Eh, I think even a 6 year old Japanese kid has a vocab that blows away most learners, even if it doesn’t cover complex ideas yet. They aren’t learning 土木 (public works, civil engineering) when they learn 土 and 木, but they go into school knowing 5000+ words, easily.
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You know a lot more Japanese people than I do, so I may be wrong, or the one person I spoke to might not be representative 
Still, it came up when I mentioned how as a foreign learner of Japanese it’s helpful to have the kanji hinting at an unfamiliar word’s meaning, and how I assumed this was different from how Japanese people learned. And she told me it was similar, since they start learning kanji so early.
I’m not saying the average Japanese 6 year old doesn’t know way more words than I do, but compared to Japanese adults their vocabularies are still pretty small right?
(Just judging from my own kids, my 6 year old doesn’t understand many “difficult” words, whereas the the 11 year old understands almost everything… which I guess would run counter to my point since in Japan he would be nowhere near having learned all the requisite kanji in school yet…)
This thing about realizing that the word you are using contains keys as to its meaning happens almost in every language! ^^
For example, most americans are surprised when I point out that the reason Breakfast is called that way is because you were technically ‘fasting’ throughout the night, and then you break your fast when you eat in the morning. But it makes no sense for a native english speaker to learn vocabulary in this way. You are immersed in the culture as a kid, you are discovering the world for the first time so new words are what give meaning to everything around you. The wanikani approach makes sense as an adult learning japanese as a foreign language. For a native child, it would just complicate things.
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In WK, we are taught kanji roughly in order of increasing structural complexity of each character, while in Japanese schools they tend to start with simpler kanji meanings first. For example, 久 is taught at level 3 on here since its simple in structure, but in JP schools I think its a grade 5 kanji since the concept it signifies is harder to explain/grasp for a child compared to numbers or mountains and rivers.
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I don’t really think English grammar is really explicitly taught beyond the basic parts of speech (nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, etc), subject/verb agreement, and mechanics (punctuation use). This is evident that most people (in America) who have never studied a foreign language (or paid attention during their foreign language classes), have a hard time explaining simple grammatical concepts and patterns in English. There are exceptions (of course), but in general English grammar isn’t vigorously taught to native speakers of English in American public schools. English as a Second Language (ESL) classes might be an exception, but ESL and native English language instruction are fundamentally different in the depth and breadth of grammar instruction.
I took both a TESL certification course (designed for college graduates) and went through a masters Linguistics program. In both settings, 90% of my colleagues felt uncomfortable teaching English grammar because they felt they had a weak understanding of grammar and couldn’t confidently explain grammatical patterns in English.
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When I was in middle school (in America), we learned sentence diagramming. I got the impression from listening to people from other English-speaking countries that that level of grammar instruction went beyond what they learned. Are schools not teaching sentence diagramming anymore?
Never heard of that. I did, however, get taught formal grammar in several languages (it was that kind of school). Care to elaborate?
We don’t learn that in England… at least from what I can remember.
I vaguely remember doing that in middle school as well (also American). …I remember thinking it was stupid, because I was already reading at a >12th grade level by that point. 
Not sure if it’s still taught that way. I only had one teacher who used that method, and it wasn’t emphasized very much. I was in honors English classes all throughout junior high and high school, though, so I wonder if explicit explanations of grammar/sentence structure were emphasized more in the non-honors classes. My guess is “maybe” for junior high and “probably not” for high school, but I’m not sure.
To @LucasDesu’s point, I don’t recall grammar ever being explicitly tested or evaluated: maybe it was in elementary school and I just don’t remember, but I’m almost 100% sure it wasn’t during junior high or high school. We were evaluated almost entirely with essays, so we never really needed to know the terms for things as long as we could use them in ways that sounded grammatically correct. Corrections were made, but they weren’t usually made with explicit explanations of sentence pattern and parts of speech (at least, not that I recall). That’s probably part of the reason why many adults have trouble explaining things in grammatical terms. Even if more complex grammar/sentence structure was explicitly taught at some point, it’s the application of it that’s tested and emphasized in later years, so by the time you get to college, you’ve been operating on implicit understanding for quite a while and it’s difficult to explain why things are grammatically right or wrong.
