A Guide To Japanese Grammar Pdf
Meri Thilmony
If you are taking Japanese classes and you want to get a better understanding of how things work, the Guide to Japanese Grammar is designed to supplement your studies and give you a solid understanding of the grammatical structure of Japanese. It thoroughly explains Japanese grammar by starting with the most fundamental ideas and building upon it layer by layer. It is much easier to understand than a traditional Japanese class which will likely skip straight to the polite forms without explaining where they come from. The grammar guide is also available as an Android or iOS app.
Achieving full fluency of a language requires not just learning the language but regularly applying what you learned by listening, speaking, reading, and writing. There are many online tools such as online dictionaries that will help you read and watch Japanese books, comics, and movies. There are also sites that will help you connect with native Japanese speakers for language exchange as well as other sites that will help with correcting your writing. These tutorials go over how to use these various tools to effectively learn Japanese online.
This guide was created as a resource for those who want to learn Japanese grammar in a rational, intuitive way that makes sense in Japanese. The explanations are focused on how to make sense of the grammar not from English but from a Japanese point of view.
Just curious, is there some equivalent learning tool for French? As currently I've found almost nothing that explains grammar in a way that isn't revoltingly clunky and badly written, and of course nothing quite as comprehensive as the Japanese guide I mentioned.
Have you ever forgotten how to conjugate a verb into its て form? Or maybe you came across the particle に in your textbook and got interested in reading about all of its uses. Perhaps you are just trying to look up some grammar points that you've never heard before.
Let's first define what I mean by online grammar guide. For this article, it is any reference database containing Japanese grammar points and patterns along with explanations, example usages, and notes. While some have a recommended learning order so that they can be used as a textbook replacement, I am not considering this as an essential factor for this article. And of course, the "online" portion means that they are stored and accessed via an Internet browser. All of the grammar guides presented in this article are free.
If you search for free Japanese resources online, you're bound to run into Tae Kim's A Guide to Japanese Grammar on his website Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese. It's fairly complete and does a decent job of explaining grammar concepts in a way anyone can understand. That said, Tae Kim's guide may not be ideal for curious learners who are seeking more in-depth explanations. The grammar explanations tend to be quite simple, often providing a one-to-one direct translation. That might be great as a starter, but if you wish to deepen your understanding on a specific grammar point, you may need to consult other grammar resources.
Be advised there are two sections to his site: The Grammar Guide and The Complete Guide. The Complete Guide covers most of the same material as The Grammar Guide, but with extras about the written language. Both guides are organized in a textbook-like fashion; you can absolutely substitute a beginner textbook for this grammar guide if you wanted. Lessons build on one another, and should cover the foundation of Japanese grammar.
Maggie Sensei is a Japanese grammar guide site designed to teach Japanese as it is used in everyday life. The site's mascot is a dog named Maggie (who, sadly, has passed away). Lessons are brief and provide easy-to-understand explanations of various grammar points. And there are a lot of lessons. They are categorized using a number of handy tags such as, "JLPT N3" and "Formal Japanese" and "Emergency."
Maggie Sensei does a great job of explaining the various usages of grammar points and providing loads of example sentences to drive home each possible situation. Because Maggie Sensei covers so many different grammar patterns, if you couldn't find information about a particular grammar usage elsewhere, Maggie Sensei might be the place to go.
Articles are not organized in any particular order; you will have to search for a specific grammar pattern if you would like to find out what Maggie says about it. Unlike Tae Kim's guide to Japanese, Maggie Sensei's website is set up less like a textbook and more like a blog.
Tofugu's Japanese Grammar lets you look up specific Japanese grammar points. You can either look for grammar constructions by selecting related categories such as "Verb Conjugation" and "い-Adjectives," or use a search bar that allows you to find constructions you are interested in.
On each page, the content is organized into "The Basics" and "Beyond The Basics" parts, which makes it easy to know what's essential and what's advanced information. It also provides patterns of usage, and then gives a number of different contexts in which one could use each pattern. There are plenty of example sentences, and the content is quite understandable overall.
