Frequently Asked Questions
This is a list of questions that people regularly ask about the guide. These are not questions about learning Japanese, but rather about the Yokubi project.
Why did you steal someone else's work?
It is not a secret that Yokubi is almost entirely based on sakubi. Most of the lessons, topics, and a lot of the phrasings have been straight up copied, rephrased, and rearranged but the core of the guide is still the same.
However, I did not steal sakubi. Sakubi is an open project, given by the Sakubi author (a good friend of mine) to the community as is. It is released under CC0 licensing as public domain. On top of that, the Sakubi project is abandoned and hasn't received updates since 2018. If you still don't trust me, I even talked to the original author and got his blessing with Yokubi.
Yokubi is the official spiritual successor of Sakubi
What are the changes with Sakubi?
I originally tried to keep track of all the changes, both minor and major, with the original guide. But the more I wrote, the more I wanted to change, to a point where the structure is now significantly different. Yet, I can list some of the changes. This list is not a complete list, but should give you a good idea of the amount of work that went into this.
Major Changes
- Lessons have been split into individual pages under an mdbook format rather than a single standalone web page. This makes it easier to browse and share individual lessons with other learners.
- Dropped words like “one form” and “five forms” in favor of ichidan and godan terminology for verbs
- A few lessons and grammar points have been split into separate lessons. Sakubi has 54 lessons. Yokubi has 63.
- Added a new lesson on negative state of being
- Added a lesson 0 on the anatomy of Japanese sentences
- Several lessons have been reshuffled and re-ordered to have more reasonable priority sorting of importance
- Added a section on する verbs
- Added a lesson on ようとする and てみる (rather than an optional section)
- Added a specific lesson for たり〜たり
- Grouped together some "Parts". Sakubi split Section 1 and 2 into several parts. Yokubi has 2 sections with 2 parts each.
- Removed the notion of "intermissions" and "hidden/optional lessons". An appendix index is being planned instead (This is not finished yet)
- Almost every single example sentence has been re-sourced (from native media) and re-sorted by difficulty/appropriateness. Aside a few exceptions, example sentences will not show grammar points that haven't been covered yet.
Minor Changes
- Changed some tone and voice. A lot of first person writing has been changed to a more appealing format.
- Reworded a lot of grammar explanations to be less jargony
- Changed some links to some videos and resources for better (newer) alternatives
- Removed a lot of questionable statements that were incorrect or very opinionated / hard to verify the correctness of
- Fixed a lot of typos and straight up mistakes
Who owns Yokubi?
Yokubi as a project was started by Morg, and the project lives in the public on github. However, the project itself is a community project open to discussion, feedback, and contributions from anyone. A lot of people have helped with ideas, fixes, suggestions, proofreading, testing, etc. If you want to join them too, you can file issues on github, or just join our discord server.
What makes Yokubi better than other grammar guides?
I am very opinionated in how I want this guide to be. There are a lot of other amazing grammar guides (and textbooks) out there if you want to learn Japanese. Yokubi (and Sakubi) aren't the "best" or "the ultimate" guide or anything like that. They are just one way of approaching things. Just like its predecessor, Yokubi focuses on (usually) short, straight to the point, and very direct explanations. It does not hold your hand the whole way. It expects the reader to put in some work and active effort. To look things up, and to achieve independence of their own learning. It also expects the learner to focus more on immersion and natural content, rather than worry about specific grammar explanations to the tiniest of details.
If you believe this matches your idea of Japanese learning, then start from the Before you begin page and get learning. If not, there are other guides out there too. Yokubi is not expected to work for everyone.
What does yokubi mean?
Just like Imabi - 今日 and Sakubi - 昨日 are puns on the words 今日 (today) and 昨日 (yesterday), Yokubi is a pun on the word 翌日, as in the following day. It also doubles down as an inside joke I have among friends, where "yoku" (よく) is used incorrectly as a shorthand version of よくある文法 or よくある言葉 (= "common grammar" or "common word").
And just like that, Yokubi is the common grammar guide.