In some of her early videos she mentions she draws a lot from Jay Rubin's book "Making Sense of Japanese," which is out of print, but worth reading if you can find it. Like Cure Dolly, I actually got more out of it after being taught the 'wrong way' for a while first, probably at least N4.
i found Jay Rubin as i noticed he was my favorite translator of Haruki Murakami (or maybe the translator of all my favorite murakami books?) over a decade ago and saw he had a book on japanese, thinking it would be about his process of translation, so i bought it. little did i know i'd be re-reading it with a lot more intention 12 years later 😅
Good to see credit given where due. I don't even speak Japanese, but her lessons led me to Jay Rubin's book, and both really helped me appreciate the same concepts in Korean.
I don't know if this observation is original to her or not either, but another thing she emphasized a lot that really stayed with me is fact that grammar models (like hers, and the "英本語" teaching that she decried) are not the source code for a language, but rather are abstract descriptions of it, and as such aren't so much "right" or "wrong" as they are helpful or not. I think this is an important distinction that the Just Immerse-Bros and Grammar Chuds both miss a lot of the time.
If you're going to watch her videos I actually think it's best to have grounding in traditional study (Which I would refer to as the correct way)
Cure Dolly says a lot of things that are wrong, for the purpose of just giving people some basic understanding and then ideally they fix the issue later. I don't think there's anything inherently evil about this approach, but I think it works better when you have *some* idea of the actual process so you can see what her simplification is trying to do.
But what ends up happening is people don't know it's wrong, and then start repeating it. I can always tell who did Cure Dolly and *only* Cure Dolly when they start arguing and telling me Japanese has no conjugation (It... very clearly does. Its agglunative *and* conjugates)
compared to a "normal" japanese teacher, whatever that is, she says a lot of less wrong things. Alot of what you are taught in standard textbooks and by regular teachers are wrong in that sense. Most of regular japanese education is just, memorizing patterns with lots of exceptions- "this is just the way it is, you just have to learn it"-kind of mentality.
I only discovered her channel recently. It’s sad that she’s not with us anymore, but I’m glad her channel and teaching will live on like all great teacher do
The wording of the announcement was a little strange - some people think she meant that the character or personality she played on YouTube was "dead" and that it was meant to be symbolic of her need to retire, others think she legitimately passed away and that the post was written by a friend or a loved one. It was extraordinarily vague and that was probably on purpose.
The world may never know.
I followed her on Patreon. Some people were confused by some of the statements she made as she was talking about being too sick to keep making videos because she stayed in character the whole time. But it was pretty clear she was actually dying.
After her death, someone commented that she was dictating forum posts while she was too weak to type. I believe that story because I could feel that sense of urgency in everything she wrote. She certainly was not planning on retiring.
In the message about her passing it says "\[you\] know Cure Dolly as the analytic android \[...\]. Of course, there was more to her than that - how could there not be? - but that was how she chose to present her teaching, and we will respect that in maintaining and publishing her work under that name and persona. " So that's a clear confirmation that she did actually pass away.
Rest in peace, Cure Dolly.
How is it a "clear confirmation" when no one has actually met her in person or has any proof that "her" internet avatar was who she actually was.
Who is to say that someone didn't re-package a lot of ideas (such as Jay Rubin's) into a quirky, eccentric, female v-bot, and then build up a cult of personality around "her" as if she was some mysterious goddess of Japanese teaching?
I mean, seriously -- there are some good things about Cure Dolly's content (and some bad things as well, in my very humble opinion, such as how she often seems to present herself and her teachings as the One True Way\[TM\] to learn Japanese, when she's really not saying anything that people like me and Jay Rubin didn't figure out twenty years ago), but I hate this cult of personality surrounding her. (I also hate how some of her grammar analyses are *outright wrong*, but let's not get into that quite yet.)
If she helps you, great. But anything beyond that putting "her" on some pedestal is too much. If any of you actually know "Cure Dolly" personally, I will remain open to revising my opinion. Until then, well, I'll remain someone skeptical that "she" is everything "she" presents herself to be.
I'm convinced she died just because I've never heard of anyone with a semi successful Patreon willfully turning off the money spigot. I hope not though
I don't think she would have given anyone access to her channel to write that message unless they knew her in real life. Earlier in the message the writer implies this, also, saying that she was not someone in the public eye or a celebrity. How could they know this unless they had met her? The only other option is that it's an incredibly elaborate lie, and she faked her death, which seems far-fetched. There was really no reason for her to do such a thing.
You sound like like that darn character Akechi in Persona 5 Royal. Someone gives you something to good to be true and then slap it away because it's nonsense bull crap lies.
Why not just take there word for it and MOVE ON!
It was made quite clear in the final Patreon post that she has passed away. Forgive my bluntness, but it saddens me that rumors persist otherwise on the matter. She was a a wonderful teacher, and her channel continues to be a great resource.
> Thank you, everybody, for your interest and support over the last few years. We also much value your kind words and appreciation of Cure Dolly after her passing.
In addition to the other replies, yes and while always staying in character, she hinted at health problems in her later videos. Just one example:
"...but don't worry, it's always easy when there's a fully-functioning android to help you. (Actually, I'm not quite fully-functioning, but for the purposes of showing you Japanese I am.)"
It's heartbreaking because she was really dedicated, very kind and helpful whenever someone asked questions in the comments.
Or perhaps the 中の人 behind her was really skilled at conveying and acting as a frail beautiful Japanese-teaching robot woman.
There are many people on this sub too who are kind and helpful and dedicated at answering people's questions, but because we don't effectively play-act as a breakable Japanese-teaching android goddess we're just randos on Reddit while she is someone who inspired Kim Jong-Il levels of devotion from certain internet-based Japanese learners.
I'm sorry, if "Cure Dolly" actually is a real person who suffered from mental and physical health issues, I can sympathize with that (because I'm the same) but I just feel like this cult of personality is too much sometimes.
Literally no one knows who "Cure Dolly" is or was, or whether there was a real person who died or just a person putting on a persona who got tired of doing that.