Wasabi is a Japanese language instruction company located in Shibuya, Tokyo, Japan. While they offer paid Japanese lessons and instruction, their website also has a grammar guide with explanations on a number of useful Japanese grammar points. Compared to other online grammar reference guides, Wasabi has a strong tendency to combine multiple grammar points that have similar meanings, functions, or uses so that you can learn about them in comparisons. This can be seen in pages such as "Parallel Markers: と, や, か, and とか" or "Numbers and Amounts: も, だけ, しか, ばかり, and すぎる".
The explanations are concise and come with some illustrations to demonstrate usage. However, the description of each grammar point tends to be very brief, and there are usually only a few example sentences. Additionally, some explanations may not always communicate the nuance behind a pattern. While it can be a great resource as a quick reference, if you are looking for more in-depth explanations and examples, you may want to consult other grammar guides as well.
Lessons are organized by three levels: "Basic Grammar", "Essential Grammar", and "Advanced Grammar". However, some of the grammar point categorizations might be debated. For instance, a lesson entitled, "How to Express Doubts: かな, かしら, だろうか, and ではないか" is found in the "Advanced Grammar" section when most textbooks would teach such points at an intermediate level.
Additionally, this grammar guide does not contain as many entries as other popular online grammar references. Still, it does a good job of explaining many common patterns; I just wouldn't use it as a textbook replacement.
An introduction to Japanese Syntax, Grammar & Language is a large, online introduction to Japanese as a whole. While the title says "introduction," this is really more than just a simple introduction. The author goes into much detail about Japanese grammar, words, particles, sentence patterns, conjugations, phrases, and more. It seems like there was also a paperback version available on Amazon, though it unfortunately says "out-of-print" as of the time of this write-up.
As it covers basic concepts of Japanese grammar in a single webpage rather than in a database format, searching for specific grammar points can be a little bit of a challenge. However, since this site truly starts from the beginning of learning Japanese, it could be used as an online Japanese textbook. It must be noted, however, that, like many of the other potential textbook-replacer grammar guides, it does not contain exercises or self-assessments.
This is a great resource for beginners to deep-dive into the nitty-gritty of Japanese grammar. For that reason, compared to other online grammar guides, it might not cover as many idiomatic grammar patterns, especially intermediate to advanced-level expressions.
When you do online research about a specific grammar point, a number of grammar guides probably pop up in your search result. However, as I've discussed in this article, many websites have their own approach, strengths, and weaknesses. Hopefully, in this article, you could find a few options for go-to grammar references or back-ups for whenever your search didn't quite work out. Simply as a grammar reference, I think that beginner-level learners (particularly self-studiers) may find Tofugu's Japanese Grammar and Maggie Sensei's grammar articles particularly helpful because of the thorough explanations and abundance of examples.
Tae Kim started learning Japanese in college and ended the first year very confused and only able to use the polite form. Eventually, he figured out how to talk like a real person and started a website for learning Japanese (www.guidetojapanese.org) to explain everything he had to figure out on his own.
Since then, he has worked at a big Japanese company in Japan as a Java developer, passed the JLPT level 1, got a perfect score in TOEIC (the Japanese company administered it every year) , and continues to work on his next book for learning Japanese in his spare time.
Are you interested in learning Japanese and wondering where to start? Or have you been studying a while and want to know more about Japanese grammar and the logic behind it? Our easy guide to Japanese grammar will give you insight into the essentials of the Japanese language.
Sentences consist of phrases, which typically contain a subject and a predicate to convey a statement or question. Sentences and phrases are also punctuated with 読点 (tōten), the Japanese comma (そ).
Unlike English and the Romance languages, Japanese grammar does not distinguish between the singular and plural forms. A plural state is expressed by simply adding a word that indicates a number or quantity.
In Japanese grammar, particles called 助詞 (joshi), also known as てにをは (te-ni-o-ha), are suffixes and postpositions that do not inflect. Particles immediately follow the modified component (such as a noun, verb, adjective, or sentence).
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