What's your method to stomp grammar?

Bunpro is great for learning grammar. I feel like I made a lot of progress in a little time thanks to bunpro. I got the free month and then I subscribed to life time since I really really love it and I feel like I’m learning a lot. I have a lot of books, but nowadays I can’t really make myself learn them. Bunpro has SRS, examples and outside links to study them. I find it really great.

I also try to write something using the grammar points I studied and recently I’ve been enjoying HelloTalk for this.

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love Bunpro too. I’d use it just for the practice of fill-out sentences using grammar points and SRS.
The grammar descriptions are concise, but rich in information, and the example sentences hammer it in.

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Ah romaji, I must confess that the more I learn, the more I try to distance myself from it. It has its use but like I can’t get my eyes off subtitles during a movie, I can’t force myself not to read romaji when it’s there.

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That sounds like it would take a lot of effort on your part to figure out the structures all on your own, when a teacher and/or textbook can explain what’s happening and save you time and brain power :sweat_smile:

The thing I find helpful with text books like Genki, rather than pure grammar guides like Tae Kim’s, is the guided exercises for production practice.
I don’t know how others feel, but if I don’t do exercises after learning about a grammar point, I tend not to recognize stuff as well in the wild…

Bunpro helps me for part of the drilling, but as a complement - because it’s mostly just gap filling, whereas I often have to write more stuff with exercises from my book or teacher…(whole sentences, paragraphs, etc)

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You’re not really supposed to remember the sentences, but the patterns, which your brain will do subconsciously.
This is not something your teacher can do for you.
They can explain how the grammar works, but that’s not enough.
The classic example is “a red big dog”. Sounds wrong, right? It should be “a big red dog”. Now, there’s a grammar rule for this in English which specifies the order of 8 types of adjectives before a noun, but noone recalls that rule for saying “a big red dog”, you just internalize the pattern.

So yes, even though grammar theory helps you understand many things, reading a large amount of sentences is how you internalize the language so that you can read, listen to and speak it quickly.
So my method is learning theory first so that i can understand things intellectually, then mass immersion to consolidate it. (i think MIA neglects the first step a bit)

Along with Genki, bunpro, and cure doll videos, I’m following WaniKani bookclubs:

You can check current weekly threads for absolute beginner and beginner. Sentences are parsed, grammar points are explained, along with colloquial patterns, dialects etc. Real practical application of all theoretical knowledge :slight_smile:

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Yeah I totally get the point of and advocate for extensive reading - but “looking at sentences and remembering them” (posted by the OP) is a lot more work than grammar by targeted example sentences.

I learned most of my French that way without explicitly learning grammar (lack of funds and internet wasn’t as awesome 13 years ago) - mostly by reading through long medical documentation with a (paper) dictionary, looking up words I’d hear on the bus, and watching terrible TV. It was much harder and stressful than the “hand holding” approach I’ve had for Japanese so far (even though French is closer to English and I was living in France)…

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Yeah, that’s why i think something like Bunpro almost replaces immersion, though maybe the number of example sentences isn’t high enough. And critically, there’s no context around them.

Think about the phrase “big deal”. You may learn that “no big deal” means not important, but you’ll probably not have an example sentence “Who cares if i was late? Big deal!”, where “big deal” is used sarcastically, until you hear it a few times in immersion. Not the best example, but anyways.

Yep I found Bunpro only recently and love it so far - mostly for the example sentences and drilling the patterns through example.
It’s a great resource for reinforcing stuff I struggle with in my lessons - and even without the important context you described perfectly in your example, in the wild I recognize far better the structures I’ve drilled in Bunpro than the ones I only read about :sweat_smile:

Grammar and I aren’t the best friends but we manage

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Exactly, i love Bunpro too, and i think just the fill-out drilling of grammar on example sentences is worth gold :slight_smile:

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Hey, thanks for mentioning Cure Dolly on this thread! I randomly clicked on this from the main site and your post interested me enough to check her out, and oh man, it really clicked with me! Definitely gonna make my way through her stuff. She doesn’t seem to be very popular yet, so I might not have come across her if not for this random post, so yeah, thanks!

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I use bunpro to introduce new grammar points and srs them and then I try and use some of them on hellotalk…
Of course I try to read books but I don’t learn from them because I try to only get the meaning while I need conscious sentence construction to learn grammar…

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Not related to the topic but I have read your bio and I thought your name was japanese :sweat_smile: by the way you could even replace hine by hime, it even has the same meaning, sounds cool :smile:

Hah yeah I guess it does kind of look/sound like Japanese (it’s maori, from NZ).
I didn’t know the word ひめ, thanks for teaching me that :sweat_smile:

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maybe you are not a “visual learner” after all. there are other types of acqisition methods.
other day we were practicing moraimasu, agemasu, karimasu and kashimasu verbs and their meanings. the drill is composed of students giving or taking items and talking about the direction of the action.
according to our teacher, some folks learn easier with this type of practice ( which has physical and verbal components )

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But, but… Mononoke-hime :scream:

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I haven’t seen that yet! But a whole lot of Ghibli movies are coming to Netflix next month and I’m so excited :heart_eyes:

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I’m a former high school English teacher, and I spent a lot of years teaching grammar. To stomp grammar in any language, you need to understand subjects, direct objects, indirect objects, and verbs, both transitive and intransitive. Transitive verbs require a direct object, as in “Raise the curtain.” Intransitive verbs can’t take direct objects, “The curtain rises.” In English, we have no way to identify these building blocks of speech other than sentence order: Mother (subject) brought (verb) the children (indirect object) lunches (direct object). If you put these sentence pieces in a different order, it doesn’t make sense: The children lunches brought mother.

In Japanese, it’s easy to know what each building block is because of the particles. Subjects are marked with が. ははが Indirect objects are marked with に and means to/for. They usually come before the direct object. こどもたちに Direct objects come after the indirect object and before the verb. ひるごはんを Verbs come at the end of the sentence. もってきました。So, the sentence in the correct grammatical order reads: ははが こどもたちに ひるごはんを もってきました。Japanese word order is a bit freer than English because the grammatical function of each piece is marked. Consider こどもたちに ははが ひるごはんを もってきました。It still means the same thing, but the word order is different. “For the children, mother brought lunches.”

It works the same way when using phrases instead of single words. こどもたちのははが The children’s mother こどもたちに for the children こどもたちのだいすきなひるごはんを the children’s favorite lunches もってきました brought. You can add other phrases about where the children were, the time of day, why mother brought the lunches, but the basic structure remains the same. ___ が ___に ___を ___ verb.

If you memorize this sequence and the particles used to identify each part, you will be able to create a grammatically sentence regardless of how complicated the individual pieces become. As you learn more sophisticated grammar, you will be able to add the appropriate additional information to the basic sentence, like this: びよういんのあとで ははが くるまで がっこうにいるこどもたちに おいしいひるごはんを もってきました。Beauty salon after mother (subject) by car for the children in school (indirect object) delicious lunches (direct object) brought (verb) OR After the beauty salon, Mother drove to the children’s school and brought them delicious lunches. The extra pieces in this sentence are a prepositional phrase (After the beauty salon), another prepositional phrase (by car), another prepositional phrase (in school), and an adjective (delicious). Otherwise, the sentence structure is the same.

Now I’m learning how to make each part of the sentence more elaborate with more sophisticated word choices. But no matter how ornate the sentences become, I know how to keep them following the basic order of sentence pieces. That’s how I stomp grammar.

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That is a very interesting approach, it sounds suited to a grammar beginner like me. Thank you for pitching in !

I hope it helps you. SB