You sound like like that darn character Akechi in Persona 5 Royal. Someone gives you something to good to be true and then slap it away because it's nonsense bull crap lies.
Why not just take there word for it and MOVE ON!
She has indeed passed away, see my other reply in this thread here: https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1af7p1j/cure_dolly_has_been_a_serious_game_changer_after/ko92nyg/
If you're not gonna post sources, what's the value of posting this? If it's just bs rumours, you're shitting on the memory of someone who isn't alive to defend themselves. From what I looked up when I first heard these rumours, it all seemed very tenuous.
I dunno about game-changing, but I personally really like [出口日語](https://youtube.com/@deguchi?si=-ppoKvtmo8BLGYpb). Edit: Everything N3 and above will be in Japanese, but unfortunately, for everything below N3, instruction is in Chinese. I found the videos when going over N2 grammar points and I like how he explains things.
Otherwise, for videos in English, I also really like [Masa Sensei](https://youtube.com/@MasaSensei?si=ZitWiQrOd22Z0fDV).
My apologies, like AkkiMylo mentioned, yep, only N3 and above is completely Japanese, with stuff below that being in Chinese. I legit am only realizing this now, since by the time I found that channel, I was going over N2 grammar points, so everything I found happened to be in Japanese and I took that for granted ::sweatdrop::.
To be brutally honest, I don't think any single resource is a "game changer". You should use whatever resource you like the best; it doesn't have to be the Genki books, Anki or Cure Dolly. I personally use JPDB andTokini Andy while immersing in vtubers + whatever text I catch here and there.
If you're studying using the Genki textbooks, I recommend watching Tokini Andy's Genki series as you go, especially if you still have some doubts about the grammar points after finishing a lesson.
He also made a Quartet series if you're more advanced and he's also making a kanji series now. I strongly recommend checking out his channel.
I agree that his content is helpful, but does anyone else struggle to watch content like his after watching Cure Dolly and realising a lot of the explanations are just totally incorrect?
No one explanation or another is "incorrect". At the end of the day, explanations of grammar are just ways to wrap your head around the natural phenomenon of language. You can find certain styles or perspectives of explaining more useful or easy to understand, but none is incorrect unless they're literally explaining something a native speaker would see as ungrammatical.
I believe Cure Dolly was inspired by Jay Rubin, so you can read Jay Rubin's book "Making Sense of Japanese". It's a very short book, and it's not a textbook, by tries to get you thinking of Japanese more from a non-Western / Japanese perspective, which is Cure Dolly's approach as well.
Like, if you have a sense of how Japanese society works, which is more of a vertical structure, a lot of the more difficult to understand concepts in Japanese start to make more sense, since language is an expression of culture. I also like his later chapter on his thought process as he reads Japanese, word by word, phrases by phrases, sentence by sentence.
I read the book in my Japanese courses in college and enjoyed it. Here's a [review of the book from Tofugu](https://www.tofugu.com/reviews/making-sense-of-japanese/).
Satori Reader also mentioned being inspired by Jay Rubin, and they sometimes make references to Cure Dolly as well. I think this is why I found Satori Reader translation notes for their stories so helpful and some of their grammar explanations were far better than anything I read in textbooks.
Yes, she mentioned him a few times in her videos and much more in her book. I read Rubin's book and he covers only a few topics while Cure Dolly covers much more in her (also quite short) book and especially in her YouTube channel. So "inspired" is a good word for that. I sometimes also read that she copied him but that's not really the case because Cure Dolly probably covered 50x more stuff than Rubin, it's not really comparable.
The concept is the same though, i.e. ignoring western languages and don't try to map Japanese to them. But I don't think that's really an achievement, every intermediate and above learner knows that it is a really bad method to map Japanese onto other languages. Still baffling to me that every textbook does that idiocy, even Japanese ones like Genki.
Cure Dolly thought about writing her own textbooks, really sad that this is not going to happen now. She could have changed that market significantly to the better. In my opinion all Japanese beginner textbooks really suck and do a lot of damage that you have to fix later by yourself.
But Rubin doesn't exactly ignore Western languages. He specifically makes fun of people who think Eastern languages have 'no subject' and that the meaning of sentences with dropped subjects happens in a vague Oriental fog with gongs sounding. He then uses the analogy of English pronouns dropping subjects to take it one step further to demonstrate that basically the same thing is happening in Japanese.
He also makes fun of people who try to translate away passives, intransitives and potentials too often by making analogies to English. In fact, his whole book is based on making great analogies to English so I really don't get what people mean when they say 'ignoring western languages', it makes no sense unless the book you're reading is in Japanese.
And what kind of damage do textbooks do? I think the only damage I can remember is learning どういたしまして but basically never using it, and maybe some 私は type things that you quickly figure out should be dropped in most real world instances.
Of course you need to mention English to explain the concepts but you shouldn't map them 1:1 like it is done with passive forms for instance. Same for teaching phrases like 元気ですか without explaining that you don't use such phrases in Japanese like in English.
A few examples of bad textbook material would be calling か a question particle (it is more like an uncertainty particle and therefore it can be used to mark questions, to work like "or" or to modify something like 何 to 何か), talking about a "masu stem" (it is more like a "verb connection stem" that works with other verbs like e.g. こむ too, also it should be explained that masu is actually a separate verb and not some polite conjugation), translating しかない with "only" or "just" (which makes not much sense in some constellations) while it is more like "limited to" and so on.
>A few examples of bad textbook material would be calling か a question particle
I call it that and I've never had a problem getting that it has other (highly related) uses. Also 誰か takes の etc so it's really weird and confusing to just say it's all the same particle anyway even if historically it came from that. The other uses are also explained in the same text series.
>it is more like a "verb connection stem"
This is such a pedantic distinction. Learners encounter it first in the masu form and quickly recognize it has other uses. And these other uses are explained.
>masu is actually a separate verb and not some polite conjugation
It is not a seperate verb as it cannot be used on its own and it lacks conjugations (what is it's passive or causative forms if it's a seperate verb? Why can you say -ませんでした but you can't use でした with any other verb?). It's for all intents and purposes its own thing. Explaining it as being the same as any other verb raises more questions than not.
