I cannot remember anything!

Bunpro
#14

As others have said, you need to do all the readings. There are a lot of resources for each grammar point and I might go through them over a couple of days before finally adding a grammar point.

If you’re using a textbook then you can pace yourself better as the grammar points are added as they are introduced in each chapter of the book, with context. I’m going through Genki and it might take me a week or three for each chapter depending on how much additional reading I do around each point. I also listen to the chapters audio whilst I’m running, over and over again whilst I’m on the chapter.

I also picked up the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar from JapanPress, which Tofugu/Wanikani highly recommended and it’s amazing. I will also go through each grammar point in that as it’s full of examples.

So basically, don’t go too fast, learn to love the ghosts as they provide you with practice and try to review all the different resources you can find for each grammar point.

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#15

I agree, Cure Dolly is the best! I have been supporting her for years :slightly_smiling_face:

I need to know WHY things are to learn them and she does a great job of explaining that. So many things just click after watching her videos.

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#16

I would gladly donate my last kidney if she would drop that robotic voice… I sometimes think she does whatever it takes to not grow her channel too much.

Well… as they say: no pain no gain.

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#17

That voice and the strange constant hype/overselling there (“what they never teach”, “debunked”, “secrets”, “textbooks destroy your Japanese”) really ruins those videos for me.

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#18

the strange constant hype/overselling there (“what they never teach”, “debunked”, “secrets”, “textbooks destroy your Japanese”) really ruins those videos for me

Kinda agree.
They’re interesting for sure, and I could even get used to the voice, but the constant bashing of practically anything that isn’t her own way of explaining things is incredibly annoying.
I got that she doesn’t like more traditional sources from her first video, no need to repeat it a million times over the course of the series. That’s just a waste of time.

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#19

English can also use strange sentences like this. Depending on what the question is.
Q- なんの動物が好きですか？
A- 私は猫だ
Q- What animal do you like?
A- For me, it’s cats.

Sounds perfectly fine in English.

Edit- I also like cure dolly a lot. She doesn’t try to make Japanese sound like it is English, and that’s an important step for anyone learning the language.

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#20

My point was that many resource misleadingly teach structure "AはBだ as “A is B” as if A was the subject of the sentence. In reality the subject of the sentence is “it”. “As for A, IT is B”.

So “私はマクフィンチュだ” really means “as for me, IT is MacFinch”, not “I am MacFinch”.

The idea of hidden “it”(or as it is called in literature: ゼロが) helps a lot.

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#21

Yeah there are a lot of garbage resources out there teaching Japanese :sweat:

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#22

Even good ones make this error. If I remember correctly Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar is presenting "AはBだ” as “A is B”.

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#23

For Genki 1 Sarah Moon has created a YouTube series that I found helpful: https://m.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLjmFzH5gSNWTi4TwEjWVxv0NEolRmiZ-7

#24

It was the same for me early on but after two months or so, I got much better at learning and remembering grammar. The “readings” tab helped me a lot. Also try to look out for the grammar you learned while watching TV/Anime/YouTube and pay attention to how it is used.

#25

I’m starting to notice that. I didn’t realize initially how quickly one can gain levels. Does it take longer as you progress through higher levels?

#26

Exponentially…

#27

Good to know what to expect. Thanks!

#28

To be clear it only takes quadratically more xp to get to the next level as you gain levels.

Where it starts becoming exponential is when you are getting xp from the same grammar point. It will take exponentially more time to get xp from the same grammar point. This is ignoring the time of actually learning the grammar points and using the SRS.

2 Likes
#29

Just a random comment, but something I wanted to point out (that I actually pointed out in one of cure dollys videos on youtube). I think the non-human approach is very smart. It eliminates the possibility of an ad-hominem attack on the maker.

These days people are so focused on peoples qualifications rather than what they have to say. So if the maker removes the ‘person’, then people cannot attack the person, and must legitimately listen to the ideas discussed at face value.

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Am I slow?
#30

It’s better to look at it as implicit subject derivation rather than some hidden “IT”. What your explanation misses is that the subject derives itself from the topic if it is not explicitly stated. The derived subject from the topic in that sentence would thus be a personal pronoun, not an object pronoun (Not to mention the fact that, in English, using object pronouns when in relation to people is extremely unnatural and rude, a heavy nuance that did not originally exist in the Japanese text and thus, is an improper literal translation.) So the most literal translation would be “As for me, = MacFinch.” which covers the pronoun and post-positional topic particle and then the name and the copula だ. An alternative translation for this that combines both Japanese and English grammar structures is “As for me, I am Macbeth.”

The “As for A” structure is taught in this way to help conceptualize that the topic exists beyond the scope of the subject. When a topic is stated as such in Japanese, it does not have to be restated again and again as subject pronouns like English does which does not have topics in the way that Japanese does, or at least if they do, they are very situational or unnatural and thus nowhere near as versatile. English does not have this kind of topic marker, only subject markers. Thus the translation “I am MacFinch” is considering and prioritizing natural English and taking the derived subject, which is what is stated in the topic, then throwing out the topic as it now only contains redundant information that isn’t necessary to reiterate to keep the English natural.

In essence, the translation of “AはBだ。” to “A is B.” is deriving the subject from the topic and then dropping the topic to keep the English translation natural without losing information or giving it a nuance that didn’t exist in the original Japanese sentence.

This is thrice as long as I was expecting it to be so my takeaway here is that it’s important to understand that some translations exist in the way they do to help conceptualize ideas rather than to be a gold standard for how some sentence structures should be translated, implying that other translations are wrong when in reality they’re serving a different purpose.

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#31

I will give you simple english examples:

  • What is your name?

  • As for me, IT is John.

  • What car do you want to have?

  • As for me, IT is Tesla.

What it means? In first example it mean “name”, in second “car”. Same in japanese. You infer the meaning of ゼロが from the contents. Japanese just allows this kind of omissions.

Full sentence could be: 私は名前がマクフィンチュウだ。You can just omit subject since it is obvious from the context. You can omit topic as well.

#32

To be fair, I am going for the brute-force strategy. If I do not remember a grammar point I will have 6 ghost reviews that will make me remember eventually.

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#33

That probably the best way around it.

I plan to read provided resources only if some gramma point will remain"troubled grammar" for more than 2-3 days. It didn’t happened yet. Analysing sample sentences and ghost fighting works fine so far.

But I had some understanding how Japanese works before hand. Harder grammar may make me reconsider this strategy.