Ive been reading a lot of manga recently and it is really frustrating to know all of the vocabularies but due to the particles, the sentence has a very hard to determine and foggy meaning. Ive been in Refold for about four months now and still don’t have a solid grip on the intricacies of particles despite studying them multiple times and going through Tae Kim’s. に, で, でも, and any particle combination are especially hard for me, any tips?
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Don’t beat yourself up. I’ve been studying quite intensely for about two years and Japanese sentence structure still isn’t always clear to me.
Have you tried any of the following?
- Cure Dolly’s youtube video’s on sentence structure and particles
- The bunpro explanations of the particles you have trouble with
- Duolingo (Probably a shock if you are a Follower of the Refold, but DL has good drills for particles)
For me hearing everything explained in many different ways, in combination with lots of exposure (with an emphasis on comprehensibility, so textbooks, apps or graded readers appropriate to your level in stead of anime or movies that you hardly understand at all) are the key to advancing. But everyone’s brain works a little different.
Good luck!
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You phrased it perfectly. The problem with particles is that they can have many different uses so as a beginner it’s very difficult to quickly grasp which one of the meanings of the particle is being used. However as you get more and more exposed to the lenguage you start to develop an intuiton. Sentences always have a very foggy meaning at first, but it gets はっきり with time. Particle acquisition felt like magic to me. It takes a bit of time, but it will happen.
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I’ll be sure to check out cure dolly, I don’t really have extra time for Duolingo, and while Bunpro does have a good catalog of examples and such, for some particles they don’t nail all the meanings or nuances for me. For now, I’ll continue immersion until I acquire it more thoroughly.
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I use duolingo too and I believe that I understand well the particles, but suddenly a sentence says that my particle is not correct, then all goes south, because I do not know if it is duolingo not accepting the particle because it is wrong or they forgot to accept it. And now that the discuss channel is down , is worse
Yeah, Duolingo really is an awful product, with the exception of the fact it has a ton of content. It can be valuable for practice, but also very frustrating for all the reasons you mentioned and more (e.g. horrible text-to-speech voices). I finally gave up on using it after once again it stopped recording lessons I had completed (the third time it happened to me). That’s been a known issue for at least two years that had numerous discussions (now all gone because they shut that feature down). I reported the bug, but of course, no one ever responded to me. Just an awful product.
Wait, what? They got rid of the forum?? Why???
Because it was swarming with bots and they didn’t want to expend the effort to keep them out while continuing to provide a place for learners to interact–which is absolutely vital on Duolingo because because they teach you so little. Instead, they told people to join unofficial Discords that various forum members were starting up.
Just an awful product.
That is why I hate the most of duolingo, the report system there is no feedback, you just report and that is all.
Why my answer to the lesson is wrong? they don’t tell you what is wrong, just the solution.
And the report system, you don’t have any feedback of if your report was valid or not or if it would be applied, or if it is applied. Theres no encouragement for people to report anything.
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For what it’s worth, if you ever have any questions about particles and their usage in a sentence, feel free to post them in the discussion thread for said particle. Particles can be (and still are to me!) SO tricky and confusing, I’m sure there’s tons of people here who would love to help you out.
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