It ranges from $150 to $200 last time I checked. I'd like to buy all three but is there like a cheaper newer print or something?

At the very least, I'd like a cheaper hard copy of Advanced.

[s0apgun]

They can be bought cheaper on Amazon.co.jp since the advanced copy is stocked more in Japan than America from what I've heard.

There is also a PDF of the basic one floating around the internet.

s0apgun Wrote:They can be bought cheaper on Amazon.co.jp since the advanced copy is stocked more in Japan than America from what I've heard.

I didn't know that. I'll take a look.

s0apgun Wrote:There is also a PDF of the basic one floating around the internet.

I'm part of the older generation: I like real books made from trees. I'm not a fan of digital copies and those Kindle thingamajigs. Books are more soothing to the eyes and lord knows I already spend too much time looking at screens.

Besides, the real books have useful font colors like red but the PDF copies I've seen are all scanned in black and white and they also also not lossless (the fonts are more blurry than crystal clear tree-books).

The kindle paperwhite is surprisingly close to an actual page (although it has some other drawbacks and, of course, not much in the way of color). But back to the real topic...

If you don't mind used copies you can get cheaper versions on Amazon, although for Advanced it's pretty much the same price used/new

I don't believe the dictionaries have ever been released hardcopy. I think any hard copies you are seeing online are people that probably had them rebound. So you could get a soft cover one and then find a bookbinding company that will re-bind the books into hardcovers. This is something I've been considering for my basic, since its nearly 10 years old and the cover is in poor shape.

vix86 Wrote:I don't believe the dictionaries have ever been released hardcopy. I think any hard copies you are seeing online are people that probably had them rebound. So you could get a soft cover one and then find a bookbinding company that will re-bind the books into hardcovers. This is something I've been considering for my basic, since its nearly 10 years old and the cover is in poor shape.

Oh when I say hardcopy I don't necessarily mean hardcover books. I simply mean a hard physical copy as opposed to digital "soft" intangible one. I am perfectly fine with a book with non-thick covers.

The first two books are cheaper used on Amazon US. The third is about $12 cheaper on Honto.JP. Buy the third from Honto, and ship it SAL to save money.

Like others have said, it's pretty hard to find advanced on the cheap, though sometimes someone puts them on eBay and don't know what they've got

qwertyytrewq Wrote:Besides, the real books have useful font colors like red but the PDF copies I've seen are all scanned in black and white and they also also not lossless (the fonts are more blurry than crystal clear tree-books).

I agree about the appeal of the paper book but on the other hand, my three digital copies are OCR'd so they are instantly searchable.

Are you sure you really want to spend that kind of money on grammar dictionaries? Not that I want to set off yet another bloody online debate on the value of grammar study for language acquisition, but that is quite a bit of money for stuff printed on paper in 2014. If you are on a limited budget, I'd invest it in some reading material and research what items of grammar you are interested in online.

Those dictionaries aren't really that special. People talk about them a lot here only because they're widely pirated and easily available as PDF's. If you're willing to shell out money then just get どんな時どう使う日本語 because it's actually tons more useful as a grammar dictionary.

I guess I'm lucky then to have gotten all three for only like 70 bucks total. I bought the advanced for 4000￥, the intermediate for 3000￥ (both at book stores in Kyoto/Osaka), and then I found a copy of the basic one that some ALT left behind at a high school I worked at.

I like the dictionaries better than どんな時どう使う日本語, actually. That book just feels like a compilation of 完全マスター文法N3-N1 to me, doing some things better and some things worse.

erlog Wrote:Those dictionaries aren't really that special. People talk about them a lot here only because they're widely pirated and easily available as PDF's. If you're willing to shell out money then just get どんな時どう使う日本語 because it's actually tons more useful as a grammar dictionary.

Well, you can talk for yourself. The only way I would improve the book(s) is by filling them with even more grammar entries that they currently lack. It's an excellent study tool esp. paired with the anki deck.

erlog Wrote:Those dictionaries aren't really that special. People talk about them a lot here only because they're widely pirated and easily available as PDF's. If you're willing to shell out money then just get どんな時どう使う日本語 because it's actually tons more useful as a grammar dictionary.

Sorry, this is stupid. どんな時 isn't even comparable as a dictionary to the D(B/I/A)JG. どんな時 treats grammar more like a phrasal thing and completely misses out on a number of actual grammar points (ie: It doesn't even cover the basic particles as grammars が・を・etc). どんな時 also lacks in depth detail on grammar points and misuses, which the JG covers incredibly well. どんな時どう使う日本語 is a supplemental to the JG as far as I'm concerned and an aid for placing grammar points against the JLPT.

Danchan Wrote:Are you sure you really want to spend that kind of money on grammar dictionaries?

Your average grammar dictionaries? No.
A Dictionary of B/I/A Japanese Grammar? Yes.

Danchan Wrote:If you are on a limited budget, I'd invest it in some reading material

Who says I don't have some already?

Danchan Wrote:and research what items of grammar you are interested in online.

I think D(B/I/A)JG is better (or best) quality though. Just because something is free and online doesn't mean it's the best (EG. WWWjdict).

erlog Wrote:Those dictionaries aren't really that special. People talk about them a lot here only because they're widely pirated and easily available as PDF's.

