Particle Review/Practice Resource Recommendations?

Japanese
#1

Basically what it says in the title - I’ve been learning Japanese for quite a while now and while there’s a lot of things I’ve improved in, I feel like half the mistakes I make during my bunpro reviews are using the wrong particle. Sometimes it just feels like I’m guessing whether I should use に or で in one sentence, or は vs が in the next.

It’s a weakness that I’ve had for a long time and I think I was hoping I would be able to just kinda start feeling the difference with enough time (the way I do in English), and while there’s a teeeeeeny tiny bit of that, for the most part I still feel quite frustrated by them.

Does anyone have recommendations for ways to refresh/practice particle use? I do have a few old genki textbooks I could dig out, but I don’t do super well with textbook studying these days so I’d like to hear what else folks do.

(I do WK and bunpro for studying, with some immersion in reading manga or watching anime as well as daily life because I’m teaching English here in Japan. But for some reason particles just do not stick well in my brain.)

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#2

It’s not really a drilling exercise, but Cure Dolly’s video series was immensely helpful for me, explaining what the particles do and why you would pick one or the other.

I recommend all of the videos in this series, but Lesson 8 gets to the heart of your question.

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#3

Normally when I fail a grammatical item in my reviewssa I’m reading the grammar explanation again, so I’ll understand the nuances better. Do you use the resources tab on grammar items?

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#4

I’ve watched one or two of her videos before, but I don’t know if I made it to this one. Thank you for the recommendation!

I go through the explanations/examples when I make a mistake in the grammar itself, but there are a lot of times where I get the grammar point but I wrote に instead of で or something similar, and those are what I’m hoping some review will help with.

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#5

I mean do you use the resources of explanations outside of Bunpro? It’s the original feature of Bunpro if I can remember this right. Like the person before me was referring to CureDolly I think a diversity of explanations is always a good way to check for yourself if you are on the right path.

#6

I like Cure Dolly’s book too, especially since it dials back the gimmick.

If you want something thorough, with edge cases and everything, Fundamentals of Japanese Grammar by Yuki Johnson is terrific.

More than that, though, I wouldn’t recommend just a book. If I had to learn Japanese all over again, the main thing I would do differently is use the knowledge as much as I study it. Lately I’ve been doing a lot of writing on LangCorrect (I don’t work for them; heck, I’m not even a paying member, but it’s a really useful site). When I don’t have ideas for what to write, I’ll just take a grammar point from here, vocab and kanji I’m having a hard time with, and just make up sentences. In fact, here’s one I did yesterday.

I do want to normalize this. Every learner struggles with は vs. が and に vs. で. Books will help but you also want to practice doing so much input and output that muscle memory kicks in. Even if you’re mostly guessing, get corrected enough and you’ll guess less.

EDIT: Here’s a Kaname Naito video that I just happened to watch over this last weekend. It talks about an “invisible” particle to replace both は and が, but I felt like it helped in a different way.

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#7

Ah, okay, sorry for the misunderstanding. While I have checked them once in a while, I can’t say I’ve used them very often. I might go try some of those links and see if they have anything helpful for particles, though, so thank you for the idea.

I’d actually rather have more than just a book! Like I said, textbooks haven’t been my go-to in recent years and I’d love to have something that lets me practice the particles specifically, but I don’t know that there’s really a resource for that.

I do have some output with my coworkers and students, but they’re often kind of hesitant to correct me (even though I’m sure I need it) :sweat:
I think I actually tried Langcorrect at one point? But I had a hard time with the journal-entry style. Maybe I’ll give it another shot, though, see if a second time is the charm.

And being able to use “muscle memory” for the particles is definitely the goal, it’s just that right now I feel like my guesses are doing more harm than good, since I either have to mark a grammar point incorrect (and slow my progress on studying that grammar) or backspace and re-type it (and hope I remember the correct particle the next time, which I often don’t). It’s a bit of a vicious cycle. I’m just hoping some review resources will help me put a little more thought into the guesses, and feel less like I’m tossing darts at a dartboard.

Thank you for the additional video! It’ll be good to have a few different explanations to try out.

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#8

An additional thing that’s been helping me: after I get corrections on LangCorrect, I then plug my revised entry into OJAD and practice reciting each sentence out loud.

My theory—I haven’t proven it yet!—is that this’ll acclimate me to the sound and feeling of producing more natural Japanese. I still often stumble on the same issues myself, though, so the jury’s still out!

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#9

There have been some good suggestions already.

I just want to reiterate some comments and add others.

  • It is normal to not grasp particle usage fully at first. Normally when first coming across a particle explanation, it will be quite limited in scope or it is forced to put things into terms that make sense for an English speaker (or speakers of whatever the language of explanation is). The Cure Dolly video posted above is a good example of this. It over simplifies a lot, speaks in absolutes which are not necessarily true, and also uses her own made up terms which are “easier” instead of using recognised grammatical jargon.
  • Meaning: When a specific particle use doesn’t make sense it may be worth consulting a more comprehensive source than a beginner introduction. Reference books like the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar or even Wikipedia have more examples and depth than something like Genki; if you are at the right level then native dictionaries actually have fairly good explanations of particle usage.
  • Particle usage can appear idiomatic. To use an analogy in English, you ride in a car but on a bus. You also ride on a boat, even a large one, but perhaps you ride in a submarine? Or is it on? Similarly, particles can imply specific nuances however in some cases they are not radically different in meaning (consider と比べて・に比べて). The general “rules” for particle use can be quite generalised, so sometimes they may not appear to “make sense” if you have a single “rule” in mind.
  • These things take a lot of time. Some specific study may help bring the issue forward in your mind but sometimes these issues are just to do with time. In my experience, the vast majority of issues like this simply dissapear with experience. Sometimes they persist and need some active input though.

Good luck!

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#10

I think it’s a problem that we all have.
Just googled some stuff and it seems like Imabi has a really great amount of info for each grammar point https://imabi.org/the-particle-ga-i　格助詞「が」①/

The articles is like 10 pages long and then it sends you to the next が articles with perhaps more nuances.
I’ll try reading it today and many taking notes or making close anki cards with sentences.