P0 The high-frequency core is missing while rare patterns are covered
The 93 live pages contain no dedicated explanation for any of these: the て-form, negative, past た, the potential (読める / ことができる), the volitional, the causative, the basic conditionals (たら / ば), そうだ, ようだ, たり, ても, のに, わけ, ところ, or sentence-final particles (ね / よ / さ / ぞ / ぜ.
The clearest evidence is the site's own example dialogue:
| Feature appearing in the site's own panel dialogue | Lines | Share | Has a page? |
|---|
| て-form somewhere in the line | 146 | 34.4% | No |
| Sentence-final ね / よ / さ / わ / ぞ / ぜ | 88 | 20.8% | No |
| から | 45 | 10.6% | Partly, 〜からこそ only |
| Conditional たら / れば | 12 | 5.4% | No |
| ても / でも | 21 | 5.0% | Partly, 〜てもいい only |
| けど / が contrast | 16 | 3.8% | Yes, 〜が〜 |
| ようだ / みたい | 15 | 3.5% | Partly, 〜みたい only |
| Potential or causative morphology | 13 | 3.1% | Partly, 〜れる receptive only |
These forms already turn up inside the site's Key Points, explained ad hoc where they happen to appear. That is a symptom: the same explanation is being rewritten per-panel instead of living on a page that examples can point to.
Recommendation: Treat this as the main body of remaining work. _docs/grammar-page-recommendations.md already identifies much of it and grammar.md carries a commented-out TODO list covering causative, そうだ, ようだ, potential, まい, tense, and the て-form. The analysis is done; the pages are not written. Sentence-final particles and the negative are not on either list and should be added, since they are the highest-frequency items with zero coverage.
P1 Half the live pages are a single summary sentence
68 of 93 live pages have no formation: block, and 49 have neither a formation block nor any body prose. The whole page is a summary line. Trying it out with 〜てみる is the clearest case: one sentence of frontmatter, no formation, no usage note, no body, no related links, despite having five manga examples attached to it.
The split tracks page age almost exactly:
| Year written | Pages | With Formation | With body prose | With related links |
|---|
| 2018–2019 | 32 | 4 | 6 | 12 |
| 2020–2022 | 18 | 2 | 7 | 5 |
| 2023–2024 | 27 | 3 | 4 | 8 |
| 2025 | 6 | 4 | 1 | 2 |
| 2026 | 15 | 14 | 13 | 13 |
Table covers all 98 explanation files including the 5 unpublished ones, so it does not sum to the 93 live figure. "With body prose" counts pages with more than 200 characters of body text.
Why this matters specifically for reading: without a formation table, a learner sees only the dictionary shape of a pattern. In a panel the pattern is conjugated, negated, contracted, or clipped. The 〜すぎる page says the pattern "may be appended to either the stem form of a verb or an adjective or to a noun" in prose, but never shows the three attachments side by side, so a reader meeting 効きすぎ has to work out the stem rule from a sentence. Compare Doing completely or ending up doing with 〜てしまう, which lays out てしまう → ちゃう, でしまう → じゃう, and the past forms in a block. That page teaches recognition; the older ones teach a definition.
Recommendation: Set a floor for live pages of summary + formation + at least one recognition note, and work the backlog in frequency order rather than alphabetically. The 2026 pages are the template.
article> P1 There is no learning path, only a lookup index
grammar.md groups 93 pages under 32 semantic sections and sorts alphabetically by the Japanese pattern. 15 of those sections hold exactly one page. Nothing on the site marks a pattern as foundational or advanced, states a prerequisite, or suggests what to read next. A learner who wants to look up 〜っぱなし is well served. A learner who wants to build up to reading has no route through the material.
The site already has the missing piece and does not connect it: _articles holds twelve reading-skill pieces (Reading readiness, Deciphering vs reading, Tolerating ambiguity, Using context to deal with missing words, Best manga for Japanese beginners). None of the grammar pages link into them, and the articles do not sequence the grammar collection.
Recommendation: Add a frequency or stage field to explanation front matter and render an ordered "core patterns first" route on the grammar index, with the reading articles as the connective tissue. Even a hand-curated list of thirty patterns in reading order, published as an article, would close most of this gap without touching the collection.
P2 Nothing covers the non-grammatical text on the page
A search across _grammar and _articles found zero pages mentioning onomatopoeia, sound effects, 擬音語, or 擬態語, and none discussing vertical reading order, hand-lettered asides, or the interpretation of … and ーー as pacing. Sound effects are a large fraction of the text on a typical manga page and are frequently the part a learner cannot even look up, since they are rarely in dictionaries and often stylized beyond recognition. Ellipsis already appears in 19.3% of the site's own dialogue lines and long dashes in 2.8%, both unexplained.
Recommendation: This is arguably article material rather than grammar material, but it is squarely inside the stated goal. A page on reading sound effects, and a note in the reading articles on ellipsis and dash as pause and trailing-off, would cover a real blocker cheaply.
