5 comments

1. Hello, what would be a natural way of saying “cooked vegetables”? Would 料理した野菜 work? Thank you 🙂

2. Hello! I’ve doing Anki with Kaishi 1.5k for vocabulary, and I’ve been doing well so far (around 250 words, not much but steady). I thought it would be a good idea to also start looking into Kanjis on their own, so I wanted to ask what methods you think are the best for this (SRS, and free if possible), and also how you think I should continue with vocab after Kaishi

3. There isn’t a single English language video I can find on YouTube that covers the 活用形

   I’ve found ones in Portuguese, Korean and Spanish but nothing in English. When learning Japanese (and I am still learning as you never really finish) practically every time I couldn’t figure something out I was able to understand it when I stopped viewing things in the typical convoluted JSL grammar (or as I call it Genki grammar) that tries to smash the square Japanese grammar peg into a circular English grammar hole and ends up complicating things.
   活用形 are the typical 6 inflectional “forms” of inflectional words in Japanese and view grammar from the standpoint of an inflectional stem that then logically appends various suffixes rather than viewing each suffix as its own form or tense (leading to for example the so called て-form which turns out later in the learning journey is not actually one form that always does the same thing.
   A good resource on this aside from the Wikipedia page on Japanese grammar is https://japanesegrammar.org/pages/021.html And the Wiktionary pages for each form in both English and Japanese.
   If you haven’t already taken some time to learn this grammar I would highly encourage you to do so and if someone has a video for my friend who would rather watch than read about things it would be greatly appreciated. I’m sure learning how the grammar works might lead to so eureka moments for learners

4. Hi everyone,

   I have a question regarding the grammar of は and が in this sentence:

   台湾の食べ物が好きですが、パクチーは苦手です

   I understand that は can be used as a comparison. But I thought that you need to use は in both part, I.e

   台湾の食べ物 *は* 好きですが、パクチーは苦手です

   Is は and が interchangeable here or there’s a difference in nuance.

   Thank you!

5. Good morning,

   I have a teacher using the translation/grammar method and who tells me that you can’t really get over N3 if you don’t prioritize grammar at the beginning, and will have to go back to studying basics at that point. I do have another teacher using Minna and almost exclusively Japanese, but I can see that although it helps fluency, it might fossilize grammar mistakes.

   I wonder how advanced learners have managed a balance between the two approaches (or not). Thank you.