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

(In November 2022, I finished studying two anki decks that I made/modified based on the content in the [Dictionaries of Japanese Grammar](https://www.amazon.com/Dictionary-Japanese-Learning-Language-Intermediate/dp/B01M3T4NJP) book series, and posted the details to this sub. But since I originally posted the decks to a file host that reddit marks as spam, it was [auto-removed](https://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/yq11ep/today_marks_the_day_that_ive_officially_studied/). Thanks mods for letting me post this again! ^(even though I’m doing so months late, ehe…))

**Download the decks on Anki web**: [Grammar](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/843402109) / [Vocabulary](https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/261818505)

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 (that is a card for each grammar point, with all of the example sentences on one card). This deck has 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, and fixed a bunch of OCR’d typos, among other things.

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?**

The long and short of it is, 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.

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. As I find errors I keep going back to fix them and reupload the fixes.

**What do the cards look like?**

Card styles and how to use the fields [are here](https://twig.art/anki/#card-specifics).

**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. I don’t remember which these were
* Not all grammar points are covered in the book series, which is annoying, but not a bad thing. It definitely has the bulk of what you need to know, and it does cover quite a bit. But if you want something insanely comprehensive down to the smallest detail, you would need to make an anki deck out of everything on imabi, or the 日本語文型辞典.
* If you make any edits to the code, I’m sorry in advance. I am not a developer by any means, and the code is a huge mess. I’ve been meaning to clean it up and I just haven’t. Learning html and css is another hobby I pursued in the creation of these cards, and it is probably very apparent when looking at the code.

**Results**

~~Well, I haven’t taken the JLPT 1, but I feel like I could~~ (now that it’s been some months, I would say JLPT 2, more realistically). 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, or watching videos on OneNote in Japanese and totally following along.

**Next steps**

Reading. In my original post I said I would take a break, which I did, but only from anki cards. I’ve been reading manga in the meantime (right now, Orange–I’ve definitely graduated from Yotsuba after doing this deck). Now I’m doing anki cards again, using イラスト related vocab and Morphman, but much less intensely).

**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](https://github.com/ninja33/anki-templates) on Github, 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)
* 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.