Tae Kim's Guide to Japanese Grammar: A Comprehensive Review

Tae Kim's Guide to Learning Japanese—a totally free textbook written for beginners learning Japanese. You don't need to enter your email to use it and Tae Kim doesn't try to upsell you anything—he's literally just dropping knowledge for free, out of the goodness of his heart.

It sounds too good to be true.

It's not.

The guide offers an accessible introduction to Japanese grammar, vocabulary, and sentence structures. It's well-known for a reason. It's pretty cool.

This guide will help you decide if it's the right Japanese textbook for you to start with, and will cover:

What is Tae Kim’s guide to learning Japanese?

Well, for starters, it looks like this:

It's a 353-page .pdf that introduces you to the basics of Japanese grammar, and then some.

More specifically, the guide is broken into six sections:

1. Introduction

Tae Kim explains why he doesn't like "traditional" textbooks:

And Tae Kim, in his guide to Japanese grammar, will be taking a different approach. He says:

At Migaku, we can get behind that. We've actually got an entire video on the problems with traditional approaches to language learning:

The rest of Tae Kim's introduction explains how to use the book and how he thinks you should go about learning Japanese.

2. The Japanese writing systems

Japanese has three writing systems:

And he introduces them like this:

(And then this is followed by further sections where he breaks the table down, but I'm not going to print the entire book here, am I?)

After introducing each script and how they work, he directs you to a hiragana practice sheet and katakana practice sheet.

3. Basic Japanese Grammar

Here you can see the basic format of all of Tae Kim's lesssons:

True to the goals Tae Kim stated in the introduction:

The basic Japanese grammar section consists of 12 units that are broken up into about 50 sections, starting with だ (the Japanese copula), moving onto a few basic Japanese particles, then covering the basics of Japanese verbs and sentence structure.

4. Essential Japanese Grammar

The essential Japanese grammar section is a continuation of the basic Japanese grammar section. Here, you'll continue learning important Japanese grammatical structures, like the polite form of verbs or how numbers work, in the same "vocabulary→explanation→example sentences" structure as before.

Below you can see Tae Kim's explanation of the volitional form of verbs:

This section is by far the longest of the book, consisting of 18 units that are broken up into about 100 sections over nearly 150 pages.

5. Special expressions

This section of the book introduces stuff that—well, I'll just let Tae Kim explain it himself:

It's still pretty much the same stuff as the previous two grammar sections—you're now just seeing stuff that's slightly rarer. Stuff you'll come across in every episode of anime you watch or every chapter of a book you read, but not necessarily in every other sentence, like much of the stuff Tae Kim has covered so far.

6. Advanced topics

This section is short enough that I can actually just include screenshot of what it covers:

And, honestly, I'm not quite sure how to describe it. It's an eclectic mix of stuff.

Some of the stuff is very much not advanced:

Some of the stuff, like べからず, I pretty much only see in signs with messages like this:

And some of the stuff, like そばから, I've literally only ever seen in the materials I used while preparing for the JLPT N1, the highest level proficiency test of Japanese.

I don't necessarily think that all of these grammar points belong in the same section (N4 to N1 is a pretty big range!), but they're indeed all things that would be good to at least be aware of.

Why learners like Tae Kim’s guide

I think that seeing the book laid out above should give you a pretty good idea of if Tae Kim is right for you or not, but if you're still on the fence, here's what people like about Tae Kim:

It's free, duh

I'm not sure how I can put this more clearly—Tae Kim is free. Like just literally click here and the .pdf file will open in your browser.

And, you know, that's kind of incredible. There's no subscription. You don't need to enter an email, give away your phone number, or sign away the wages of your first born child. You just click the link and get the book and can even download it if you want to. It covers basically the same stuff as you'd see in Genki I and Genki II... for free.

Tae Kim's textbook is available on Amazon as a $5.00 Kindle purchase or a ~$20.00 physical book, but you won't see that mentioned in the guide. He has a blog, but doesn't do affiliate marketing or sponsorships or anything like that.

Everything Tae Kim offers, he offers for free.

If you find it helpful, you can choose to support him.

Naturally, people like that.

Simple, to-the-point explanations

Most textbooks are written by academics and, for lack of better words, the way they think language stuff should be explained sometimes just isn't how us normal folk need stuff to be explained to us.

