Reddit reviews Japanese the Manga Way: An Illustrated Guide to Grammar and Structure
We found 16 Reddit comments about Japanese the Manga Way: An Illustrated Guide to Grammar and Structure. Here are the top ones, ranked by their Reddit score.
Stone Bridge Press
There are four great resources out there for checking grammar rules:
I'm waiting to get my hands on this grammar dictionary - from what I've seen it's bit of Engrishy piece of work, but might be more concise than the three volumes behemot above. Plus it covers exactly JLPT range.
Get a good textbook and a good dictionary. I recommend Genki as your first textbook. Look through these links, all of them are excellent resources:
http://www.amazon.com/Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese-English/dp/4789009637/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313916758&sr=1-1
http://www.amazon.com/Genki-Integrated-Course-Elementary-Japanese/dp/4789011631/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1313917396&sr=1-2
http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Manga-Way-Illustrated-Structure/dp/1880656906
http://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Kanji-Kana-Revised-Language/dp/0804820775
Forget the Mangaland books, Japanese the Manga Way is much better, well-structured, covers a great amount of grammar, and deals with the politeness levels.
You should get a reference book (A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar) with it, and The Kodansha Kanji Learners Dictionary.
I've answered this question before, so you might find some useful information there. Special emphasis on Japanese the Manga Way and JapanesePod101
To add to that, let me add a few more pointers directed specifically at you.
I think is "Japanese The Manga Way" but not 100% sure since I haven't read the book.
Also interested in the answer to OP question.
I'm sorry to hijack this thread.
I'm heading to Japan in 11 hours for 4 months(Going abroad for my college), and I lived there for 10 months in high school. I study Japanese at my college.
My biggest fault in grammar. I've used a couple of resources to help me, so I'll start with that.
Japanese the Manga Way is one of my all-time favorite resource book. It's less boring, and has well written explanations. I've often used this book as a supplement to my other textbooks.
Genki is another favorite. I've used both 1 and 2 in my college class, and if well taught is extremely valuable. It teaches Kanji/grammar/ vocab at a moderate pace.
I've also used this grammar book in the past. It's good, but lacks in presentation.
Tuttle's Japanese Guide to Kana/Kanji provides good practice space for Kana/Kanji. The later Kanji's space can be limited, but if you write it in pencil you can erase and re-write at any given time.
I use the Random-House dictionary, but it's kind of 'old hat'. For online I use Jisho.org or Jim Brean's dictionary. There was another one I used to use that was very similar to Jisho.org that was made by a Redditor but I lost the link. If you have a DS I would recommend Kanji Sonomama Rakubiki Jiten, it's like have a full electronic dictionary w.o the full price (Though I wish you could jump from English -> Japanese words [You can do Japanese -> English words] but that's my only grievances against it).
Good luck!
It's pretty neat. The author takes panels from various manga along with a brief description of the context, gives a translation and breakdown of what each word is doing, and explains the grammar point for that section. It's a very fun read, and actually teaches you a lot. I suggest clicking "look inside" on the amazon page to see what it covers in the table of context. Read the preface, too.
A Google search reveals that it'll bring you up to about an N4 level of grammar, which is as good as what the Genki 1+2 gets you. The difference is that it's actually fun to read, and it teaches you casual speech in conjunction with the formal stuff. If you're taking a class, Genki takes 2 years to finish; I finished The Manga Way in 2 weeks.
At level 10 you should be able to somewhat guess the meaning of most sentences if they only use the kanji you've already learned.
I recommend watching these videos:
They actually show you the grammar being used with context. It also covers more grammar than Tae Kim. If you want to read and take it with you I would recommend "Japanese the manga way" It's a cheap textbook with manga examples of grammar usage.
Sure. To regain motivation, have fun.
Do you need to learn kana? Make mnemonic charts with your own art.
Genki's method of kanji is bad? Textbooks don't excel at that. KanjiStudy does.
Japanese Graded Readers are fun, tho you may not be ready yet.
Rosetta Stone [insert obligatory condemnation in the next reply] costs money, but if you have it and it doesn't bore you stiff, it's worth a try. (Do the demo first to see if it's for you.)
You can do Japanese the Manga Way ( https://www.amazon.com/Japanese-Manga-Way-Illustrated-Structure/dp/1880656906 ) or online versions of the defunct Mangajin almost from the beginning, tho you get more out of it the better you get.
