When we start reading next month, chances are youâll encounter content thatâs covered in the videos youâve seen, andâŠyou wonât recognize them at all. But what happens next is where the magic starts. Either youâll ask, or some else will ask, for help on breaking down that sentence. âI know all the words, but I canât figure out what they mean.â Then a reply will be received with some grammar information to help tie the words together, and thatâs where you may think, âWait, this seems familiar.â
Those whoâve seen enough of my posts are probably tired of seeing me write âpattern matching, pattern matchingâ, but the brain is a pattern matching machine. (Not a very good one, but thatâs beside the point.) Through the volume, youâll encounter the same grammar over and over, and your brain will start to recognize it. Maybe not from reading (as you may not the vocabulary words very well), but rather by seeing it come up again and again in the discussion.
Then, after reading the volume (or even at any time during), if you decided to re-watch a Cure Dolly video on that content, it should seem much more familiar, and maybe even more memorable.
Iâm painting a overly optimistic picture, so donât worry if it doesnât come to you quite that fast. When I read through volume one of ăăĄăă, I looked up every word and every bit of grammar, a process that spanned several months. Next, I read through volume one of ăăăăŸ with the book club here, and I felt like I hardly knew anything. I think it wasnât until later in that year that I started watching Cure Dolly, so Iâd already had some (meager) reading experience.
(Sorry if that was way too wordyâŠ)
Learning the different forms of adjectives took me way longer than Iâd care to admit. Itâs like I had this blind spot where even though I was looking up sample sentences and writing them 20 times each, multiple days per week, if I stopped for a month Iâd completely forget everything I knew about the different forms for adjectives.
I have no explanation for why it was so difficult for me, but I will say this: if anything comes as being too difficult to grasp, donât worry too much about it. You have so much grammar waiting to be learned to let any specific grammar slow you down for too long. If you keep up reading, you will encounter the grammar again and again. So long as you occasionally look them up to ensure you understand it, pattern matching will slowly kick in. (It just takes longer for some of me us than othersâŠ)
It might not get easier right away, but over time youâll start to get a feel for it. ă comes after a noun, and ă is used for the past-tense of verbs that normally end in a " (such as ă).
Once you have a good grasp of 㯠and the topic-comment structure used in Japanese, and the logical particles (such as ă, ă, ă§, ă«, and ăž), thatâll make it easier to use a little detective work on simple sentences to deduce the meaning.