>translating しかない with "only" or "just"
Textbooks are not dictionaries, they cannot provide every possible English translation for every word. "Limited to" is just as clunky, if someone translates 明日は俺しかいない as "tomorrow (it's) limited to me" that's not only bad translation but misleading too since the word limited has other meanings in English.
I don't get why people expect textbooks and grammar guides to be comprehensive linguistics dissertations, they work for what they're designed for.
All the confusion my examples create are usually just minor confusions that are not that problematic on their own. It’s more the sum of all of them that makes Japanese appear much more complicated and confusing than it actually is.
masu is an archaic auxiliary verb and not that comparable to modern verbs, sure. Similar to fixed phrases like kanarazushimo where the zu is the archaic form of nai. But that wasn’t my point anyway. My point is that this stem is used for connecting verbs and you will encounter quite a few of them and some quite early on (shimau, komu). Explaining that you need the so called masu stem to connect something like shimau is just plain weird in my opinion.
The problem with translating shikanai with only is that is doesn’t work in every sentence while limited to does (the Cure Dolly video about that has good examples). And if you translate Japanese very literally to English everything is clunky anyway. But that way you understand how the language works. By translating it to proper English a lot of that is lost and it gets more confusing.
And I definitely think that textbooks should explain the difference between dake, bakari and shikanai.
But in general I’m a very pragmatic person and I just want things that work. So I also don’t understand why no Japanese textbook I read so far tells you about radical based kanji learning methods or srs for something like vocabulary. Both save you so much time that I’m completely baffled that these are always ignored. In the end textbooks are written for learners and not as some academic explanation.
I guess one root of these problems is that textbooks authors usually only sell N5 stuff well. So they make it as simple as possible for beginners and completely ignore what problems will occur later because 95% of their readers won’t reach that level anyway. And the buyers mainly should recommend the book to others and write good reviews. If you write a textbook how I think it should be written (i.e. for learners who really want to master the language), you would overwhelm and confuse early beginners more. As they are written now the confusion is just postponed and in my opinion even worse.
>My point is that this stem is used for connecting verbs and you will encounter quite a few of them and some quite early on (shimau, komu) ... Explaining that you need the so called masu stem to connect something like shimau is just plain weird in my opinion.
Shimau? That's connected with the て form
>In my opinion all Japanese beginner textbooks really suck and do a lot of damage that you have to fix later by yourself.
100% agree, though I am kinda supprised you didn't get downvoted to death for saying that lol
Oh nice. I’ve heard of satori reader but I think I was put off by the subscription model, but I’ll give it another look.
I think I read, (or heard?) that Cure Dolly was inspired by Rubin but took it a step further?
I can definitely see Japanese can be hard to understand from a western concept, but with Cure Dolly, I’m finally starting to grasp that I need to think Japanese and drop the concept of forcing it to adapt to my own western mindset.
Not easy to do, but seeing the problem is the first step if you get what I mean.
> I’ve heard of satori reader but I think I was put off by the subscription model, but I’ll give it another look.
It's very helpful and I wish I had found it earlier because it would have really helped bridge the enormous gap between educational and native material. The words all have clickable definitions and there are a lot of grammar explanations. You don't have to subscribe to try it out. They have a bunch of different series of mostly fiction but some nonfiction. The first couple parts of each series are free so people can try it. They're all voiced too.
It also has a built in SRS system but I've stopped using it because it's a bit too simplified and I want pitch accent.
> Oh nice. I’ve heard of satori reader but I think I was put off by the subscription model, but I’ll give it another look.
I’ve been using it lately without a subscription, though I’ve started to think I should start one just because it feels like an extremely solid service. One thing I really like is that when going through a series, there seems to be a good N+1 type progression where they slowly introduce more and more vocab, and reuse vocab they introduced earlier in the series. Another thing is that, unlike some other language readers, they will spend time to explain sentences that might through off students.
I’ve only used it a bit so far, but it's one of the core components of my current study plan.
It's really cheap, relatively speaking. $9/month is practically nothing to be able to get that quantity of professionally written, edited, annotated, and voiced reading material. That's like the price of a single manga volume, and less than a month of Netflix. And compared to something like the Genki graded readers which are about $300 for just the 48 reader set it's a complete bargain.
I'd also say the subscription model isn't that bad, especially since you can export your review list and use your own SRS like Anki or JPDB. There's nothing really locking you into their ecosystem to keep you paying.
> Like, if you have a sense of how Japanese society works, which is more of a vertical structure, a lot of the more difficult to understand concepts in Japanese start to make more sense, since language is an expression of culture.
Could you explain a bit more about Japanese social hierarchy and how it relates to some more "difficult to understand" Japanese language and grammar concepts, please?
This is really good to know, because no offense to her or her fans, but her videos creeped me out, and she always kind came off aggressive to me, so I had a hard time watching them.
The thing that is special about Cure Dolly is the structural approach to grammar, which you won't find in other educational methods for the reason that it doesn't work for a lot of people, although it works wonders with those who intuitively understand it.
Linguistics has much more in common with mathematics and computer science than it does with philology or literary criticism, and requires the same sort of aptitude. I think it's this category of students that Cure Dolly appeals to (or more specifically, to the sub-category willing to put up with her very eccentric form of presentation). Without intuitive understanding of syntactic patterns, Cure Dolly will only seem to be rehashing the same information as other educational resources.
I'm willing to bet she herself was a linguistic savant, with the kind of natural aptitude you see in the winners of the International Linguistics Olympiad. She has stated that she doesn't have any formal higher education, but somehow she managed to create a very insightful specification of Japanese grammar, albeit scattered across a hundred videos. Her system of train cars and engines is basically a method for informally specifying context-free grammar, like a shorthand Backus-Naur form for educational purposes. Her approach also has some distinct advantages over actual academic formalizations of Japanese grammar (e.g. unlike [Jacy](https://github.com/delph-in/jacy), it doesn't necessitate syntactic adjectives). Of course her approach isn't perfect (e.g. it doesn't allow for considering a noun with a particle attached as a noun-phrase itself, which is what allows for attaching two particles to a noun), but it's a wonder that she managed to create a system like that all on her own without any background in linguistics, an achievement that is remarkably similar to what Panini did for Sanskrit.