Whatever you do, if it's learning or practice at all and you like doing it, you've got something to make it fun.
You might check out Japanese the Manga Way. Yes, it will go over all the same grammar in Genki I/II, but it has a lot more as well.
It also has a fair amount of colloquial expressions/grammar in the explanations, especially since it pulls straight from various different manga. I went through Genki I/II first, and then I did Japanese the Manga Way. I learned a lot of new stuff in it.
I don't know what is covered in Intermediate Japanese, though. YMMV.
Several things I'm thinking after reading your post:
First: MIA bases a lot of its work on the assumption that you don't want to learn grammar consciously separately from acquiring it. I think in order to do this you need to acquire the grammar in order, starting from basic particles, conjugations and helper verbs and build up. The alternative is to learn further ahead, allowing you to understand more grammar consciously, with the tradeoff that time spent learning is not spent acquiring. Personally I think there is a balance to be had between the two, as increasing the comprehensibility of your immersion, even a bit, will speed up your acquisition by a lot.
Based on that I think you have a few general options to increase your grammar aquisition:
For number 3, the resources I like for grammar are: Japanese the Manga Way by Wayne Lammers: this gives a great intuitive view of Japanese grammar, with each point backed up by a real example from a real manga. One downside is that it delays by some time plain negative and past forms which I think is really fundamental. Another is Cure Dolly's Youtube channel which is really good if you can get over her weird voice. Also her pronunciation is weird, both in English and Japanese, so make sure you just get the grammar from there and solidify / acquire it through immersion. If you're doing MIA I would avoid all her videos on "organic immersion" too, and stick to her "Japanese from scratch" stuff. With either of these sources I would recommend going through one "lessons" every few days, and making sentence cards from your immersion for each point from the lesson. So the first lesson of Japanese the Manga Way covers basic sentence enders and polite forms, so I would look for sentences which use all of those forms (and from which I know all the vocab), and add them as sentence cards to my deck.
This is the one I have. I don't know if it's related but I really liked it; it was a lot easier for me to grasp grammatical concepts this way.
Japansepod101 is great! But they are super spammers its true. Great product made to look terrible. Why???? Not as good as JFZ though.
George, I guess the reason people want you to recommend books is they trust you. You should be proud of that.
Books I'd recommend (even in you won't!) are:
Making Sense of Japanese by Jay Rubin (very funny and lots on interesting bits even if some of it was beyond me)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/Making-Sense-Japanese-What-Textbooks/dp/156836492X/ref=sr_1_fkmr0_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1486317692&sr=8-1-fkmr0&keywords=don%27t+tell+you+about+japanese
Japanese the Manga Way by Wayne Lammers (Really terrific and great practice on your kanji too.)
https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/Japanese-Manga-Way-Illustrated-Guide-Grammar-Structure/1880656906/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1486317895&sr=1-1&keywords=japanese+the+manga+way
Actually I don't think these books compete with your ones in any case.
And finally I recommend this explanation of when to use wa and ga. Its a video thing and you can throw away all textbooks after watching this. (I suppose it is just barely possible there is more to it than this guy says but surely not).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nU9rjYZe2P4
Oh, just realised George did a video on this subject I haven't seen. Well, I am sure they are both equally good . . .
Ah, I was just writing a comment that this looks really similar to Japanese the Manga Way. I've been reading that, and really like it:
http://www.amazon.co.jp/Japanese-Manga-Way-Illustrated-Grammar-Structure/dp/1880656906/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1459375417&sr=8-1&keywords=japanese+manga
But I do wish that it used hiragana instead of romaji.
You're not just going to be able to guess/work it out/get an answer in even a long reddit post.
Are you actually studying Japanese? You need a self-study book at the very least (many people recommend the Genki series) or, if you just want to dabble, look at the Pimsleur or Michel Thomas audio series. Another fun approach you may enjoy is Japanese the Manga Way.
It's well worth making the effort. Good luck!
I'm all up on Wanikani. It costs like $5 a month with a coupon code you can google for, but it's worth it in the end.
For gramar, Japanese The Manga Way is amazing, and I supplemented that with (Japanese Demystified)[http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/0071477268/ref=oh_aui_detailpage_o03_s00?ie=UTF8&psc=1).
It was enough to navigate Tokyo and order food after a year of study.