Grammar course
Japanese grammar course: from zero to reading real books
Japanese grammar looks hostile because the order is backwards and the little words are everywhere. It is much more regular than it looks. This course teaches it as a small number of ideas that keep coming back, with every example glossed piece by piece and every lesson ending in longer passages you parse step by step.
Start with lesson 1 and go in order. You should know hiragana and katakana first (the kana chapter gets you there in days) and be learning vocabulary alongside. You will not memorise a lesson in one pass, and you are not meant to: read it, go and meet the pattern in real Japanese, and come back when something puzzles you.
- How a sentence worksThe shape of a Japanese sentence, the particles that hold it together, names, politeness and pointing words.
- Verbs, adjectives and the everyday basicsEvery basic form of verbs and adjectives, the て-form, numbers and time, and the first patterns built on them.
- Joining ideasClauses that describe nouns, lists, reasons, conditions, time and quoted speech: how to read long sentences.
- Actions and attitudeAsking others to act, obligation, negatives, passives and causatives, change and intention, wishes and regrets.
- Judgement and nuanceGuessing and likeness, comparing and approximating, the smaller particles, verb endings, written-style particles, and keigo.
- Reading real JapaneseCasual speech, sentence endings, questions, the voice of narration, the small nouns that make patterns, and a method for any sentence.
To practise as you go, the JLPT grammar lists have a short drill for hundreds of patterns, and the conjugation drill trains verb and adjective forms until they are automatic.