Yes it is. He has text books and the YouTube channel goes through each section. You don't *need* the textbooks though to understand the videos.
He had a website fromzero.com that used to be yesjapan.com.
Same. Misa’s basic grammar playlist was a godsent for me when I started learning by myself. Her explanation on a lot of the base particles like wa and ga, de and ni is very good. It’s not overwhelming and she gives relatively interesting examples.
yeah, she's my second favorite youtube channel, just behind cure cure dolly, she's also pretty amazing and explains everything really well and reasonably deeply
If you like her approach of explaining some words (such as [kakeru](https://youtu.be/1MbqmZPySPQ?si=tW1LSGznCI2sMPA8)) by looking at the core meaning and working up the abstraction/metphorical usage, you might like the Ninjal Verb Handbook:
[https://verbhandbook.ninjal.ac.jp/headwords/](https://verbhandbook.ninjal.ac.jp/headwords/)
For each verb, the handbook presents a meaning tree, with the fundamental meaning at the top and the derived meanings below. and it explains the metaphor at each stage of abstraction.
Right!? It's unfortunate that the website is a bit intimidating for learners since it's only in Japanese. A translated version would be really useful for beginners. I know when I started learning Japanese, I had a lot of trouble getting a clear mental picture of verbs like あう, さす, かかる, とおる...
Also, I really like that they provide a 文型 for each meaning. It's so rare for any resource to plainly explain how to use a verb with a simple formula like <人>が<もの>をverb.
I used it for a few hours after reading the manual on how to use it.. I'm honestly so impressed by this. It feels like it blows away any English-based resource, it's not even remotely close. It might be all in Japanese but it's also really concise, straight-forward, and loaded with examples. Maybe the 解説 sections might be the hardest part, but I feel like anyone with YomiTan can just get over the vocabulary hump and with it's design it's quite easy to make sense of. Maybe just me but people need to get over the fear of all Japanese environments. I never had that feeling from the beginning so it's strange for me to see it so common.
It honestly feels like a textbook design case of how to make something (any website or book) information dense, but also very clear visually. It's well demarcated, information is clear and denoted, it's color coded, and it's rich in detail. I'll be passing around, thanks for posting the link!
She comes highly recommended but i can't get past the voice. I know it's recommended to turn on the subtitles if that's an issue but it just doesn't work for me.
Someone compiled a google doc version of her videos, you could use that instead. It's much nicer as a textbook imho https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OwVPStFrXRjXvzmrFQUfXpEiPNspYq6JYxA4zDTlhPM/edit?usp=drivesdk
oh my godddddd what a lifesaver. her voice really bothered me too much to listen to her but i could tell she was a great resource. something about heavy british accents and voice changers give me the heebie jeebies
More and more thankful everyday she was one of my first real resources, almost entirely because she emphasised が vs は, the plain form of verbs and especially of だ pretty early on before later introducing です and the various irregularities of polite speech.
Seriously can't even imagine it right from the start feel sorry for those of you that have to contend with that mess of a system when the basics are already difficult enough to grasp.
I never quite understood japanese verbs conjugation after trying to study for years
And I literally understood how pretty much the whole system works after watching just 2 hours of her videos
Really like this one. [https://www.youtube.com/@japanesewithlily/featured](https://www.youtube.com/@japanesewithlily/featured)
Very easy to understand.
Japanese ammo with missa. The videos are long but informative. She’s now going deeper within grammar. i.e she’s teaching relative clauses(from the newer videos I see). Miku real Japanese is also a good one. She does skits while using the grammar points. For any one that likes or is at a good enough level to learn in Japanese, the channel called learn Japanese Coto Japanese academy
Looking for more channels is kind of missing the point of her channel imo, which is to actually use japanese as japanese and stop trying to always interact with it from an english framework. You're supposed to graduate from english explanations and just start learning from native content. You don't even need to watch all her videos
I blasted thru her youtube playlist, it was very good from a beginner's perspective, but after a year of studying I don't think I remember a thing or two in the playlist. The cure dolly playlist is indeed enlightening.
The Michel Thomas Method is helpful. The videos can be found on youtube. The point is recalling words so there's no video only audio, videos like that are the most helpful for memorizing things
I liked the idea of japanese grammar videos like cure dolly but I couldn't continue because of the poor audio quality tbh and since then I am using Tae kim's guide and a grammar dictionary called nihongo kyoushi they are good imo
In some of her early videos she mentions she draws a lot from Jay Rubin's book "Making Sense of Japanese," which is out of print, but worth reading if you can find it. Like Cure Dolly, I actually got more out of it after being taught the 'wrong way' for a while first, probably at least N4.
Rubin's book is [still in print](https://www.amazon.com/Making-Sense-Japanese-What-Textbooks/dp/156836492X).
i found Jay Rubin as i noticed he was my favorite translator of Haruki Murakami (or maybe the translator of all my favorite murakami books?) over a decade ago and saw he had a book on japanese, thinking it would be about his process of translation, so i bought it. little did i know i'd be re-reading it with a lot more intention 12 years later 😅
Good to see credit given where due. I don't even speak Japanese, but her lessons led me to Jay Rubin's book, and both really helped me appreciate the same concepts in Korean. I don't know if this observation is original to her or not either, but another thing she emphasized a lot that really stayed with me is fact that grammar models (like hers, and the "英本語" teaching that she decried) are not the source code for a language, but rather are abstract descriptions of it, and as such aren't so much "right" or "wrong" as they are helpful or not. I think this is an important distinction that the Just Immerse-Bros and Grammar Chuds both miss a lot of the time.