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You’re right though. I do remember vaguely doing an exercise in elementary school called DOL (daily oral language) in which we corrected poorly written sentences as a class. I also remember snippets of times where the parts of speech were explained in both textbook form and in class. That was also during elementary school. After that, it was just assumed that people knew how to put together coherent thoughts into an essay. I don’t ever recall having an English grammar test. Up until I took Spanish in high school I had no formal awareness of metagramatical concepts (e.g., knowledge of kinds of tenses used and why they are used, etc). This phenomenon bewildered me as that I heard more than once from teachers and professors that their students’ reading and writing ability was simply not up to snuff. I’ve always wanted to learn more about English language education in America to native speakers, but I have never gotten around to doing that quite yet.
This is the first I’ve seen of sentence diagramming. Maybe some school districts have adopted this form of instruction? I mean, the state of education in America is FAR from standardized, so it’s not a stretch that I’ve never seen that before.
My middle school (honors) language arts teacher seemed to think he was doing us an unusual favor by teaching us how to diagram sentences. I think he said it used to be taught more than it was even at that time (20 years ago).
I figured they didn’t teach English properly in Scotland…I went there once, and I could barely understand a word anyone said 
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I’m from Illinois and never learned sentence diagramming. I had never even heard of it until it was described to me at university.
I did sentence diagramming in high school. We basically had to learn everything on that page you linked. I went to a hard to get into college prep school and this was around 10 years ago so I don’t know how things are now for the average American student.
I didn’t find it very useful. Ironically, almost everything I know about formal English grammar I learned from my Latin classes. I think it’s almost impossible to view your native language objectively unless it’s through the lens of a foreign one.
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yes and no. depends upon what year you were growing up and where - US schools vary widely in approach. i did not learn grammar about english, but I am a 90s kid. At that time, the way that reading was taught was via the “whole word” method, where kids did not learn to sound anything out. It’s still shifting and growing, but yeah, in most elementary schools, they’ve moved away from that. The issue is that if you start learning a foreign language when you are older, you sort of have to go backwards and learn grammar.
My mom did the whole tree-ing sentences as a child though. I didn’t do that until I was a grad student in linguistics - and I studied Latin as an undergrad, which is pretty much the most grammar/translation language you can get in the US.
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I can attest to that. Studying Japanese has made me realize how little formal English grammar I know, and I was in the advanced classes in high school (Canadian FWIW). :-/ One example would be the subordinate clause referred to in Tae Kim’s guide.
My father grew up in the States and he did diagram sentences, so there likely is a generational difference.
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I went to a Catholic elementary/junior high school in New York City and we learned a lot of grammar. We did sentence diagramming too. I never thought much of it back then, but having that strong foundation helped me learn other languages.
I’m not so sure about what was taught in public schools though.
In addition to what’s already been said by the various knowledgeable people in this thread, something that’s baffled me for ages now is how little (many) Japanese kids read about current events or the world around them outside of school. When I was 10 or 11, I was regularly reading the newspaper to try to get a feel for the world outside of my bubble, learning words that I didn’t know along the way, because I could just sound them out in my head or easily look them up. From what my Japanese friends tell me, this isn’t common in Japan at all, not least of all because of kanji - without furigana, an elementary student simply cannot read the Asahi Shimbun, for example. (Well, at least not without considerable time investment and a kanji dictionary and knowledge about how to use it.)
Japanese kids seem much more confined to what the adults around them deemed age-appropriate enough to “translate” than children with a more phonetic writing system. (Obviously this isn’t meant as a slight against Japanese people - most pick up knowledge like that, just a little later in life, and may have a more enjoyable childhood of it for all I know.)
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