Making Sense of Japanese: What the Textbooks Don't Tell You

This is a slim volume of articles on a variety of mostly grammar topics that tend to cause trouble for Japanese learners at the early intermediate stage, where they've completed the equivalent of a basic textbook like Minna no Nihongo but some of the grammar is still confusing. It helped me a lot when I was at that stage, and I find myself frequently recommending the book to other people, because the topics covered are mostly the main ones everybody has trouble with at that point in their Japanese learning journey, so they come up regularly in questions on language learning forums.

Rubin assumes you've already learned about the things he's talking about in your textbook; his aim is to give you a different viewpoint on the topic, that hopefully can be the seed you need to have it all crystallise in your brain into something you understand a lot better than you did before. I think he does a great job of this. The book is also pretty funny.

If you're starting to dip into reading Japanese books, you'll probably find the final chapter helpful. Here Rubin describes a way to analyze long complex sentences by starting at the beginning and working through to the end, with a complete worked example. Personally I find this a more natural method than the one suggested in for instance the Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, where you start at the end with the verb and bounce all over the sentence looking at what it connects up to.

If you've studied the verbs of giving and receiving, or the causative, or the explanatory の, or は vs が, but you still feel like you're guessing at meaning when they appear in real sentences, do yourself a favour and pick up this book.