you’re right.
did i get my point across though?
yeah, and always use your name for “i”, lol.
僕ドラえもん！(=^・・^=)
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You yourself said you cringe when foreigners use casual in formal situations… So that seems like a point on the side of starting there, but eh.
I don’t agree that if you’re a beginner it just doesn’t matter what you use, but I don’t think we’ll come together on that.
I just remembered the case of someone learning for work. Depending on the boss, they might think it’s cute, but a lot of people probably wouldn’t want to risk being rude when their job’s on the line.
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So personally, my view on it is that it does not really matter either way. Just make sure you learn polite forms before you bother talking to people. That said…what you learn early on, or hear the most ends up being what you say by habit so I slightly lean towards the side of learning ます form first. I heard 俺 a ton in the wild and so thought that that was a normal thing to say and learned, when talking to someone (who was nice enough to laugh and inform me kindly) that it was really rude in almost all cases. It is really hard to break that kind of habit and get used to 私 in this example. I imagine it would be the same with the ます case if you only get to it really late in your studies ( I am more comfortable with informal forms for verbs, again from exposure to anime-type-language and that also makes it a habit I would have to try to override when attempting to communicate politely). That said though, probably not an absolutely huge deal either way.
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I personally think that if you learn the dictionary form first and then how to convert it to ます, it means you start to understand how the verb works and how to change it to the different forms. I used to think that ます form was the root one, and once I heard actual Japanese people taking, it just confused me. But once I knew the dictionary form as well, it made sense.
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i myself cringe, but i’m also not a japanese. it’s more a case of “being embarrassed for so. else”.
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I mean, ignoring the million ways the dictionary form is used in polite language, you can’t even say 食べています until you know て, and you can’t predict て unless you know how dictionary forms conjugates, so…
As a side note, my first Japanese experience was Rosetta Stone like 10 or more years ago. It initially taught everything in the progressive, ala 「男の人は走っています」 and I’ll never forgive Rosetta Stone for that. Heh.
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As someone who is part Japanese, with Japanese family and currently living in Japan, I suggest learning the dictionary form first. Truth is, Japanese people will just be happy that you can communicate in Japanese. The vast majority of people here do not hold foreigners to the code of politeness. You will build better understanding of the language if you know the dictionary form well.
Also, ます is not necessarily polite form. It is polite to those of equal status. But for your elders and those who rank above you, teineigo and keigo is required. Often, Japanese people will use teineigo and keigo when they first meet someone as the rank/social status may not be yet established. But again, if you are a foreigner, they won`t expect that from you. Your honest attempt to speak the language, your mannerisms, and respect for the culture will count much more, trust me 
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Both of those statements are true… but again, is it really something you want to start with? The operative word being start.
I keep reading the same arguments, but I still don’t understand why anyone would want to start with the dictionary form.
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ます is part of 丁寧語, which is part of 敬語. Though that whole system is a lesson for intermediates at least, yeah.
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gee, how could this topic come to this again 
so much stress for such a little thing.
just keep learning. use whatever book you got and stick to it, that’s way more important than nitpicking which verb form to learn first.
in fact, newbies don’t even know yet what they don’t know, might as well just take everything and anything in until things start to make sense, and then decide if it’s worthwhile to search for alternative resources, or if it’s easier and faster to just continue and let it all come to you.
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Especially since the original post mentions up to one semester of lecture. That’s what? 20~30h if even that?
It’s nothing in the grand scheme of things.
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I kinda felt like I made my answer clear, but yes.
Anyway, has already been said, it depends on your goals etc etc blah blah and there isn’t a wrong answer. If you want to talk to people in your broken crap right away, then obviously masu. If you want to learn for the long term without talking to people who are going to slap you for being an idiot, dictionary. Voila.
Edit:
Also, for what it’s worth, I used to used Sharedtalk back in the day, and there was a decent community of natives and non-natives hanging around in the Japanese-English chatroom, and everyone was fine with speaking pretty casually because everyone was learning. I only really understand masu first if you’re going to Japan for business in two weeks.
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Indeed. I don’t know if I would even waste my time (and money) like that. Universities are not the fastest and most complete way to study the language.
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Yes, I just realized the misunderstanding.
I’m taking the problem from the teacher’s point of view. You have 50 odd complete beginners in the room. What’s the method that will maximize the number of students sticking to the class? To me, that’s obviously the ますform, since the dictionary form would just bombard the class with too much info and a bunch will probably just give up.
From a motivated learner’s point of view, getting as much info as fast as possible makes sense, if you have the time. And then indeed, everything should be based on your goals.
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Yeah. Personally, if I was going to teach a group of people, I would probably want to just make the type of course it was going to be clear. If I was going to teach only the casual forms first, I would be upfront about that ahead of time, and would inform that “there is a more appropriate way to speak to people, but we’ll cover that later” in the same way that we’ll cover, say, conditional statements later.
But that would be a specific type of class for a specific type of pupil. Which I think is what this comes down to.
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I think that students should learn the dictionary form first along with conjugation rules for each verb group and each verb form including polite. When I first started learning Japanese about 10 years ago I learned the masu form first then when I picked back up Japanese about 5 years ago I was introduced to the dictionary form chart. I think this method makes it easier to conjugate verbs and for me starting from the masu form feels backwards.
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I took a japanese class at a community college once (before ubiquitous internet, so a bit more dependent on the teacher). The whole first semester class, we talked about -ます. Which, I think is fine. But, I feel like the teacher should have mentioned the strategy, that we were learning a polite conjugation of the verb. It was explained as for example, 歩きます = to walk. That’s it. Then ません、ました, etc. but no mention at all of the standard dictionary form. I finished that class baffled when I opened a dictionary and not able to read compound sentences (or even understand why I couldn’t read them)
Which, again, fine, you can’t expect much in 3 months. But I feel like the class should have taught enough that someone could know there is this other thing, even if just to know you don’t know it yet (but will).
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one thing teachers do is, they try to avoid information overload. that might be why your teacher didn’t mention it. kind of like mommy doesn’t mention that the bike has training wheels
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