P2 Contractions are taught one at a time instead of as a system
The seven Colloquial and Casual Speech pages each document a single contraction. There is no page stating the general processes that produce them: ら-row syllables collapsing to ん, 〜ている reducing to 〜てる, の becoming ん before the copula, 〜てしまう becoming 〜ちゃう. A learner who has read the 〜んない page still cannot decode わかんねー or やってらんない unless those specific forms happen to be covered.
Recommendation: Add one overview page that states the processes and links to the instance pages as worked examples. This converts seven lookups into one transferable skill, and it is high-value per page written for casual manga dialogue.
P2 Vocabulary support on example pages is stubbed out
255 of 261 example files carry todo: add vocabulary, and exactly one has a populated vocabulary: field, despite the field being documented in _docs/example-page-structure.md with guidance to select 3–5 key words. For a reader working through a panel, an unknown word blocks comprehension just as hard as an unknown pattern. The Key Points partly compensate by glossing words that bear on the target grammar, but that is incidental coverage.
Recommendation: Either populate the field or drop it from the documented contract. 255 identical TODO markers suggest a decision was deferred rather than made. If the intent is that the separate _vocabulary collection and words: index carry this load, say so in the docs and remove the TODOs.
Appendix A: Small Defects
_data/common_points.yml holds only 4 entries (nameさん, nameちゃん, nameくん, ご飯) though _docs/example-page-structure.md advertises ref: reuse with a small_tsu example that does not exist. The reuse mechanism is a good idea sitting mostly unused, and the recurring explanations identified above (imperative, やっぱ, dropped subject, clipped endings) are exactly what it is for.
Appendix B: Live Pages With No Formation and No Body
49 pages. Sorted by attached example count ascending, so the ones learners are least able to figure out from context come first.
| Page | Examples | Has usage note |
|---|
| Contracting 〜らない to 〜んない | 1 | No |
| Contracting 〜る＋な to 〜んな | 1 | No |
| Contracting 行っておいで to 行っといで | 1 | No |
| More than with 〜方が and 〜より | 1 | Yes |
| Sensation of with 〜気味 | 1 | No |
| Not at all with 全然〜ない | 1 | Yes |
| The prohibitive な | 1 | Yes |
| Should not do with 〜てはいけない | 1 | Yes |
| Strongly forbidden with 〜べからず | 1 | Yes |
| Because of too much with 〜あまり | 1 | No |
| While with 〜うちは | 1 | Yes |
| Until an action occurs with 〜まで | 1 | Yes |
| Managing to complete an action with 〜終える | 1 | Yes |
| Completing an action with 〜終わる | 1 | Yes |
| Speaker's conviction with 〜た＋つもり | 1 | No |
| Amount with 〜分 | 1 | No |
| Wasted effort with せっかく〜のに | 1 | Yes |
| Expectation with はず | 2 | Yes |
| Contracting 〜ているのだ to 〜てんだ | 2 | No |
| Proportional to with 〜ば〜ほど | 2 | No |
| Easy to do with 〜やすい | 2 | Yes |
| Hoping with 〜といい | 2 | No |
| Permission to do with 〜てもいい | 2 | Yes |
| Doing better with 〜直す | 2 | Yes |
| Starting something with 〜出す | 2 | Yes |
| After doing with 〜てから | 2 | Yes |
| Taking advantage of an opportunity with せっかく〜だから | 2 | Yes |
| Lack of interest with 知ったことか | 2 | Yes |
| Or something similar with 〜か何か | 3 | Yes |
| Contracting いる＋の to いんの | 3 | No |
| One's house with 〜んち | 3 | No |
| Leaving something as-is with 〜っぱなし | 3 | Yes |
| Thinking of doing with 〜ようと思う | 3 | Yes |
| Doing for a reason with 〜ように | 3 | No |
| It's not the case with 〜ではあるまいし | 3 | No |
| During with 〜うちに | 3 | Yes |
| Covered in with 〜だらけ | 4 | Yes |
| Thinking or feeling something with 〜気がする | 4 | Yes |
| That said with だって | 4 | Yes |
| Must not do with 〜てはだめだ | 4 | Yes |
| Past decision still in effect with 〜ことになっている | 4 | No |
| To end up being with 〜ことになる | 4 | No |
| Completely opposite to with 〜どころか | 4 | No |
| Trying it out with 〜てみる | 5 | No |
| Objective reason with 〜ので | 5 | Yes |
| Presuming with 〜だろう and 〜でしょう | 6 | No |
| Too much with 〜すぎる | 6 | Yes |
| Wanting to do with 〜たい | 8 | Yes |
| Receptive verbs with 〜れる | 16 | Yes |
The last few rows are the best return on effort: 〜れる has 16 panel examples and 16 chances for a learner to misread a receptive as a potential, with no formation table to disambiguate them. 〜たい has 8.