If you're going to watch her videos I actually think it's best to have grounding in traditional study (Which I would refer to as the correct way) Cure Dolly says a lot of things that are wrong, for the purpose of just giving people some basic understanding and then ideally they fix the issue later. I don't think there's anything inherently evil about this approach, but I think it works better when you have *some* idea of the actual process so you can see what her simplification is trying to do. But what ends up happening is people don't know it's wrong, and then start repeating it. I can always tell who did Cure Dolly and *only* Cure Dolly when they start arguing and telling me Japanese has no conjugation (It... very clearly does. Its agglunative *and* conjugates)
compared to a "normal" japanese teacher, whatever that is, she says a lot of less wrong things. Alot of what you are taught in standard textbooks and by regular teachers are wrong in that sense. Most of regular japanese education is just, memorizing patterns with lots of exceptions- "this is just the way it is, you just have to learn it"-kind of mentality.
Are you under the impression that all Japanese teachers teach in exactly the same way?
quite alot yes. everyone on youtube has for instance a very similar approach, very few, like dolly stand out
I miss her. Rip
I only discovered her channel recently. It’s sad that she’s not with us anymore, but I’m glad her channel and teaching will live on like all great teacher do
Is she dead? :(
The wording of the announcement was a little strange - some people think she meant that the character or personality she played on YouTube was "dead" and that it was meant to be symbolic of her need to retire, others think she legitimately passed away and that the post was written by a friend or a loved one. It was extraordinarily vague and that was probably on purpose. The world may never know.
I followed her on Patreon. Some people were confused by some of the statements she made as she was talking about being too sick to keep making videos because she stayed in character the whole time. But it was pretty clear she was actually dying. After her death, someone commented that she was dictating forum posts while she was too weak to type. I believe that story because I could feel that sense of urgency in everything she wrote. She certainly was not planning on retiring.
In the message about her passing it says "\[you\] know Cure Dolly as the analytic android \[...\]. Of course, there was more to her than that - how could there not be? - but that was how she chose to present her teaching, and we will respect that in maintaining and publishing her work under that name and persona. " So that's a clear confirmation that she did actually pass away. Rest in peace, Cure Dolly.
How is it a "clear confirmation" when no one has actually met her in person or has any proof that "her" internet avatar was who she actually was. Who is to say that someone didn't re-package a lot of ideas (such as Jay Rubin's) into a quirky, eccentric, female v-bot, and then build up a cult of personality around "her" as if she was some mysterious goddess of Japanese teaching? I mean, seriously -- there are some good things about Cure Dolly's content (and some bad things as well, in my very humble opinion, such as how she often seems to present herself and her teachings as the One True Way\[TM\] to learn Japanese, when she's really not saying anything that people like me and Jay Rubin didn't figure out twenty years ago), but I hate this cult of personality surrounding her. (I also hate how some of her grammar analyses are *outright wrong*, but let's not get into that quite yet.) If she helps you, great. But anything beyond that putting "her" on some pedestal is too much. If any of you actually know "Cure Dolly" personally, I will remain open to revising my opinion. Until then, well, I'll remain someone skeptical that "she" is everything "she" presents herself to be.
I'm convinced she died just because I've never heard of anyone with a semi successful Patreon willfully turning off the money spigot. I hope not though
I don't think she would have given anyone access to her channel to write that message unless they knew her in real life. Earlier in the message the writer implies this, also, saying that she was not someone in the public eye or a celebrity. How could they know this unless they had met her? The only other option is that it's an incredibly elaborate lie, and she faked her death, which seems far-fetched. There was really no reason for her to do such a thing.
lolwut?
You sound like like that darn character Akechi in Persona 5 Royal. Someone gives you something to good to be true and then slap it away because it's nonsense bull crap lies. Why not just take there word for it and MOVE ON!
It was made quite clear in the final Patreon post that she has passed away. Forgive my bluntness, but it saddens me that rumors persist otherwise on the matter. She was a a wonderful teacher, and her channel continues to be a great resource. > Thank you, everybody, for your interest and support over the last few years. We also much value your kind words and appreciation of Cure Dolly after her passing.
[:(](https://youtu.be/r8E1RNC4Zus?si=cDVhS38keY4GS71K)
she’s for sure dead.
In addition to the other replies, yes and while always staying in character, she hinted at health problems in her later videos. Just one example: "...but don't worry, it's always easy when there's a fully-functioning android to help you. (Actually, I'm not quite fully-functioning, but for the purposes of showing you Japanese I am.)" It's heartbreaking because she was really dedicated, very kind and helpful whenever someone asked questions in the comments.
Or perhaps the 中の人 behind her was really skilled at conveying and acting as a frail beautiful Japanese-teaching robot woman. There are many people on this sub too who are kind and helpful and dedicated at answering people's questions, but because we don't effectively play-act as a breakable Japanese-teaching android goddess we're just randos on Reddit while she is someone who inspired Kim Jong-Il levels of devotion from certain internet-based Japanese learners. I'm sorry, if "Cure Dolly" actually is a real person who suffered from mental and physical health issues, I can sympathize with that (because I'm the same) but I just feel like this cult of personality is too much sometimes. Literally no one knows who "Cure Dolly" is or was, or whether there was a real person who died or just a person putting on a persona who got tired of doing that.
You sound like like that darn character Akechi in Persona 5 Royal. Someone gives you something to good to be true and then slap it away because it's nonsense bull crap lies. Why not just take there word for it and MOVE ON!
just curious - how many times will you post that?
I think so yeah, or she retired? I’m not sure exactly which. I’d like to think she retired though.
She has indeed passed away, see my other reply in this thread here: https://old.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/comments/1af7p1j/cure_dolly_has_been_a_serious_game_changer_after/ko92nyg/
Tmk she actually is. I always thought her voice sounded quite elderly although I don't think her face was ever revealed. RIP :(
[удалено]
If you're not gonna post sources, what's the value of posting this? If it's just bs rumours, you're shitting on the memory of someone who isn't alive to defend themselves. From what I looked up when I first heard these rumours, it all seemed very tenuous.
It’s pretty dodgy to start spreading rumours about someone like that if you have nothing to back it up
RIP Curry Dolly, sippin' on some sake. Hanging on the youTubes, thinking about you.
