How much grammar is beyond N1?

Japanese
#1

I’m wondering how much grammar still remains if you finish all 930 items in Bunpro.

The famous “A Dictionary of Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar” book trilogy covers 600 items. So only two thirds of Bunpro if you just compare the numbers.

But my favorite grammar dictionary, the “日本語文型辞典 - A Handbook of Japanese Grammar Patterns for Teachers and Learners” claims to be covering 3000 items. :astonished: I guess they count multiple meanings of items because with 700 pages there should be four items per page and it doesn’t look like that. But on the other hand I now know N5-N2 completely with 730 items in Bunpro and just by going through the book and checking some items I still find quite a lot I don’t know.

So I wonder whether there’s actually grammar left that isn’t covered by JLPT N1. Besides all the colloquial and dialect stuff that you usually won’t find in grammar books of course.

And no, I don’t want to learn it, I’m just curious. :slight_smile: At the moment I rather think about postponing the remaining N1 stuff for a very long time…

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#2

The ting is with grammar, is nothing is really set in stone. even basic constructs of grammar can have so many nuances, it all depends what do you count as a grammar point.

grammar is just prettied up vocabulary anyway.

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#3

The DOJG has that many headwords but if you include all the Key Sentences (showing different nuances and therefore technically different meanings) the number is much larger. Equally plenty of stuff isn’t included in the DOJG that even advanced learners may consider grammar. Considering the fact that, for example, many adverbs are included the question becomes where do you draw the line? Keigo and classical Japanese grammar are largely absent as well, although of course the most common instances are noted. Specific dialect, speech register, 役割語, slang usages, various types of 音便 etc are all also largely excluded. Certain collocations and patterns are taught but, again, there are hundreds or thousands that are excluded. Specialist dictionaries for that kind of thing do exist though.

I have two comments on this “problem” though. First, by the time you are around done with most stuff in the DOJG/Bunpro/whatever learner resource you are using you should be able to pick up these things without much thought (although it is a lot of things so it may take a while…). Second, at a certain point you develop a sense of the language and stop having to think of patterns as “grammar points” and rather just gain an intuitive sense of what something means.

It’s hard to say what should or shouldn’t be included but if you were as permissive as possible and strict about every nuance being a different “grammar point” then I reckon you could make a list of 3000+ things without too much bother.

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#4

In Japanese it seems like that, nearly all of N3-N1 is just fixed phrases. I guess the real grammar is widely covered with the N5 stuff.

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#5

What I find quite strange about these grammar dictionaries is that extremely common colloquial phrases are ignored. E.g. you learn “totemo” but not “meccha” while in reality you rarely hear totemo but meccha all the time. Same for sentence ending particles where something like “no” has a different meaning in colloquial speech than what is listed in the dictionaries.

It would be nice if Bunpro had a separate section for this stuff. Because when you’re watching movies and YouTube videos you have very common stuff that you can’t look up in grammar dictionaries because it’s not covered.

I wouldn’t want to have real dialect stuff in there but when it’s already used all over Japan like the Kansai “meccha” it should be teached in my opinion. For now I understood most of it out of context like you said but you never can be sure whether you really got it right.

Instead you probably have a lot of ancient stuff beyond N1 in there that you will probably never need.

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#6

As you asked about “beyond N1” I’ll reply further on that specific point:

Even if you don’t use various dialects (and it would be weird if you did) there is still a large amount of regional dialect grammar/vocab that most native speakers can understand and recognise. Kansaiben is by far the most famous example of this due to 漫才 however an advanced learner would want to recognise more than basic エセ関西弁 that is often found on TV and YouTube.

Equally, children study classical Japanese in school so, again for an advanced learner, having at least the same degree of familiarity with classical Japanese as a native of your equivalent education level is probably something you’ll want to get round to at some stage. I don’t mean the fossilised literary phrases found in N1 when I say this.

I totally agree with you about how there should be more learner resources focused on spoken casual Japanese. I think Tae Kim attempted to do that but outside of that guide there is nothing I know of that tries to focus on it. It’s certainly easier than pure literature however it’s still a beast in its own right.

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#7

Thanks for the tipp with Tae Kim, I’ll check it out. I have the book but I didn’t really liked it that much (especially after discovering Cure Dolly) and quit it quite early.

It’s understandable that schools and textbooks prefer official grammar points. But by reaching around N3 grammar level you can usually start to comfortably use Japanese media and that’s the moment you’ll get confronted with all the stuff that isn’t covered from N5 until N1. But on the other hand JLPT gets pretty weird after N4 anyway in my opinion. The JLPT structure is not really ideal for learning the language but that’s another topic.

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#8

Yes and no