Cure Dolly Path

[CursedKitsune]

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.

[Aikibujin]

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:

Cure Dolly Path (Beta)

There’s been quite a bit of interest in a Bunpro Cure Dolly Path. A few months back I started to chart the path myself, so hopefully this will be useful to some, and may even kickstart an official pathway on here eventually. I got through the first 13 lessons. If enough interest is shown, I might do more (or someone else can). Note: Each post contains a Cure Dolly lesson with a list of all the Bunpro grammar items discussed in that lesson. I’ve mapped the grammar items used according to th…

[tedledbetter]

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

[wct]

@Asher

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.

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]

[wct]

@Rukishou

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).

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.