Quote:
Originally Posted by DewarHolmes
Hmm...not so good. I know Hiragana, Katakana, a little bit of Kanji, and a handful of phrases. I recently purchased the book "Minna No Nihongo" (unfortunately, I bought the Romaji version instead of the Hiragana) and I started to study the grammar, but I'm thinking it might be a good idea to get become acquainted with English grammar before I move ahead. (I was having difficulty even with the simple rules about Japanese particles.)
Do you have any recommendations for English grammar books? (Any advice that would save me searching at the 20,000 + books out there would be good. Haha.)
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Nothing about English grammar will help you with Japanese particles. The biggest issue, は vs. が, has absolutely no English equivalent, really. There are hacky ways to understand it, but it has nothing to do with English grammar.
Wikipedia is a good enough for English grammar reference while learning Japanese. If you see a term (like "passive") in your Japanese textbook, just read up on "passive" on Wikipedia's entry.
However, in my opinion, it's a colossally stupid idea to try and equate Japanese and English grammar when you're learning Japanese. You're best to just take what it tells you at face value and not try and find equivalents in Japanese. There are tons of things that just don't exist in English (and vice versa). The most obvious example to me is causative-passive form. And the other way around, there is no concept of "future" or "present" in Japanese like there is in English. There is just "non-past."
Obviously these are simplifications, but just an example of why you should not fret about English grammar right now.
Also, there's this interesting new invention called Google. Look how much information there is on は vs. が, for example!
は vs. が - Google Search