For those studying Jlpt grammar would you say that important grammar points (by important I mean ones you’d see used very frequently in conversation) are distributed evenly or more concentrated in earlier levels like N5, N4 and N3? I’m asking because I heard N1 has some less-used grammar (some even kind of archaic?) but I’m not sure if it’s true or not. I think I’ll be finished N3 grammar by Summer but I’m not sure if I’ll still be missing loads of important grammar… I can play some Japanese games right now and often I get the gist of things (I think anyway…) but that’s a game and not real life. x.x…
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Once you get to N3, everything you learn can be rephrased in simpler Japanese. So the N2 and N1 grammar is not going to be the “glue” of the language, but the things that give extra nuance. I’m not sure I’d say that there’s really “archaic” grammar in N1, but some of it is only used in very specific formal or literary contexts. Sometimes that takes the form of classical grammar continuing on into modern usage, but it’s still modern in the contexts it appears.
The later grammar is not important in the same way that the lower level grammar is, but it’s important in a different way. It allows for the expression of various fine grains of nuance, or various ways to change the register.
Without it, serious written Japanese would sound like it was written by middle school students.
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I see, that’s perfect then! And I’m glad to hear N1 grammar is still relevant since it’ll give me motivation to study it haha… I really hope to be able to immerse myself even more in Japanese when I reach N3 then. It sounds like a good time to read a bunch of stuff (not that starting earlier is bad…).
Now, to be fair, that doesn’t mean that it’s easy to study all of that grammar. It becomes increasingly hard to learn things just by encountering them. Because of the fact that it’s about shades of nuance, you have to parse handfuls of very similar grammar points that will seem nearly indistinguishable. And you’ll have to hunt for examples, because they will be too infrequent to just absorb randomly.
But it’s true that many of them are interesting.
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Have you ever encountered grammar that was so similiar to other grammar items that you found no way to distinguish them?
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As in once you finish N3?
I’m currently using Bunpro for grammar, occasionally I look it up myself if a game I play has grammar I didn’t get taught yet. Also using 10k and 5k anki decks that give me example sentences for words/grammar.
What happened to your profile picture?? Where’s the kitty
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https://community.wanikani.com/t/setting-up-an-avatar/39245/9
WE HAVE ASSIMILATED!!!
kitty will return in the foreseeable future
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Holy shit
This explains so much though. Today I was like, why is pragmata replying to this thread twice
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Nah, I’ve seen N3 books explain the grammar using only simpler Japanese grammar.
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