As a more advanced learner, I now realize that textbook authors tended to go to way too much detail in some places and brush straight over stuff they thought was common sense (which wasn't) in others. As a beginner, that frustrated me to no end—I thought I was too stupid to understand how a certain Japanese grammar point worked, and I didn't realize that the real issue was simply that the Genki explanation of that grammar point wasn't super great.

So, yeah. You know what to expect from textbooks, and you probably expect that when you open up Tae Kim for the first time.

And then you see stuff like this:

"Use だ to declare that something is so and so".

Yeah.

Tae Kim isn't winning any literary prose awards—but, in the world of textbooks, that's a plus. His explanations are intuitive. Easy to follow. It feels like he's talking to you. It's really just kinda nice.

The community generally approves of Tae Kim

The internet is full of haters, but if you spend a few days hanging out on Reddit's r/LearnJapanese, a Japanese learning discord, or pretty much anywhere else Japanese learners congregate—you're probably going to see at least one person recommend Tae Kim.

Now, the reception isn't totally positive. We'll get to that in the next section. At the end of the day, though, Tae Kim has been online for like 20 years; it hasn't been abandoned or pillaged, and people still recommend it. How many other resources can you say that about?

Where Tae Kim’s Guide falls short

I personally like Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide.

...but it's not perfect.

We've been pretty positive so far, so now let's take the gloves off and talk about why Japanese learning guides don't unanimously begin with "First, go do Tae Kim."

It's literally just a book of grammar explanations

As mentioned up in the third bullet point of "What is Tae Kim's guide to learning Japanese", every unit of Tae Kim follows the same format:

And then you move on.

There's no interactive elements, no quizzes, no media, no audio, no sample dialogues or reading material. It's literally just a compilation of brief textual explanations.

And, oftentimes, that's not quite enough.

Now, to be clear:

So I don't necessarily think it's Tae Kim's job to do everything for you, but I agree with the general Internet concensus: to learn Japanese, you're going to need more than Tae Kim.

Bookmark Tae Kim's guide as a quick and dirty grammar reference, but understand that it's really just a quick and dirty grammar reference.

Some of Tae Kim's takes aren't so great

So, Tae Kim is a Korean learner of Japanese. He's not Japanese, nor a Japanese teacher. According to lore, Tae Kim's guide to Japanese was initially just his personal notes about Japanese grammar points. They got pretty extensive, and he decided to polish them up a bit and make them available to other learners. I have no idea if that's true or not, but having gone through the textbook, I'd believe it.

On one hand, and I want to stress this, I absolutely admire people who put skin in the game and make something for the good of others.

On the other hand, this not-a-professsional-ness sometimes leads to things like this showing up in Tae Kim's book:

And I mean that's technically true, but like—well:

Grammatically speaking, that's a valid English sentence!

But people don't talk like that.

I don't want to dwell on negativity, so I'll simply say that there are a number of sections like this throughout the book—some takes that are kind of weird, some where he's overly abstracted or simplified a concept, and some where he's kinda just wrong.

Unfortunately, as a beginner, you likely won't be able to tell when Tae Kim is being brilliantly intuitive and when he is missing the mark.

It doesn't hold your hand at all

I'm looking at page 47 right now—Tae Kim just dumps 23 new vocab words on you and is like here remember this stuff. The next unit begins on page 50, we get 7 new words, and it's just assumed that you remember those words from page 47—they start appearing in example sentences.

So, in addition to Tae Kim, you're going to need to be using a tool or practicing on the side in order to keep up with Tae Kim. You won't be able to learn Japanese just by reading through the guide.

This is true for most textbooks, of course, but most textbooks also include things like dialogues so that you at least get some practice with vocab words and grammar points before moving on. With Tae Kim, if you don't put in the legwork to keep up, you'll be left behind. Fast.

Again, that's not necessarily a bad thing. If you have a vocab-learning system that works for you, you might even like Tae Kim's hands-off-ness. It's just something you should be aware of, and something that I think a lot of beginners might not be ready for.

Ok, fine, but if I want to learn Japanese, should I use Tae Kim?

As a blanket statement, Tae Kim is an excellent tool to have in your tool box, but I don't think it's what most people should use as their primary Japanese resource.

But, to be more specific:

Yes, use Tae Kim to learn Japanese if...

