We are the power learners of the Japanese learning world, just by virtue of being on this site. The average person who tries a language never makes it past absolute beginner, so I feel that materials should really focus on making that stage accessible. If you design materials with an eye on the later stages, you may lose more people before you even get there.
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No matter how you cut it, people are going to quit regardless. So I’m not sure how teaching with polite form as the base, will change that outcome (especially since it’s the statue quo).
And no one seems to bring up the hideous conjugation charts Spanish. As opposed to the same form regardless of number, gender, and person in Japanese. Learning the plain conjugations is not much of stretch from that. I understand that Japanese is different from Western languages, but perhaps the way it’s taught causes people to quit as well?
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You can definitely make materials bad enough that more people than average will quit. And the assumption seems to be, among a lot of people, that the status quo is the way it is because no one has thought to change it or something. I don’t know if anyone has done any testing on it, but surely it’s in any materials’ best interest to retain as many people as possible, and I don’t think that it’s fair to say that “some people will quit regardless so all methods are equally likely to lead to quitting.”
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What you should learn is based on your overall goal; If you are planning to master the language to work there then I suggest formal.
If you are traveling or don’t really care about sounding polite (Japanese version at least) or know that who you will be talking to wont care, go causal.
Over time you will puck-up the other versions so…no worries.
Not sure I see the point in designing material or courses around those that are going to give up anyway at the very beginning. A phrase book would be better if you only intend to learn to say a few things (and don’t mind not understanding the responses!)
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I didn’t say anything about designing it FOR people who are going to give up. I said if you don’t make it accessible to people more people will give up. Accessible as in, immediately useful. The longer you make people wait the more likely they are to give up. And if you start with casual it comes with all kinds of caveats about where it may or may not be appropriate to use.
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tbf, people are gonna learn -masu a couple days after anyways, and I feel like people won’t care if you fail to use masu when you should have after only learning for a couple days.
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You think so? There’s a lot to get through.
Its been 3 years since I learned, but from what I remember it didnt take me too long to get to it. Once you learn te form, past tense is a breeze. Potential form is easy because you just make it eru and then from there conditional is just swapping out the ru for a ba. Theres a lot of patterns that make it easy to learn for the others as well.
Maybe i’m out of touch, but how long do you expect the average learner to take to learn neg, volitional, causative, passive, conditional, potential, past, and te form? Also, even if it took them a month, I feel like the same would apply and people wouldnt care.
All this talk about time/duration when it comes to learning things is quite variable.
Most non-Japan based language learning for adults only meets up once or twice a week and you’re expected to learn an amount of the content on your own.
The intensive in-Japan language schools are naturally super fast but those feature ~6+ hours per day of contact hours, plus you get to be surrounded in Japanese the whole time in your day-to-day.
The pacing for how long it takes to be across grammar is entirely dependent on how much time you have and your educational setting. If you don’t have a job and are doing entirely full time Japanese study then of course you will be across it faster. If you only have an hour or so per day it will take more time.
In terms of pure hours, there are some general measures on How Long Does It Take to Learn Japanese? - How to Learn Japanese - NihongoShark.com, but certainly the beginner stage of a) learning hiragana, b) the nature of the basic Japanese sentence, and c) conjugating verbs can take up to 100 hours depending on the frequency and opportunities for practice.
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isn’t it irrelevant how important a grammar point is? it’s ease of learning that should dictate the order.
look at how WK teaches the kanji. it doesn’t go by importance or frequency. it takes items that are simple, then teaches you how they form kanji when combined. it doesn’t pick the next piece because of it’s importance, because then, your first five levels would be 米、心、人、火、水 - but 一、山、口 are easier to retain if you’re new to kanji.
same for grammar. it doesn’t matter how many grammar points are derived from which base. what counts is how easy it is to learn, and you just cannot possibly beat the binary ます、ません and です、ではありません
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I don’t particularly subscribe to the argument that if you don’t start with the easiest form of speaking then you’ll scare people away. The fact is that like any language, Japanese takes a lot of work to learn. One can’t possibly hide that fact from learners.
But even if I did accept the premise, you could equally make the case that plain form is easier than the ます form.
たべる—3 mora; たべます—4 mora.
のむ—2; のみます—4.
いった—3; いきました—5.
Etc.
Those are a lot of extra mouthfuls for a beginner to process and speak. It’s true that the ます form is more regular to a degree, but a beginner learns verbs one by one, not all at once, so I don’t see that as a big problem.
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I think I might do だ and です together and use that opportunity to:
- Explain that だ and です are not the same thing, as not enough sources tell you this.
- Introduce the concept of politeness in the Japanese culture (just a quick introduction - because I don’t think this is well explained to beginners).
Then, I’ll introduce dictionary form and eventually ます form. This time, it won’t seem strange to have different levels of formality because that was previously explained. I will also be able to explain conjugation from stem form.
This is basically a compromise between starting with dictionary or polite form. By separating です from ます, it might simplify things.
I completely agree with you. As an example, I gave up on Genki pretty quickly, but Misa from Japanese Ammo made me interested in grammar. Anki never gave me a reason to use it, but now I’m the #1 user SRSing the most cards on Kitsun.
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Side note:
Cases like this are what ‘interleaving’ is really about. Not just mixing random things together because it’s supposed to enhance learning somehow, but practicing related things together in a strategic way so your brain can discern the similarities and differences at a deeper level than the text can reasonably convey.
(In this case, to emphasize the differences between だ and です)
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Yeah, pretty much what I’m doing for every grammar point. The only thing I isolate is verb conjugations for the most part.
Btw, I’ve been wanting to ask you if you have any book recommendations about learning, the brain and anything in between? 
You seem quite knowledgeable on it. Just not sure if reading is your thing 
All you really need to know to get around is はい
Anytime anyone says something just say that, you will be good to go!
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Yes. That and “Toy ray wa…”
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What you need is どうも, どうぞ and すみません.
はい is mostly used in conversation to mean “yeah, I’m listening” rather than “yeah, I agree”, so you’re gonna get a lot of blank looks if you go around saying that.
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Hmm… I’ve been reading books and studies on neuroscience, artificial intelligence, and natural language processing since I was 16 (so, about 26 years). Unfortunately, I don’t keep track of book titles, so I don’t think I could give recommendations (sorry… 
).
I can say, though, that my views on learning come more from neuroscience than from studies/literature about learning. I do read studies about learning when I want to compare notes, but in general, I find that neuroscience and theory-of-mind are better at predicting experimental outcomes, and give a better framework for hypothesizing.
I’ll dig through some of my e-books and see what jumps out at me for possible recommendation, though probably none of them are light reading…
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