English textbooks for teaching grammar often use English grammar concepts to explain Japanese grammar concepts. This works effectively as an analogy for a shortcut to vague understanding. Keep learning Japanese long enough, however, and you’ll realize that the English grammar you were taught doesn’t really convey what is happening with the Japanese grammar.
Verb tense is a perfect example of this. Thinking in terms of past, present, and future, one is told that Japanese verbs have a past tense, and they have a present/future (or non-past) tense. This can lead to wondering, “How do I know if this verb is present or future?” In reality, Japanese verbs are completed actions or not completed actions, so the question of whether it is present or future doesn’t conceptually exist. The action of the verb simply has not completed.
There’s no harm in referring to grammar here in the way textbooks teach it. I personally lean more toward what the actual Japanese grammar is (as best I understand it).
I agree 100% that this is a good route, so long as the person has learned verbs with the ます helper verb attached first. (It’s the route that I was taught back in high school, and I know it’s the route the very-popular Genki teaches.)
Authors of modern (online) Japanese learning courses and materials understand it’s better to teach the most common (casual) form of the verb first, and save the ます helper verb for later on. This means we’ll have a mix of people who learned the ます helper verb form first, and people who did not.
As you can probably imagine, this makes it an un-level playing field (so to speak) when it comes to explaining grammar, because everyone’s starting from somewhere different. But I think by the end of the volume, a lot of basic concepts will have leveled out in readers’ recognition and understanding of them.
This is it.
For some people, this will be the way they first learned it, and this can differ wildly whether they were introduced to Japanese grammar by reading Genki, or by watching Cure Dolly, or by picking up a Japanese novel and doing a Google search every time they encounter something unknown.
For others, it will be based on the deeper understanding they’ve gained over time, as they’ve read up on grammar from different sources, possibly including Japanese language resources in Japanese.
I agree that there is possible room for confusion when a textbook says one thing, and another source says another thing. But I also know that I learned a lot the textbook way, and it hindered my proper understanding of various concepts for a long time.
There’s no easy solution to this. But if you see a question answered with grammar concepts in a way that differ from how you learned them, don’t hesitate to give your own reply to the question explaining things the way you learned them. It’s perfectly fine to have two or more people answer the same question, and different explanations will help different learners!
There’s not much utility to the polite forms for this specific manga, because they only come up a few times in the volume. But as a teaching tool (“いる is the casual version of います”), don’t hesitate to mention it at any point =D
Over time, readers will come to recognize various patterns with verbs. For example, 飲む (to drink) becomes 飲みます when polite. 行く (to go) becomes 行きます when polite. And it’ll be easier to understand the concept of “godan” verbs, where the last letter (む and く in these examples) changes from the う sound to the い sound (み and き here) before adding the ます helper verb.
Once learners get used to enough of these patterns, the verb recognition game takes on a whole new conceptual level.
Ah, I wish I worded it like that. That captures perfectly what I wanted to convey!
I agree with you on this regarding formal textbooks.
I think resources originally started with ます decades over half a century ago because people learning to speak Japanese would want to speak politely in Japan. And then later resources just copied that because that’s the way it was always done. I’ll be surprised if any modern (created in the past five years) resources lead with ます unless they are doing things “the way they’ve always been done”.
As examples of this, Sakubi introduces ます at lesson 6, but doesn’t really cover it until lesson 12. Cure Dolly also holds off on it until later on.
This is normal. You’re coming from a manga with short chapters, mainly only two characters, one of whom speaks in a polite manner. And you’re entering a manga with longer chapters, more complex situations, and more casual/colloquial speech.
Do the best you can, hang on tight, don’t give up, take in as much as you can, and you’ll make so much progress over the span of the volume!
One thing that first-time readers (and maybe even second- or third-time readers) will notice is that higher level JLPT grammar shows up. This can lead to the question of: should I be learning this right now?
When it comes to grammar, if you can memorize it on one pass, I say go for it. If you’re like me and it takes (quite) a bit longer to learn things, it’s okay to loosely understand it, and move on without trying to commit it to memory.
The reason for this is because when you’re still relatively new to learning grammar and recognizing it when reading, it’s best to learn the most common grammar first. After all, that’s the grammar you’ll see the most.
You can think of a JLPT level as a frequency guide. JLPT5? It’s ✭✭✭✭✭ frequency grammar. JLPT3? It’s ✭✭✭ frequency grammar. JLPT1? That’s ✭ frequency grammar.
It’s not a perfect concept, but when you have a lot to learn, always aim for higher frequency items, because they’ll come up most often.
For those who don’t want to look up the JLPT level for grammar (I never did), you can determine frequency by recognizing “I saw this grammar a few of times now in this manga” and determine that’s something to give extra focus to.
Even if some skimming happens, I expect I will learn a ton here.