Hello all. My understanding of English grammar is really bad at this point in my life. (I’ve not been in school for 15 years at this point.) It’s one of those things where I’ve written and spoken english so long that I just don’t think about a words function in a sentence anymore. (Ie: I don’t think of the word “bent” as a past participle.) As you probably all know, grammar is often mentioned a lot in language learning texts to give clarity on what a certain word is doing in a sentence. Specifically on resources like Genki, they all seem to be aimed at people who are in school and who likely have this knowledge of grammar to build off of. With that said, I feel like I’m relearning what a specific grammar construct is, on the fly, from my Japanese lessons instead of the other way around.
Are there any good resources out there either aimed at or that are simply good for studying grammar so that it can make the references to grammar in Japanese coursework more clear for me? Also (and this might show my ignorance even more on grammar), when someone is talking specifically about a certain word fitting a grammar structure, is that using English grammar as the reference? Or is this part of grammar in a broader sense? (ie: Linguistics as a whole.)
3 comments
wikipedia
also ask in the daily thread about SPECIFIC things you dont understand. that should help.
Although the resource is not grammar-specific, in some cases it could be beneficial to use [Tangorin](https://tangorin.com). In it, you can find meaning and example sentences in-context. Do note, in the sentence check, it may not separate between words and grammar, but, well… Let us see an example, N2-level grammar まい. In Tangorin, you can find its [meaning](https://tangorin.com/definition/%E3%81%BE%E3%81%84) and [usage in context](https://tangorin.com/sentences?search=%E3%81%BE%E3%81%84) with translated sentences to English. Well, it also finds sentences with まい as reading of words, but be sure to ignore them.
I’ve honestly had better luck understanding japanese explanations of grammar than in english. English explanations, in my experiences either make the pitfall of being too linguistic terminology heavy, too generalized, or skip over points because it gets covered by other grammar points thwt you maybor mwy not know.
Like i remember seeing this explanation of 受け身形 and it kind of unlocked a third eye. https://xn--3kq3hlnz13dlw7bzic.jp/multiple-interpretations/
Even though I already had an idea and used 受け身形, it gave me more nuance to the usage that I didn’t explicitly understand. I forgot where else I saw this, but it was a japanese article explaining how 可能形 stems from 受け身形 (you might have noticed that they both take on the られる form) from old Japanese and why the language is built around passivity and indirectness.