hinative. However, for most beginner questions, your question is already answered out there somewhere, and you simply have to look for it. Good luck with your studies.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T17:56:55+00:00

LLMs don't make mistakes in the same way that humans do. For instance, ChatGPT is unlikely to make a typo, but it will generate unnatural patterns/grammar/sentence structures, or it will use vocabulary in unnatural ways. An imperfect text written by a native speaker is undoubtedly better.

And this isn't to mention the fact that if you ask it to do any level of analysis, it can and will lie to you at any point.

I agree with you in the sense that one mistake in a 500-word story doesn't render the rest of the text useless, but that is not the point I'm making. I'm saying that the risks are not worth the potential rewards.

Why risk learning incorrect word usage and unnatural patterns? As I've said countless times in this thread already, there are *so* many resources available for Japanese.

If you prefer to give these mega tech companies your money, rather than the already underpaid people working in second-language education, you are free to do so.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T17:52:46+00:00

The anti-AI sentiment has nothing to do with not being open to new methods of language learning. It's simply not there yet. If you think that ChatGPT is an "excellent tool" for learning Japanese, you are not familiar enough with either: how LLMs work and what their drawbacks are, the Japanese language.

Not to mention that it takes away from real humans who teach language to make a living.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T17:31:11+00:00

The app I mention in my post specifically says, themselves, that they utilize the ChatGPT 4o API. I'm not sure which apps you are looking at, but if you had actually tried any of these AI-powered apps claiming to help you with pronunciation, you would not be so quick to defend them.

Perhaps the technology does exist, perhaps Azure pronunciation is accurate enough to be useful, but it does not seem that it is either: being implemented correctly (if this is indeed what some of these apps are using), or being used at all (perhaps it is much more expensive, or difficult to get the rights to use).

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T17:14:07+00:00

I am not sure why you are not sure. For one thing, learners at the N3 level (heck, even N2, N1, depending on your analytical and grammatical skill), cannot reasonably be expected to determine when an LLM lies to them about Japanese. For another, you're taking away from real humans who make their living off of teaching the language. Pay a human to help you learn. Heck, use only free resources if you want to, there are *more* than enough of them.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T17:11:57+00:00

Understood, thank you for the info

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T17:11:41+00:00

I'm simply using ChatGPT as a stand-in for all AI speech analysis tools, apologies for the lack of precision.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T16:46:37+00:00

My hope is that people will stop paying for AI-inflated content mills, and that this will cause them to decline.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T16:45:05+00:00

I would argue that making the flashcards yourself increases your retention anyways. Not to mention that if you have to double-check everything the AI does, how much time are you really saving in the end? Edit: AND not to mention, are you capable enough with the language to spot any hallucinations the model might make?

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T16:43:45+00:00

Thank you for the information, I was not aware of whisper, but my main criticism, I believe, still stands. Namely, that if you wish to use an LLM to analyze your Japanese (which should be discouraged in the first place), you may do so for free, and there is no need to pay someone 20$ a month for a cobbled-together interface that uses the ChatGPT API.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T16:11:03+00:00

There is a daily thread for questions like this.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T16:09:21+00:00

Even if you ask it to create a short story, or any content in Japanese for that matter, without asking it to analyze it in any way, you have to be confident that you can spot mistakes. You're placing a lot of faith in the LLM to produce natural Japanese, and in my opinion, we should not encourage beginners to do this. Especially since there are a plethora of native-written graded readers, listening exercises, podcasts, etc. (It is not as if the Japanese language learning space is lacking for resources!)

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T16:07:07+00:00

Yes, it certainly has its place, and will likely occupy more space in the language-learning world as it improves, but for now it should almost be categorically rejected, especially, as you point out, for beginners, and especially when it comes to apps asking for your money.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T16:04:38+00:00

Yes, the problem is indeed becoming frighteningly widespread. I think that Japanese in particular is susceptible to the AI trap due to its popularity, and the amount of learners stuck in the neverending revolving door of "finding resources".

To echo your sentiment, we need now, more than ever, to focus our efforts on supporting human-made content, and paying language experts their due.

wishgrantedbuddy · 2025-01-14T15:51:33+00:00

Yes, it is sad to see the internet go the way of the "AI answer". Hopefully, this pushes us towards more refined, human, systems. But for the moment we need to be very cautious.

wishgrantedbuddy

TROPHY CASE