Japanese writing practice

Japanese writing practice that finally settles は and が

You can recognise thousands of kanji and still stall on a two-clause sentence. Particles, transitivity and register are production problems, and production is the one thing most Japanese study routines never ask for.

What makes writing Japanese hard

は and が are not interchangeable, and not a rule you can memorise once

は marks the topic — what the sentence is about, often already known. が marks the subject as new or in focus, and is required in certain clause types. The choice depends on what came before in the discourse, so it cannot be decided from the sentence alone, and it stays hard well past N3.

Particles carry the grammar

Japanese has flexible word order because に, を, で, へ, から and まで do the work English does with position. Get one wrong and the sentence is not merely awkward — it says something else. Reading gives you very little feedback on this, because the correct particle is right there on the page.

Transitive and intransitive verbs come in pairs

開ける and 開く, 閉める and 閉まる, 始める and 始まる: one takes を and an agent, the other takes が and simply happens. Choosing the wrong member of the pair is one of the most persistent learner errors, because both sound plausible and both exist.

Register has to be sustained

です/ます, plain form and keigo are not decorations you add at the end. A paragraph has to stay in one of them, and mixing だ into a です paragraph or using casual endings in a message to a teacher reads as a real mistake — one that a grammar checker for a European language would have no equivalent of.

5 mistakes learners keep making — and the rule behind each

These are the errors that survive years of study, because they rarely break communication: a listener understands you and moves on. Written practice is where they get caught.

はじめまして。私が田中です。

はじめまして。私は田中です。

が puts the subject in focus, as an answer to “who is Tanaka?”. A plain self-introduction sets you as the topic, which is は.

毎朝、公園に散歩します。

毎朝、公園を散歩します。

を marks the space moved through with verbs like 散歩する, 歩く, 渡る and 通る. に would mark the destination you go to, not the area you walk around in.

友達は新しい車を買いたいです。

友達は新しい車を買いたがっています。

〜たい states your own desire. For a third person you use 〜たがる, usually in the progressive, because you can only report what someone else shows they want.

窓が開けました。

窓を開けました。

開ける is transitive and takes を with an agent doing the opening. If the window opened by itself you want the intransitive 窓が開きました.

今日は寒いだ。だから家にいました。

今日は寒いです。だから家にいました。

い-adjectives never take だ. And once a text is in です/ます, every sentence in it stays there — switching mid-paragraph is jarring in a way English register shifts are not.

What to write this week

Prompts chosen to force the structures above, rather than to let you rewrite the sentences you can already produce. Take one per session and write for eight minutes without a dictionary.

  1. Describe what you did yesterday in order, with a time expression on every sentence — it forces に, から and まで into use.
  2. Write about something that broke or opened by itself, then the same event with you as the agent: the intransitive and transitive pairs side by side.
  3. Introduce a friend to a reader who does not know them, then say something new about them — the second sentence is where が belongs.
  4. Write the same short request twice: once to a close friend in plain form, once to a teacher in です/ます with a polite ending.
  5. Explain how to cook something you make often, using 〜てから and 〜たら to chain the steps.

How practice works in dojo

You write a real text in Japanese — a journal entry, a message, a translation, or a conversation with a tutor persona. Every sentence comes back corrected, with what changed and why. The errors you repeat are filed, and returned later as drills built from your own sentences, so the fix has to be produced from scratch rather than re-read.

There are no flashcards, no multiple choice and no reading comprehension. It is output practice only, on the theory that the gap between what you understand and what you can produce closes from the production side.

Japanese writing practice: common questions

Do I have to write in kanji?

Write in natural Japanese script — kanji, hiragana and katakana as a native writer would use them. Romaji is not accepted, because it hides exactly the choices that matter. If you do not know a kanji yet, writing it in kana is normal and correct; over-using kanji you have not learned is the more common problem.

Will it explain why a particle was wrong?

Yes — a correction names what changed and why, so を rather than に comes with the reason it applies. That matters more in Japanese than almost anywhere else, since a swapped particle produces a grammatical sentence with a different meaning rather than an obviously broken one.

What JLPT level do I need?

From N5 you can write single sentences usefully. The practice earns the most between N4 and N2, where you know the grammar points in isolation but have not automated them in production — that is the level at which は/が, transitivity and register still break down under time pressure.

Does it check keigo?

It corrects register as part of grammar: a text written in です/ます is held to it, and a message written in plain form to someone who warrants politeness is flagged. It is not dedicated keigo training for business Japanese — for that, write actual business messages and let the corrections apply to those.

Start writing Japanese today

Write a few real sentences, have every one corrected, and drill the Japanese mistakes you keep making.