JapanNewbie

Japanese Grammar Quiz

Posted on 17. Mar, 2009 @ 10:34 pm by harvey in Books, Language

Are you confident in your Japanese language skills? Try this pretty tough online grammar quiz and see what you still need to learn.

Japanese Grammar Quiz 文法クイズ

After you submit your answers it will tell you what you got wrong, and explain what the correct answer should be.

It’s all in Japanese, so this is only useful for intermediate to advanced learners.

I’m not gonna lie. I may have passed JLPT 1-kyuu, but I only average about 3 or 4 out of 5 on these quizzes! This is pretty tough stuff.

Some of the links to the クイズ解説 are broken though… But you can still see what the correct answers should have been! Then, if you have a good grammar dictionary you can look up the patterns and get other examples of how they are used.

I used this Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar” when I was in high school, and it probably saw more use than my regular vocabulary dictionary, no joke.

For example, if you want to know what,「医者がくれた薬を飲んだら、かえって病気がひどくなった。」means, you can look up all the nouns and verbs in a regular dictionary, like 医者 is doctor, くれた is to be given, 飲む is to drink/take medicine, 病気 is sickness, and ひどくなる is to become worse… but what in the world is かえって？

“I drank the medicine that the doctor gave me, but in fact (to the contrary of what the expected result would have been), my sickness got worse!”

My electronic dictionary lists かえって as “on the contrary”, which is correct, but this grammar dictionary not only tells you what it means, but gives you a ton of example sentences so that you can really figure out how this particular grammar point works… and in Japanese, there are a lot of grammar points. Personally, I think learning straight vocabulary is easy in comparison.

Here is a video explaining what this grammar dictionary is all about.

For the stuff in these quizzes I suspect that you’ll at least need the Dictionary of Intermediate Japanese Grammar, and maybe the Advanced Grammar Dictionary.

Three volumes of grammar dictionaries. Incredible. It’s funny to think that after all this time there are still grammar points that I need to learn!

On second thought. That’s not funny. It makes sense. You can get along very well speaking Japanese with the grammar of a 10 year old, and for a non-native that’s no small feat. However, if you want to sound smart when speaking Japanese, or if you want to be able to understand the news, literature, or other more advanced topics, you’ll have to step it up a notch.

Japanese language vs. Foreigner. The battle continues.

- Harvey

Tags: japanese, Language, quiz