I’ve been shifting through Lessons 5 - 7 and having a hard time grasping the adjectives, verbs, and their Te-forms. I’m in a bit of a slump at this point, and feel like I’m just confusing myself even more by haphazardly going through: Anki, Kaniwani, and Genki for vocab memorization. Any tips on how I should tackle this?
何かじょげんをありがとう!
EDIT: Thank you for all the suggestions! I’ve been doing a lot of exercises with these tips in mind and I’ve made less and less mistakes, making me a bit more comfortable with sentence structure
What is your exact problem? Are you having difficulties memorising the て-form rules? You will get used to it with practice. So do the exercises, don’t be afraid to make mistakes, and then check if your answers are correct (and if not, why). It’s learning by doing that helped me a lot.
When you said the voice filter might be too much, you weren’t kidding! But after a few rewatches I feel like I’ve gotten better at remembering some conjugations now. Thanks!
Are you doing the lessons and the workbook as well?
I find more helpful to see the verb in different phrases than to re-read the grammar explanation over and over again. It’s unlikely that you’re going to memorize them just by reading the concept. But after seeing them several times in context, you’ll start reconizing the patterns in the conjugations.
So, at least to me, it’s easier to know that 食べて is the ~て form of 食べる after seeing it in use than to memorize the rule that the ending ~る will become ~て. Just be patient and it’ll stick eventually.
Also, if you haven’t tried yet, Bunpro will do magic in helping memorizing this sort of stuff. You can try it for a month for free. So you can jump straight into those specific lessons and give it a try!
(as a site note, the Genki website suggests at least 9 hours per chapter. So, quite a lot of time".
When I learned て-form in my Japanese class, my professor made a song out of it! We used the tune of “Oh, My Darling Clementine”.
う-つ-るって (Oh, my darling) (-うverbs ending in -る)
む-ぶ-ぬんで (Oh, my darling)
くいて ぐいで (Oh, my darling, Clementine)
すして するして (You were lost and gone forever)
くるきて (dreadful sorrow)
てフォーム！ (Clementine)
If you remember this song, you only have to remember that る-verbs conjugate as just “て”.
This is right where I am in Genki…I just can’t get into it. I want to move past chapter 6. This is actually my second time getting up to this point. I didn’t study for like 3 years and forgot everything so I did it again…and stopped at the same place, halfway through 6.
I find making example sentences using the new word/conjugation with other words I already know really helps things stick in my head! It’s much easier to remember something with context than on its own!
Try writing all the rules down a couple of times then sit and drill it on this site Japanese Projects | Steven Kraft , no need to know all the verbs, just check the last character and practice the conjugations. If you do that for a few minutes a day it’ll start to become natural (at least for me it did!)
