Am I missing something? I've been looking for a grammar quiz on particles on the site and haven't found it. Do we have one? If not, are there plans to start one or can someone suggest a place to interactively practice using particles? I have some great texts (including a particles dictionary and a particles workbook) and the only particles app I could find, but I'd also like something online.
even if there aren't grammar quizzes on particles, there are definitely grammar pages on them where you can write your own example sentences using particles in context - take a look at that, see if it helps!
Thank you, mysticfive. I've been looking at that section but in some ways, it's confusing to me. I'm trying to sort out how it's organized and what the [color=red]A[/color] parts represent.
I'm even shakier on writing my own sentences than I am on particles usage right now!
The A will usually (and I'm using English grammatical terms here) be something like a subject or a primary clause. Then you'll see the particle, conjunction, whatever, then B will be an object or subordinate clause. Sometimes the definitions of the terms are a little spare, but the usage instructions will tell you what kind of element you should be using before or after the target term; and look over the examples, they'll help clarify things.
For myself, I do wish there were more links among the various usages, like links between と, と言う and と言えば or すると, to help illustrate how a common concept like "and or "if" applies.
Tae Kim has some particle exercises in his [url=http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar]grammar guide[/url] but it's like what you'd except to find in a textbook, not an interactive quiz. There also aren't a lot of them, they're sprinkled in various places, and they mainly tend to show up in the early part of the guide.
I found[url=http://www.all.umn.edu/japanese_language/class_materials/particle_exercise/index.html] this quiz set[/url] through the Genki I self-study section of the official website.
These two are pretty short, but hey, more practice if you want it.
In the same vein [url=http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/Download.htm]http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/Download.htm[/url] has a bunch of various worksheets you can download.
There are also a couple of programs for smartphones that tend to hew pretty closely to the stereotypes of each platform. First is an iPhone app called Japanese 101: Particles, but it's $6 and I don't have an iPhone (or $6) so I can't judge it. On the other side of the fence is Obenkyo for Android which is free and generally rather good, but the particle function is still under development and doesn't have very many particles at present.
You can probably find even more just poking around on Google, but yeah... there's not much that's particularly comprehensive out there and definitely nothing that lets you create personalized quizzes to study.
I'd be totally in favor of seeing something like that here. Maybe just take some user sentences (ideally that have been verified by a native speaker as is being discussed in another thread) and find a way to pull out particles to use for quizzing. I'm sure there are a number of interesting ways to test this that could be fairly well automated.