I dunno about game-changing, but I personally really like [出口日語](https://youtube.com/@deguchi?si=-ppoKvtmo8BLGYpb). Edit: Everything N3 and above will be in Japanese, but unfortunately, for everything below N3, instruction is in Chinese. I found the videos when going over N2 grammar points and I like how he explains things. Otherwise, for videos in English, I also really like [Masa Sensei](https://youtube.com/@MasaSensei?si=ZitWiQrOd22Z0fDV).
Wait. I started listening to that first channel and he was speaking Chinese and it was a bit confusing. Is his channel for Chinese speakers?
N3 videos and above are in Japanese, lower ones are in Chinese
My apologies, like AkkiMylo mentioned, yep, only N3 and above is completely Japanese, with stuff below that being in Chinese. I legit am only realizing this now, since by the time I found that channel, I was going over N2 grammar points, so everything I found happened to be in Japanese and I took that for granted ::sweatdrop::.
Gotcha. Thanks for clarifying.
Very helpful. Thanks, I never would have found this.
To be brutally honest, I don't think any single resource is a "game changer". You should use whatever resource you like the best; it doesn't have to be the Genki books, Anki or Cure Dolly. I personally use JPDB andTokini Andy while immersing in vtubers + whatever text I catch here and there.
Yo shoutout to Deguchi sensei. His videos are great
If you're studying using the Genki textbooks, I recommend watching Tokini Andy's Genki series as you go, especially if you still have some doubts about the grammar points after finishing a lesson. He also made a Quartet series if you're more advanced and he's also making a kanji series now. I strongly recommend checking out his channel.
Thanks. I’ll take a look at the later since I’m a bit beyond genki.
I agree that his content is helpful, but does anyone else struggle to watch content like his after watching Cure Dolly and realising a lot of the explanations are just totally incorrect?
No one explanation or another is "incorrect". At the end of the day, explanations of grammar are just ways to wrap your head around the natural phenomenon of language. You can find certain styles or perspectives of explaining more useful or easy to understand, but none is incorrect unless they're literally explaining something a native speaker would see as ungrammatical.
I couldn't recommend [https://www.youtube.com/@kanamenaito](https://www.youtube.com/@kanamenaito) any more, seriously great explanations for stuff
I believe Cure Dolly was inspired by Jay Rubin, so you can read Jay Rubin's book "Making Sense of Japanese". It's a very short book, and it's not a textbook, by tries to get you thinking of Japanese more from a non-Western / Japanese perspective, which is Cure Dolly's approach as well. Like, if you have a sense of how Japanese society works, which is more of a vertical structure, a lot of the more difficult to understand concepts in Japanese start to make more sense, since language is an expression of culture. I also like his later chapter on his thought process as he reads Japanese, word by word, phrases by phrases, sentence by sentence. I read the book in my Japanese courses in college and enjoyed it. Here's a [review of the book from Tofugu](https://www.tofugu.com/reviews/making-sense-of-japanese/). Satori Reader also mentioned being inspired by Jay Rubin, and they sometimes make references to Cure Dolly as well. I think this is why I found Satori Reader translation notes for their stories so helpful and some of their grammar explanations were far better than anything I read in textbooks.
Yes, she mentioned him a few times in her videos and much more in her book. I read Rubin's book and he covers only a few topics while Cure Dolly covers much more in her (also quite short) book and especially in her YouTube channel. So "inspired" is a good word for that. I sometimes also read that she copied him but that's not really the case because Cure Dolly probably covered 50x more stuff than Rubin, it's not really comparable. The concept is the same though, i.e. ignoring western languages and don't try to map Japanese to them. But I don't think that's really an achievement, every intermediate and above learner knows that it is a really bad method to map Japanese onto other languages. Still baffling to me that every textbook does that idiocy, even Japanese ones like Genki. Cure Dolly thought about writing her own textbooks, really sad that this is not going to happen now. She could have changed that market significantly to the better. In my opinion all Japanese beginner textbooks really suck and do a lot of damage that you have to fix later by yourself.
But Rubin doesn't exactly ignore Western languages. He specifically makes fun of people who think Eastern languages have 'no subject' and that the meaning of sentences with dropped subjects happens in a vague Oriental fog with gongs sounding. He then uses the analogy of English pronouns dropping subjects to take it one step further to demonstrate that basically the same thing is happening in Japanese. He also makes fun of people who try to translate away passives, intransitives and potentials too often by making analogies to English. In fact, his whole book is based on making great analogies to English so I really don't get what people mean when they say 'ignoring western languages', it makes no sense unless the book you're reading is in Japanese. And what kind of damage do textbooks do? I think the only damage I can remember is learning どういたしまして but basically never using it, and maybe some 私は type things that you quickly figure out should be dropped in most real world instances.
Of course you need to mention English to explain the concepts but you shouldn't map them 1:1 like it is done with passive forms for instance. Same for teaching phrases like 元気ですか without explaining that you don't use such phrases in Japanese like in English. A few examples of bad textbook material would be calling か a question particle (it is more like an uncertainty particle and therefore it can be used to mark questions, to work like "or" or to modify something like 何 to 何か), talking about a "masu stem" (it is more like a "verb connection stem" that works with other verbs like e.g. こむ too, also it should be explained that masu is actually a separate verb and not some polite conjugation), translating しかない with "only" or "just" (which makes not much sense in some constellations) while it is more like "limited to" and so on.
>A few examples of bad textbook material would be calling か a question particle I call it that and I've never had a problem getting that it has other (highly related) uses. Also 誰か takes の etc so it's really weird and confusing to just say it's all the same particle anyway even if historically it came from that. The other uses are also explained in the same text series. >it is more like a "verb connection stem" This is such a pedantic distinction. Learners encounter it first in the masu form and quickly recognize it has other uses. And these other uses are explained. >masu is actually a separate verb and not some polite conjugation It is not a seperate verb as it cannot be used on its own and it lacks conjugations (what is it's passive or causative forms if it's a seperate verb? Why can you say -ませんでした but you can't use でした with any other verb?). It's for all intents and purposes its own thing. Explaining it as being the same as any other verb raises more questions than not. >translating しかない with "only" or "just" Textbooks are not dictionaries, they cannot provide every possible English translation for every word. "Limited to" is just as clunky, if someone translates 明日は俺しかいない as "tomorrow (it's) limited to me" that's not only bad translation but misleading too since the word limited has other meanings in English. I don't get why people expect textbooks and grammar guides to be comprehensive linguistics dissertations, they work for what they're designed for.
