♡elfire♡ on Nostr: Japanese the Manga Way is a grammar guide aimed for beginner learners that ...

Japanese the Manga Way is a grammar guide aimed for beginner learners that incorporates actual dialogue used in manga to emphasize grammar points. This guide is written in a lax matter, and is easy to understand, being targeted toward the enthusiast rather than the business person who is trying to learn Japanese for work purposes. The simplicity (not as in the content has no depth but rather the thorough but concise explanations) along with the fact that it uses panels from manga makes it very fun and engaging, more so than your usual grammar guide. I tried Tae Kim and 昨日 Sakubi in the past and while there wasn’t anything inherently wrong with them, the enjoyability of JTMW stuck to me more. Of course, grammar guides are supposed to be skimmed through and used as reference generally, but I had such a great time with this guide that I read it like a book. The only problem I say I had with JTMW (which is a personal nitpicking) is that while there are sentences in Japanese, it transliterates them into romaji instead of furigana.

You can purchase JTMW online or at your local bookstore, but there are versions available online too, such as the one here at archive.org: https://archive.org/details/japanese-the-manga-way/page/n17/mode/2up

Additional Note for Absolute Beginners: Like I mentioned, grammar guides like these are for getting a quick understanding. Do not try to go in ‘depth’ about the ‘why’, you will only get distracted and confused in the end. Think about how you learned your native language growing up. Did those grammar classes in school really do much for you, or rather, was it you reading, listening, speaking, engaging in the language that helped you improve? I’m not saying grammar lessons or books are useless, but they should be used merely for initial understanding and reference. You are not going to remember all these points, their exceptions, when they should be used, etc. until you start immersing yourself into the language more and more and your brain starts to make patterns.

Another thing to note is that eventually you’ll want to start to make a transition from an English (or whatever language) grammar reference (and dictionary) to a Japanese one. As for why this is, to put it simply, think about it this way: The Japanese understand their language better than anyone else do they not? Japanese can only be fully conveyed by Japanese.

For the transitioning period, I’d recommend either the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar (DoJG), 日本語文型辞典英語版 which has an ‘english’ version now, or even とびら which is not a reference and more of a guide, but can still be useful if you want to practice.