And because those dictionaries are good.

erlog Wrote:If you're willing to shell out money then just get どんな時どう使う日本語 because it's actually tons more useful as a grammar dictionary.

Can't say I've heard of that book but other posters seem to disagree with your assertions. Your retort?

None of these is a do-all, be-all answer. It's about breadth vs. depth, what you need it for, and what your level of Japanese is. They all involve trade-offs.

The DOJG series doesn't have great breadth, but it has really good depth... IF it covers the thing you're trying to look up. And the more advanced the thing you're looking for, the less likely you are to find it. It's fine for basic competence in Japanese, but not well-suited for learning upper-level JLPT grammar, which it omits more than it should for the price.

どんな時どう使う日本語 has great breadth, but only so-so depth. I can find just about anything I need, but the explanation can range from really good to 'meh.' But sometimes a 'meh' explanation is better than none.

日本語文型辞典 is a good resource, if you can handle an all-日本語 explanation. It has wide coverage, pretty good explanations, and a good number of examples. It's a nice back-up to the どんな時 book.

rich_f Wrote:日本語文型辞典 is a good resource, if you can handle an all-日本語 explanation. It has wide coverage, pretty good explanations, and a good number of examples. It's a nice back-up to the どんな時 book.

I guess, I was wrong thinking that 日本語文型辞典 was a nice back-up for DoXJG... (I own both and am glad I do.)

Didn't see this どんな時 book but I tend to avoid cluttering my bookshelves with positions that contain spurious information and are not as authoritative as DoXJG and 日本語文型辞典.

rich_f Wrote:IF it covers the thing you're trying to look up. And the more advanced the thing you're looking for, the less likely you are to find it. It's fine for basic competence in Japanese, but not well-suited for learning upper-level JLPT grammar, which it omits more than it should for the price.

Could you elaborate on the DOJG books not having great breadth?

AFAIK there are close to 900 unique entries in the series. How many does どんな時 have? 250 or so?

Just counting the pages and some rudimentary math. I'd say どんな時 has about 630 entries.
Has sample pages.
Up close shot of a page.


The entries are usually fairly short with maybe 1-3 example sentences. While there is a lot of content on the page, its worth noting that it contains a Japanese explanation of the grammar point and then translates that to English/Korean/Mandarin. So the book can be nice if you are looking to learn Japanese through another language but it doesn't have a lot.

Again, all this book really offers is a few more examples, nice cross-langauge reference and JLPT labels for grammar so you know what is N1 and what is N2. A person could get Basic and Intermediate of the JG and be set in my opinion.

Womacks23 Wrote:Could you elaborate on the DOJG books not having great breadth?

AFAIK there are close to 900 unique entries in the series. How many does どんな時 have? 250 or so?

Not everybody here cares about N2 or N1, so if you don't care about it, don't sweat it.

But if you're going to tackle those at some point, be aware that the DOJG books have gaps that you're going to need to cover somehow.

While studying for N2 and N1, around 2/3 of the time, I could find what I was looking for in the DOJG books.

どんな時's coverage is closer to around 95%. There were only a few terms I couldn't find in it. To be fair, I couldn't find them in just about anything else, either, except maybe EIJIRO, and I just had to rely on the prep books or tutors for proper explanations. (It's handy to know a Japanese Language teacher you can turn to in a pinch.)

Some prep books, like Kanzen Master, will have a decent explanation that very well may be good enough, but other books, like Nihongo-So-Matome, just suck at explaining grammar. The books take varying stands on whether you've learned this stuff before picking them up, and just how well you already know it. (Just compare thicknesses between review books and dictionaries!)

DOJG has a really annoying habit of using "REL." a lot. (Related expressions.) It will cite some related expressions in the definition of a word-- other grammar that behaves similarly in the author's opinion, but usually there *aren't* any separate entries for any of those related expressions. So you're just stuck. No examples to work with, no explanations. And they stick the related expressions in the index in the back, so when you look them up, you might think, "Oh, there it is!" only to find out it's just a related expression for some other phrase, with no useful information whatsoever. Sure, it may act the same, but it may not. Or it may have other meanings. Ugh.

My other major beef with DOJG is its index. Often I would come across a grammar term in a prep book or two, look it up, and not find it in DOJG's index. That doesn't mean it's not in there, it just means it's not indexed very well. Sometimes removing the leading particle is necessary, sometimes turning the verb into dictionary form is necessary... generally, I wound up wasting time doing something that I shouldn't need to do, because whoever put the index together didn't do a good job with it. (And I hate looking up advanced grammar in romaji. It's totally a personal preference, but 99.9% of what I read in Japanese is NOT in romaji. So having to look it up in romaji strips the gears in my mental transmission.)

どんな時 is a lot better about that. (五十音万歳！) You just turn to the page where you expect it to be, and if you have to go to some other grammar point, there's a short entry telling you to turn to page whatever and look under another heading for the definition. Much easier to work with.

EDIT: I don't want to give the impression that I hate the DOJG books-- they're useful, especially when just starting out. But they have omissions and problems that make them annoying when you get into more advanced stuff.

My $0.02.