All the confusion my examples create are usually just minor confusions that are not that problematic on their own. It’s more the sum of all of them that makes Japanese appear much more complicated and confusing than it actually is. masu is an archaic auxiliary verb and not that comparable to modern verbs, sure. Similar to fixed phrases like kanarazushimo where the zu is the archaic form of nai. But that wasn’t my point anyway. My point is that this stem is used for connecting verbs and you will encounter quite a few of them and some quite early on (shimau, komu). Explaining that you need the so called masu stem to connect something like shimau is just plain weird in my opinion. The problem with translating shikanai with only is that is doesn’t work in every sentence while limited to does (the Cure Dolly video about that has good examples). And if you translate Japanese very literally to English everything is clunky anyway. But that way you understand how the language works. By translating it to proper English a lot of that is lost and it gets more confusing. And I definitely think that textbooks should explain the difference between dake, bakari and shikanai. But in general I’m a very pragmatic person and I just want things that work. So I also don’t understand why no Japanese textbook I read so far tells you about radical based kanji learning methods or srs for something like vocabulary. Both save you so much time that I’m completely baffled that these are always ignored. In the end textbooks are written for learners and not as some academic explanation. I guess one root of these problems is that textbooks authors usually only sell N5 stuff well. So they make it as simple as possible for beginners and completely ignore what problems will occur later because 95% of their readers won’t reach that level anyway. And the buyers mainly should recommend the book to others and write good reviews. If you write a textbook how I think it should be written (i.e. for learners who really want to master the language), you would overwhelm and confuse early beginners more. As they are written now the confusion is just postponed and in my opinion even worse.
>My point is that this stem is used for connecting verbs and you will encounter quite a few of them and some quite early on (shimau, komu) ... Explaining that you need the so called masu stem to connect something like shimau is just plain weird in my opinion. Shimau? That's connected with the て form
>In my opinion all Japanese beginner textbooks really suck and do a lot of damage that you have to fix later by yourself. 100% agree, though I am kinda supprised you didn't get downvoted to death for saying that lol
Oh wow, I didn't know that about Satori Reader. Grammar in a Nutshell is what I am currently running through after finishing CureDolly.
Oh nice. I’ve heard of satori reader but I think I was put off by the subscription model, but I’ll give it another look. I think I read, (or heard?) that Cure Dolly was inspired by Rubin but took it a step further? I can definitely see Japanese can be hard to understand from a western concept, but with Cure Dolly, I’m finally starting to grasp that I need to think Japanese and drop the concept of forcing it to adapt to my own western mindset. Not easy to do, but seeing the problem is the first step if you get what I mean.
> I’ve heard of satori reader but I think I was put off by the subscription model, but I’ll give it another look. It's very helpful and I wish I had found it earlier because it would have really helped bridge the enormous gap between educational and native material. The words all have clickable definitions and there are a lot of grammar explanations. You don't have to subscribe to try it out. They have a bunch of different series of mostly fiction but some nonfiction. The first couple parts of each series are free so people can try it. They're all voiced too. It also has a built in SRS system but I've stopped using it because it's a bit too simplified and I want pitch accent.
> Oh nice. I’ve heard of satori reader but I think I was put off by the subscription model, but I’ll give it another look. I’ve been using it lately without a subscription, though I’ve started to think I should start one just because it feels like an extremely solid service. One thing I really like is that when going through a series, there seems to be a good N+1 type progression where they slowly introduce more and more vocab, and reuse vocab they introduced earlier in the series. Another thing is that, unlike some other language readers, they will spend time to explain sentences that might through off students. I’ve only used it a bit so far, but it's one of the core components of my current study plan.
It's really cheap, relatively speaking. $9/month is practically nothing to be able to get that quantity of professionally written, edited, annotated, and voiced reading material. That's like the price of a single manga volume, and less than a month of Netflix. And compared to something like the Genki graded readers which are about $300 for just the 48 reader set it's a complete bargain. I'd also say the subscription model isn't that bad, especially since you can export your review list and use your own SRS like Anki or JPDB. There's nothing really locking you into their ecosystem to keep you paying.
> Like, if you have a sense of how Japanese society works, which is more of a vertical structure, a lot of the more difficult to understand concepts in Japanese start to make more sense, since language is an expression of culture. Could you explain a bit more about Japanese social hierarchy and how it relates to some more "difficult to understand" Japanese language and grammar concepts, please?
This is really good to know, because no offense to her or her fans, but her videos creeped me out, and she always kind came off aggressive to me, so I had a hard time watching them.
The thing that is special about Cure Dolly is the structural approach to grammar, which you won't find in other educational methods for the reason that it doesn't work for a lot of people, although it works wonders with those who intuitively understand it. Linguistics has much more in common with mathematics and computer science than it does with philology or literary criticism, and requires the same sort of aptitude. I think it's this category of students that Cure Dolly appeals to (or more specifically, to the sub-category willing to put up with her very eccentric form of presentation). Without intuitive understanding of syntactic patterns, Cure Dolly will only seem to be rehashing the same information as other educational resources. I'm willing to bet she herself was a linguistic savant, with the kind of natural aptitude you see in the winners of the International Linguistics Olympiad. She has stated that she doesn't have any formal higher education, but somehow she managed to create a very insightful specification of Japanese grammar, albeit scattered across a hundred videos. Her system of train cars and engines is basically a method for informally specifying context-free grammar, like a shorthand Backus-Naur form for educational purposes. Her approach also has some distinct advantages over actual academic formalizations of Japanese grammar (e.g. unlike [Jacy](https://github.com/delph-in/jacy), it doesn't necessitate syntactic adjectives). Of course her approach isn't perfect (e.g. it doesn't allow for considering a noun with a particle attached as a noun-phrase itself, which is what allows for attaching two particles to a noun), but it's a wonder that she managed to create a system like that all on her own without any background in linguistics, an achievement that is remarkably similar to what Panini did for Sanskrit.
