Over the last few months, I’ve been posting a bunch of Intermediate-Level Japanese guides on Twitter. As with the Beginner Guides I published here last year, I’ve cleaned all of them all up, removed (I hope) all the typos, and am now re-publishing them here as PDFs! These six guides are all free under the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License. Credited sharing is permitted, but alteration and reproduction and/or use for profit is not. All clip art is from Irasutoya.com
These guides are not for beginners, and assume that you know hiragana, some kanji, both the plain and “polite”/です・ます forms, and the ~て form. If you don’t, you might want to check out the Beginner Guides instead, or the free Introductory Textbooks I offer on my Free Resources page.
The first guide covers the giving and receiving verbs ~くれる, ~あげる, and ~もらう, as well as their ~て[verb] forms used to “give” an action.
The second collection focuses on other things you can attach to the ~て form of a verb. Specifically, this covers forms like the “try to do” ～てみる, the “do in advance/preparation” ~ておく, the “want you to do” form ~てほしい, and the “is done” form ～てくる.
The third collection discusses the ～たい form, which indicates desire. The final slides also introduce forms you should use when talking about other people’s desires. While it’s okay to use ~たい in a generic sense (there are a lot of people who want to…), you don’t want to talk about other people’s feelings (Mike wants to…) in the same way as your own (I want to…) in Japanese if you can avoid it!
The forth guide then introduces the volitional and potential forms. The volition is just the “let’s” or “shall we” form, but focusing on its use in plain form Japanese rather than the polite (and simple to use) ~ましょうか. The potential form is the “can” form, which in Japanese involves conjugating a verb rather than simply placing the word “can” before the verb in a sentence.
The last “real” document then discusses how to use the passive, the causative, and the causative passive form in Japanese. I know these are often confused, so I hope this guide helps you tell them apart!
…but both last and least, here’s a bunch of forms you absolutely should never use in Japanese. If you use these to your teacher, boss, friends, or on tests, don’t blame me if you get in trouble! However, I can promise that as you get better at Japanese, and especially as you start to engage with Japanese media, you absolutely will hear these forms, so I hope they help you understand what is going on.
And that’s it for the intermediate guides! I don’t have any plans for “advanced” guides at the moment, but there is something else in the works, so do stay tuned.
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Scripting Japan 
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