For example to practice my Japanese I will type a sentence into google translate and see what it translates to into English so I know that what I am saying in Japanese makes sense.
However, I sometimes find that if I type a sentence and place the wrong particle eg. で or に or が the sentence still makes sense in English even though I know I have inserted the wrong particle.
Are there any sites that give quizzes or the ability to type sentences in Japanese and point out your mistakes when you type them?
1 comment
I will say it in a direct and honest way. You are doing it wrong. Top 20 particles cover 30-40% of any Japanese text and particles generally would push it above 50%. In other words, in any written sentence there are more particles than anything else. So every particle is absolutely crucial and worth you paying special attention to all functions and how it’s used.
What you need to do is to use online articles like this:
[https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2017/07/particles.html](https://www.japanesewithanime.com/2017/07/particles.html)
[https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-lessons.html](https://www.learn-japanese-adventure.com/japanese-lessons.html)
Or grammar books, or anything else with any kind of explanations. And you need to focus not on translation, but why people use it and for what purpose. Particles often have a lot of English translations, but most of the time it’s not because it’s something extremely complex, but because English simply doesn’t have such thing. Quite often all these 5-7-10 or even more definitions could be combined into a single function. For example, if we have some action like “to kick”, then we have kind of slots for person who does it, object that is kicked, maybe also some goal/direction as “to kick the ball into the gate”, maybe also the place where we do it or some manner as “in a rush” and so on. All these slots are what particles are used for. Translator simply ignores wrong particles and pick most obvious relation between several words.