I feel totally comfortable recommending Tae Kim to a few sorts of people:

Basically, I think Tae Kim is great to use as a "trial" resource:

No, don't use Tae Kim to learn Japanese if...

I would not recommend Tae Kim to a few sorts of people:

Basically, Tae Kim was designed to do one thing—provide brief but intuitive explanations of grammar points. It does that pretty well, but learning a language is much more than making sense of grammar points. If you don't feel comfortable juggling Tae Kim with other resources, I wouldn't recommend using it.

A few Tae Kim alternatives

If you like the idea of a practical grammar reference as opposed to a traditional textbook, but don't quite think Tae Kim is for you, you might prefer one of these alternatives:

A few Japanese textbooks for beginners

This article is already getting kind of long, so I'm not going to talk about it here, but we've actually got an entire article devoted to the best Japanese textbooks for beginners. In it, we talk about:

So if you've read this far and decided that you need a bit more than "just" a grammar reference book, head over to that blog post and see which textbook would be a better fit for you 💪

Imabi, a super comprehensive Japanese reference

If Tae Kim's strength is in its concise and casual explanations, Imabi is exactly the opposite: it goes into incredible detail and most of its ~500 entries contain literally dozens of example sentences.

Like Tae Kim, Imabi is totally free and can be accessed online. Here's how Imabi goes about explaining the volitional form of Japanese verbs:

This entry is 2,000 words long... and it's only the first of three parts.

Generally speaking, I'd recommend that you first look up a grammar point in Tae Kim. If you feel like you need more information, then look up the same grammar point in Imabi. You'll get all the information you ever wanted... and more.

Maggie Sensei, or Japanese grammar points explained via (cute) dog memes

Maggie Sensei is ran by Yukari, a Japanese language teacher, and Maggie, her French pit bull. They describe their approach to teaching with this introduction to why they didn't like the current (then 2008) world of Japanese-language education:

So they decided to change that by creating simple and fun Japanese lessons (full of dog photos), such as the below explanation of the volitional form:

As you can see, the lessons are heavily based around example sentences. The formatting of the explanations aren't great, but Maggie always goes out of her way to make sure that they're accessible even to total beginners.

If you like the brevity of Tae Kim but want something that's been vetted by a Japanese person, try Maggie Sensei!

Migaku, a flashcard-based course to learn essential Japanese grammar and vocabulary

Migaku offers the same kind of practical, to-the-point explanations as you'd see in Tae Kim's grammar guide, but we've also patched over many of Tae Kim's weaknesses:

As is tradition, here's a peek at how we go about explaining the volitional form of Japanese verbs:

So if you love Tae Kim but wish it had kept up with more modern resources, give Migaku a shot!

We're pretty sure that you'll be able to understand 80% of all Japanese media within ~6 months of using Migaku. Here's why we're so confident.

Pomax, another super long .pdf about Japanese grammar

Pomax is another independent Japanese grammar guide in .pdf format that you can read in your browser by clicking this link. It's better formatted, and, unlike Tae Kim, doesn't shy away from using more technical language when describing Japanese grammar points. On the contrary, it gravitates toward it.

For reference, here's Pomax's explanation of the Japanese volitional form of verbs:

So, uhh, yeah. We get words like cohortative and that I'm honestly not even going to try to explain. If you've got some formal knowledge of linguistics, you'll probably like Pomax. If not, you probably won't.

Wasabi, an online Japanese magazine for learners with a decently robust grammar dictionary

Wasabi is a kind of interesting mix of Tae Kim, Imabi, and Maggie Sensei. The Wasabi team consists of professional Japanese teachers, so their posts go into some detail and include many example sentences, but they've worked with enough students to know that more information isn't necessarily better.

Their grammar posts are quite thorough, in that they cover many usages, but each individual section is quite concise and dominated by helpful tables and practical example sentences.

Once again, here's the beginning of Wasabi's explanation of the Japanese volitional form:

Wasabi's website is a bit outdated, and their table of concents is significantly shorter than all of the other alternatives we've listed—but if they have a listing for the grammar point you're looking up, it's worth checking out.

Conclusion

So, there you go! Tae Kim is a free resource that covers an impressive amount of information about Japanese grammar.

My personal stance as to if you should use it:

Good luck!