this would be amazing, i’ve been watching cure dolly and doing bunpro n5 grammar separately, this would seriously help me out.
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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
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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.
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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.
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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
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I’d like to see this!
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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.
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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.
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“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?
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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. 
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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.
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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.
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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.
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@rururun Would you mind elaborating a bit on what was incorrect from Cure Dolly’s teachings? As @Asher suggested, it would be super useful.
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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.
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I will try to keep this as short and neutral as possible. It has been a long time since I have seen her videos so forgive me if I make a clear error here. The things that stand out the most as negatives:
- Her obsessive focus on the subject in each sentence.
- Her theory that 形容動詞 (so-called “na-adjectives”) are nouns.
- Her insistence that she is teaching Japanese “as it really is”.
- Her constant attacking of textbooks.
- Her refusal to use commonly accepted naming conventions in English (and I think in part in Japanese) could lead learners to become confused when they look at more advanced materials which use linguistic terms.
These things can all be somewhat reasonably defended in the following ways:
- English speaking beginners get very confused if they don’t know where the subject of a sentence went.
- 形容動詞 are certainly noun-like and going into a detailed explanation of her disagreement with Japanese school grammar would become too confusing for beginners so it is easier to leave out the detail.
- She probably really did believe that her personal way of looking Japanese grammar was the best and was “real”.
- Textbooks do have problems.
- It is easier for some learners to understand things in the terms she created than using the commonly accepted terms.
I personally found some of these negatives to outweigh the possible methods of defending them but for some people her way of explaining things really does help and as a beginner learning Japanese you should take any help you can get.
I think for some people the issue with Cure Dolly is not her actual way of looking at things but that as she is rather evangelical it can lead to a minority of her followers having quite strong opinions about things a bit too soon in their learning journey. There are plenty of live arguments in Japanese linguistics so this isn’t to say Cure Dolly is 100% wrong or anything but just that these things are lot stickier than they may appear from her videos and the fact that other textbooks/guides don’t mention them or choose a different pedagogical approach (i.e., not focusing so heavily on the subject) is a deliberate and well-informed choice (normally) and not random.
For anyone looking for something similar to Cure Dolly (approaching basic grammar from a different angle and a strong focus on the grammatical subject) then I would recommend Jay Rubin’s book, Making Sense of Japanese. Cure Dolly notes that she owes some of her ideas to him. I personally found that book quite fun.
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This inspired me to post a pathway for Cure Dolly that I did up for my own use a few months ago.
It only goes up to lesson 13, but I’d say those are some of the most important ones for anyone getting started:
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I also loved Cure Dolly and have both her books. Obviously she wasn’t perfect but she did give a different perspective that I enjoyed. Sadly she passed away during COVID 
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On formal qualifications: I never heard her mention any such formal qualifications.
The one thing she did mention (that I know of, anyway) is that at some point she lived in Japan in a home-stay kind of arrangement – I believe she also mentioned that it was not in a major city, so it was quite immersive. So, she at least had reached a passable level of conversational Japanese, I imagine. And perhaps/probably had studied it prior to that, so that the home-stay thing would be worth it.
She strikes me as someone who was an auto-didact (self-learner), and I’m guessing that she has studied Japanese on her own, for example picking up a lot of the same ideas that Jay Rubin has taught, but also mixing and matching in additional insights, some from other resources/teachers, and some that she has come up with on her own through experience.
I’m sure she’s familiar with many textbooks (she seems to have a good grasp on what they teach, and why they end up being confusing), and she does have some understanding of some concepts from linguistics/languages at a more academic level, but I don’t get the impression that, for example, she got a degree in Linguistics or whatever from some university.
I don’t have anything specific as evidence for this but I get the impression/feeling/hunch that she has some practical experience as either a teacher/tutor of Japanese for English speakers and/or a teacher/tutor of English for Japanese speakers (perhaps as a job in Japan).
She seems to have some experience/knowledge of the difficulties that people face when trying to learn a language – Japanese, specifically, but other languages as well.