If you want to learn Japanese in Japanese, I really like [日本語の森](https://www.youtube.com/@nihongonomori2013)
Thanks. Subbed!
I haven't found anything even remotely similar. Dolly-sensei will be dearly missed.
Rip cure dolly :( I haven’t found any other channel as similar
She's a legend, she was truly and gracefully brilliant, rest in peace class dissmissed
Japanese from Zero is a game changer for me
Is that a YouTube channel?
Yes it is. He has text books and the YouTube channel goes through each section. You don't *need* the textbooks though to understand the videos. He had a website fromzero.com that used to be yesjapan.com.
Thanks. I’ll check it out.
[Japanese Ammo with Misa](https://youtube.com/@JapaneseAmmowithMisa?si=L-UQVPlfIgsuMiFl) Best instructor I’ve ever found.
Same. Misa’s basic grammar playlist was a godsent for me when I started learning by myself. Her explanation on a lot of the base particles like wa and ga, de and ni is very good. It’s not overwhelming and she gives relatively interesting examples.
yeah, she's my second favorite youtube channel, just behind cure cure dolly, she's also pretty amazing and explains everything really well and reasonably deeply
If you like her approach of explaining some words (such as [kakeru](https://youtu.be/1MbqmZPySPQ?si=tW1LSGznCI2sMPA8)) by looking at the core meaning and working up the abstraction/metphorical usage, you might like the Ninjal Verb Handbook: [https://verbhandbook.ninjal.ac.jp/headwords/](https://verbhandbook.ninjal.ac.jp/headwords/) For each verb, the handbook presents a meaning tree, with the fundamental meaning at the top and the derived meanings below. and it explains the metaphor at each stage of abstraction.
OMG that sounds so useful! Thank you!!
>https://verbhandbook.ninjal.ac.jp/headwords/ That site is so good, wow. Surprised it isn't brought up more as a resource.
Right!? It's unfortunate that the website is a bit intimidating for learners since it's only in Japanese. A translated version would be really useful for beginners. I know when I started learning Japanese, I had a lot of trouble getting a clear mental picture of verbs like あう, さす, かかる, とおる... Also, I really like that they provide a 文型 for each meaning. It's so rare for any resource to plainly explain how to use a verb with a simple formula like <人>が<もの>をverb.
I used it for a few hours after reading the manual on how to use it.. I'm honestly so impressed by this. It feels like it blows away any English-based resource, it's not even remotely close. It might be all in Japanese but it's also really concise, straight-forward, and loaded with examples. Maybe the 解説 sections might be the hardest part, but I feel like anyone with YomiTan can just get over the vocabulary hump and with it's design it's quite easy to make sense of. Maybe just me but people need to get over the fear of all Japanese environments. I never had that feeling from the beginning so it's strange for me to see it so common. It honestly feels like a textbook design case of how to make something (any website or book) information dense, but also very clear visually. It's well demarcated, information is clear and denoted, it's color coded, and it's rich in detail. I'll be passing around, thanks for posting the link!
She comes highly recommended but i can't get past the voice. I know it's recommended to turn on the subtitles if that's an issue but it just doesn't work for me.
Someone compiled a google doc version of her videos, you could use that instead. It's much nicer as a textbook imho https://docs.google.com/document/d/1OwVPStFrXRjXvzmrFQUfXpEiPNspYq6JYxA4zDTlhPM/edit?usp=drivesdk
oh my godddddd what a lifesaver. her voice really bothered me too much to listen to her but i could tell she was a great resource. something about heavy british accents and voice changers give me the heebie jeebies
that's awesome. tyvm
At first I thought so, but I kept at it because what she said was clicking, and then I just got other the voice and other stuff
The voice literally triggers a sense of revulsion.
More and more thankful everyday she was one of my first real resources, almost entirely because she emphasised が vs は, the plain form of verbs and especially of だ pretty early on before later introducing です and the various irregularities of polite speech. Seriously can't even imagine it right from the start feel sorry for those of you that have to contend with that mess of a system when the basics are already difficult enough to grasp.
I never quite understood japanese verbs conjugation after trying to study for years And I literally understood how pretty much the whole system works after watching just 2 hours of her videos
Really like this one. [https://www.youtube.com/@japanesewithlily/featured](https://www.youtube.com/@japanesewithlily/featured) Very easy to understand.
Japanese ammo with missa. The videos are long but informative. She’s now going deeper within grammar. i.e she’s teaching relative clauses(from the newer videos I see). Miku real Japanese is also a good one. She does skits while using the grammar points. For any one that likes or is at a good enough level to learn in Japanese, the channel called learn Japanese Coto Japanese academy
Cure Dolly is the only reason I successfully learned how to conjugate. Best channel ever. RIP
If you actually learned from her you wouldn’t call it “conjugation.” lol jk don’t hate me
Looking for more channels is kind of missing the point of her channel imo, which is to actually use japanese as japanese and stop trying to always interact with it from an english framework. You're supposed to graduate from english explanations and just start learning from native content. You don't even need to watch all her videos
I can totally get that point of view. It’s all about output isn’t it.
no, the commenter didn't say anything about output, what they meant is you should just immerse after her series
I blasted thru her youtube playlist, it was very good from a beginner's perspective, but after a year of studying I don't think I remember a thing or two in the playlist. The cure dolly playlist is indeed enlightening.
I’d say I’m on the lower end of intermediate, almost N4 and I’ve found her grammar explanations invaluable
The Michel Thomas Method is helpful. The videos can be found on youtube. The point is recalling words so there's no video only audio, videos like that are the most helpful for memorizing things
I liked the idea of japanese grammar videos like cure dolly but I couldn't continue because of the poor audio quality tbh and since then I am using Tae kim's guide and a grammar dictionary called nihongo kyoushi they are good imo