Age is just a number

Hehe, I completely understand. My wife doesn’t fancy herself a teacher either, so she doesn’t particularly enjoy explaining grammar or definitions, though she often does so brilliantly.

So let me amend: engage in Japanese as much as possible within the dynamics of your relationship. But yes, an outsider may make a better teacher.

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I believe most spouses will appreciate the effort to learn. However if I make a simple mistake, I get a quick ‘demotion’ in abilities and told I need to go back to basics :slight_smile: In a way, many people would not be so brutally honest so it’s good to hear despite the frustration. There is also grammar debates that often end with “that’s just the way it is so learn it”! :smile: Of course there is the feared red pen for tegami corrections. The best lessons I learned were fundamentals, pronunciation and finding easier paths of expression within a limited vocab. So in a way, she is my primary teacher but I try to research my questions first before asking.

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How many times have I heard that? hahaha. I mean, she’s right, of course. As language learners, we often start thinking of language as a system defined by its grammar (we say Y because the rule is X), when in fact it’s the other way around. And people who are fluent in a language are under absolutely no obligation to know anything consciously about its grammar.

I’ve been reading different opinions lately about the が particle and what it really means. It’s amazing the diversity of opinions out there (even among Japanese people) about whether it’s really a subject marker, or something else entirely, and the same goes for many other points of grammar. I don’t think anyone is “wrong” per se. It’s just that there are a lot of ways to try to explain sentence patterns in Japanese. But yes, ultimately the best answer is just to learn the language and leave grammar to linguists.

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48 years old. I have been studying for two years and am roughly N4 (self-assessed). I figure that rate of progress is slightly below average. No worries, though, since I’m enjoying the journey.

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i believe that doing it slowly, then speeding up, is crucial for physical tasks, like speaking. for purely intellectual tasks, speed is everything. you see something and just repeat your mistakes until you get it right consistently.

this is not possible with wk as is, but if you supplement it with something like quizlet, you have it both… carefree mistakes and speed, bite-sized (quizlet is not an srs, so who cares if something’s wrong), and the slow, constant wailing away at the big mountain (wk)

i’m 43 by the way, and i can confirm that there’s been studies that show that learning doesn’t slow down the older you get. i’d say we blow many 20-somethings out of the water, because we give ourselves more time and have better learned to be patient (and with ourselves) over the years, so we tend to do things more thoroughly and deliberately. that’s of course very subjective, but i think it fits in a lot of cases.

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