Also, she definitely knows at least one language other than English, which I get the impression is her native language, and perhaps more than just one. I seem to recall her saying that she had learned English very early in her life, and that she was taught it in a very specific way (I’m thinking like ‘Queen’s English’), and that this is why she has such a weird accent.
Overall, in my mind, I picture her as a quirky, little old lady-android (and I mean that in the nicest way!), who grew up in a country where English was a common second language, such as perhaps India or the Philippines or something like that. She may not have official/formal qualifications, but she has the mind of a lifelong learner, someone who’s especially passionate about Japanese for whatever reason, and who has a lifetime of experiences that she really wanted to share with people with the help of the internet.
On hiding her identity: Personally, I think she is a perfect example of a VTuber before VTubing really took off. Old school, I guess you’d call it. She may have been shy/introverted. Maybe didn’t want people to judge her due to her age or appearance. Maybe she was just one of those who got involved in the Internet early on, with newsgroups and forums and whatnot, and just became comfortable with the culture of anonymity/pseudonymity that was prevalent at the time. Then she found chat-rooms, and later VR-chatting, got herself an avatar, and the rest is history. Something like that.
[P.S. I don’t really know much/any of this as absolute fact. I just watched a ton of her videos and read a few of her articles on her website, and pieced things together. I could be wrong on details, etc. YMMV]
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And also – it must be added, IMO – when it comes to learning one’s own language from the perspective of a non-native speaker, especially when the learner’s language is structured significantly differently than one’s own language.
For example, perhaps to a Japanese native, the train metaphor seems wrong in some fundamental way. Or perhaps they think the idea of the ∅が (so-called ‘zero ga’) is complete nonsense. After all, they personally don’t think of Japanese sentences being composed of various train cars, nor do they spend any mental energy imagining a non-existent が subject-fragment in a sentence that completely lack an explicit が element. Or whatever.
Of course many of these concepts will seem ‘wrong’ to a native speaker. Their way of understanding the language is ‘native’, after all. They’re not encumbered by all these foreign notions of European languages, nor English in particular.
Notions which, for us English-speakers trying to learn Japanese, we have to kind of ‘unlearn’ to some extent; or at least use things like meaningless mnemonics to bootstrap learning Japanese Kanji/vocabulary, or strange metaphors to provide us with the ‘scaffolding’ to help us learn a different way of using language from English.
I would absolutely not be surprised if there are native-Japanese teachers/tutors who have their own ‘strange’ ways of explaining to fellow native-Japanese ‘better’ ways of learning English which, to some native-English speakers, might even seem to be ‘wrong’.
But, at the end of the day, I’m always reminded of the important advice:
“All models are wrong but some models are useful” ~ George Box
(See All models are wrong - Wikipedia for some interesting background on this quote)
So, yes, sometimes Cure Dolly’s ideas about learning Japanese are wrong. But also sometimes the ideas of the more traditional textbooks/resources about learning Japanese are wrong, too. And also, sometimes a native-Japanese speaker’s ideas are wrong. And even, sometimes uber-qualified Japanese linguistics specialists’ ideas are wrong.
Actually, all ideas about learning Japanese are wrong – to some extent. The real question is whether – and to what degree, and for which particular audience – those ideas are useful.
Personally, I have found that Cure Dolly is able to identify a lot of the weaknesses of the ideas/concepts/‘models’ that are taught by the more-traditional textbooks/resources, and she’s able to provide ‘more useful’ (IMO) ideas/concepts/‘models’ to overcome those weaknesses.
So, for example, I don’t care if native-Japanese speakers do or don’t expend any mental energy thinking about ∅が. For me, it 95% solves the confusion I’ve long had about how to identify the subject of a sentence in Japanese, and also about how and when to use が, and also how/when it can be omitted. So, whether ∅が is ‘wrong’ is irrelevant to me. For me, it is useful for my understanding of Japanese grammar.
And that’s all that really matters, IMHO.
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