First off, love the platform! It’s been super helpful for my Japanese studies.
I’ve been following Cure Dolly on YouTube, and her way of explaining Japanese grammar really clicks with me. Her lessons make things so much clearer.
Do you think you could add a “Cure Dolly Path” on Bunpro? Something that matches her lesson order and style? I think it would be awesome for those of us who learn well from her videos but also want the structured practice Bunpro provides.
I also use Cure Dolly. That would be pretty nice
I love Cure Dolly so even if I may be past this being useful to me personally, I’ll still advocate for it. And I’ve suggested this before, a long time ago, but if her videos aren’t already included in grammar point resources (where applicable) they really should be!
Be careful with Cure Dolly. She has some good content, but some of her explanations involving the trains is just downright wrong. Several years ago I tried incorporating some of what I had learned from her into my speech and it prompted me to get corrections from a native. I was confused and asked some other native speakers about it and they all confirmed that what I had learned from Cure Dolly was wrong.
That’s not to say that you shouldn’t use Cure Dolly - after all some of her content is really good, but don’t put too much faith into some her of her grammar explanations.
Same goes for all learning resources tbh, and blindly believing random natives can lead to mistakes as well. When you’re native you never really learn the underlying structure and mechanics of a language like an academic would; you just know what sounds right and what doesn’t.
Edit: rephrased for clarity
this would be amazing, i’ve been watching cure dolly and doing bunpro n5 grammar separately, this would seriously help me out.
No, this is just silly. Foolish even.
I understand that is a claim that Cure Dolly makes but that doesn’t make it true. Textbooks aren’t just written by random natives, they’re written by academics who hold licenses in teaching Japanese as a foreign language, and often times they’re made by schools for the purpose of their curriculum and are published so that other schools can use them. Obtaining a license to teach Japanese requires studying and passing examinations including the JLPT N1 (And you may have seen information related to this on the JLPT website when you registered for the test). It’s not as if random native speakers are hired to write the textbooks.
I understand that there are some “textbooks” which are filled with errors, and I also understand that there are some actual textbooks which overly simplify content to the point that it may lead to an error in immediately understanding how a particular grammar point works, but that isn’t even remotely similar to what you just said
I feel like you’re almost going out of your way to misunderstand me here xD
Anyway, I was saying that it goes for all language learning resources, including Cure Dolly, when I said “textbooks”. I wouldn’t take a single resource as gospel, and neither should you.
I said nothing about all textbooks being written by natives nor that if they were that would somehow make them wrong. What a ridiculous leap. What I did say was that it’s easy to know how your native language works without being able to recite why, so a random native saying smth doesn’t automatically mean the academics are wrong.
I just want to point out that everyone has their own experiences with studying.
Tae Kim, Genki, and Minna no Nihongo might all be considered excellent resources, but learning Japanese isn’t only about using textbooks. Personally, I see errors as part of the learning process—one could even argue that natives without formal teaching qualifications can sometimes be great teachers.
For me, Cure Dolly has advanced my Japanese more than all the textbooks I’ve used, and in a shorter time.
All I’m asking for is a path on Bunpro that aligns with her YouTube lessons to help consolidate my learning.
I assume you mean the learning japanese playlist - They SHOULD be able to do that - I heard after the first 10 or 12 lessons it jumps around a bit and then you can kind of pick and choose what you want to do but mostly I think it would just take someone going thru the playlist and organizing it - good luck
I’d like to see this!
Cure Dolly was really to good for us.
I really liked her, she just said what things meant instead of using a dozen 50 cent words like “conjugate” or “Plain negative non past form”.
Uhh…but her books might not be worth going out of your way to buy.
I did buy the Kanji Land book. I also would really recommend it and have to admit there are better resources; however the Alice mnemonics approach solidified N5 kanji for me. Everyone’s journey is going to be different.
“Several years ago I tried incorporating some of what I had learned from her into my speech and it prompted me to get corrections from a native. I was confused and asked some other native speakers about it and they all confirmed that what I had learned from Cure Dolly was wrong.”
Can you provide an example?
It’s definitely fine for both of you to have your own opinions, but solid examples of things that you do or don’t find incorrect will help other people out in the thread to see where you’re both coming from.
Cure Dolly had a huge following in their day, so they must be doing something right, and there are also many qualified teachers of Japanese that don’t really know how to teach, so it’s not a great idea to diminish anyone or anything without investigating it a bit. You can have a qualification and be terrible, and you can be without a qualification and better than a vast majority of academics, so it’s, in my opinion at least, better to judge by results than by merits.
Off-topic, but I always wondered if Cure Dolly had a formal qualification. I assumed that they never showed their face/revealed who they were because they knew what they were saying was academically controversial. 
Agreed. I wouldn’t claim Cure Dolly is flawless either, but I like her approach (even if she sometimes goes on a bit too long about the inefficiency of certain textbooks) for showing there are different ways to look at things, and what doesn’t work for one might for another. And I think more options for learners is usually a good thing.
My original comment was just to say even natives can be wrong, especially if they haven’t studied their language beyond the basics taught in school (which a lot of us probably forget anyway). Didn’t love having my statement misrepresentated in order to insult me tho 
but it’s water under the bridge, and I updated it to be a bit clearer.
I didn’t insult you, I criticized what you wrote. I said that your statement was foolish, not that you are a fool. I’m not going to respond to this topic anymore, but I ask that you respond in good faith when other disagree with you because criticism is not the same as a personal attack.
What is the request, exactly?
If it is that bunpro creates a path that matches the order of grammar points in Cure Dolly’s videos, then the quality of her explanations is not an issue, since bunpro would simply reuse existing grammar points.
If there is a concern that bunpro would be seen to be endorsing Cure Dolly’s explanations, then it might be a concern for bunpro. Personally, I don’t see the presence of paths for any text book as an endorsement of that book.
@rururun Would you mind elaborating a bit on what was incorrect from Cure Dolly’s teachings? As @Asher suggested, it would be super useful.
I’ve done some Cure Dolly forum battling in the past.
There are the occasional typo type errors in her videos that happen to any channel/book, however I’ve yet to see anyone point out a fundamental flaw in her content that didn’t end up being the person in question simply misunderstanding the content.
Granted, she can be a bit confusing at times. There were a few instances where I too had misunderstood her and thus learned something incorrectly, until someone else pointed out that she taught it wrong and I checked, only to realize that it was actually taught correctly just not clearly.
Often times if you watch the 3-5 videos before that given video, it’s much less likely you’ll misunderstand it. She sometimes leaves critical info out of an individual video because she’s already harped on it so much during those last few ones, and assumes you would definitely already know that bit, so why repeat it.
I found that when I first watched her videos, I thought I fully understood them. Then I watched them again from the start a few months later and it was like I unlocked a hidden level. It might of even happened again on a third watching, but regardless, I always watch her videos in chunks now, rather than isolation.