Today marks the day that I’ve officially studied every sentence in the entire A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series! Here are the anki decks I made; hopefully they help you, too

I don’t have anyone to share this with, but I’m super proud of myself today so here’s my public journal about it lol. Also, I think these decks will be really helpful for someone, so I’m sharing them!

There’s over 5,000 sentences across the three books in the *A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar* series. I found an anki deck in this subreddit awhile ago (which seems to have since been deleted) that was a modified version of the one on itazuraneko. So I don’t take full credit for it. But it had a card for each sentence in the books with the grammar explanations.

I edited it even more to add a dark mode, and paid for an AwesomeTTS subscription to add high quality voices to each sentence.

Then I made a separate deck for all of the new vocab that I was finding. I started this journey at about JLPT3 level, but there were nearly 4,000 words I ended up not knowing, or not knowing well, so I made a card for each one, and added AwesomeTTS voices to each. I also heavily modded another anki theme I found, and added a dark mode for this deck, also.

**Why?**

I really wanted a simple way to study grammar. Things weren’t sticking with workbooks, and I wasn’t finding them helpful. Youtube videos for grammar points *were* helpful, but the repetition wasn’t there. So anki it was!

**How did you use these?**

I focused on one book at a time, starting at the beginner level. I gave myself a certain limit of sentences to study each day, like ten, and just went through them. I would read the sentence, and if I understood it (even if I got some vocab readings wrong) I would pass it. If I struggled to understand, I would mark it as hard or even completely forgotten. Then I would add words I didn’t know from each sentence to the vocabulary deck and study those the next day. There’s a bit more to it that I did, but I don’t want this to be too long, so feel free to ask for more details in the comments.

Sometimes the vocabulary deck making took quite awhile, because I wasn’t sure of the right reading, or I would later realize what I thought was a word was being used differently as part of a phrase.

For the voices, I mostly added them in batch, but went back and re-recorded those with incorrect readings, or where the grammar point emphasized something was male or female speech.

**What do the cards look like?**

[Here’s an album on imgur](https://imgur.com/gallery/M9zunjc) that includes more details about card fields and how they work.

**Where can I get them?**

[Here’s the grammar deck](https://gofile.io/d/nSdbIQ) and [here’s the vocabulary deck](https://gofile.io/d/F5CbSx).

**Caveats**

* I wasn’t planning on sharing this, so the vocabulary deck has about ten or fifteen words that aren’t in the books; I didn’t mark them, so I don’t know which ones they are.
* Sometimes the ADoJG’s English translations are needlessly over localized. There are about ten sentences I edited the translation of to be more literal, but they are unmarked.
* The original itazuraneko grammar deck must have been ocr’d or something, since there were quite a few typos. I fixed as many as I could, but I don’t think I found them all, so if you find a mistake let me know. I want to iron out more of the mistakes before adding this to the anki shared decks database.

**Results**

Well, I haven’t taken the JLPT 1, but I feel like I could. Mostly I’m just studying Japanese, very slowly, as a hobby. My goal is just to be able to read and understand without subtitles, and my ability to do so went waaaaayyy up since going through all this. The best part was studying a new grammar point and then hearing it that day being used in Genshin Impact or something (heh) or watching videos on OneNote in Japanese and totally following along.

**Next steps**

Taking a break from adding new anki cards lol. But unfortunately this book series doesn’t cover all grammar points on the JLPT or in novels, just the bulk of them, so I’ll probably make a supplement deck eventually using some other source material.

I think the biggest thing holding me back now is vocab (I really want to learn イラスト related vocab in particular), so I’m going to focus on that and reading.

**Credits**

* /u/TrainOfPotatoes, who seems to be the original author of the theme for the grammar deck I found. My version has been changed quite a bit, though
* [ninja33 on Github](https://github.com/ninja33/anki-templates), who made the base version of the theme for the vocabulary deck I ended up changing
* [abdo](https://forums.ankiweb.net/u/abdo/summary) on the anki forums who helped me with my Javascript
* The [Migaku Dictionary](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1655992655) developers
* The redditor who uploaded the edited itazuraneko grammar deck. I can’t find your post anywhere, so if you are out there, thank you!
* The developers of [AwesomeTTS](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1436550454) and of course the authors of the *A Dictionary of Japanese Grammar* series

I hope you guys find this post helpful! Honestly putting this together even not starting from scratch was a lot of work, but I’m thankful to all of the other Japanese learners that have come before me, created all of these resources, and encouraged learners to keep going. So if you’re reading this–keep going! I promise it gets easier.