What's your method to stomp grammar?

Japanese Language Grammar
21

It’s no problem. Again, I’m not some Tae Kim fanatic, it’s just that I’ve heard people quote that line in other threads as warnings against Tae Kim, but no one can ever give a more detailed explanation of the errors they are worried about. I hear people disagree with some of his opinions, but most of those have little bearing on the actual substance of most of his reference.

If anything, I’d honestly love to know what these errors that that line is referencing actually are. It would be good info to have. But since I use multiple sources for grammar study anyway, I’m less inclined to worry about any one source’s flaws.

22

I would say to just pick something and start with that.

Plenty of people have used Genki for self study so you can totally use that to get started and while yes, it is pricey, I am pretty sure you can score a used copy easy enough or maybe your local library has a copy… there’s also Japanese for Busy People and Minna No Nihongo to suggest a few more titles…

There are numerous grammar threads in the community that you should take a look at. Everyone is pulling grammar from different sources all of the time which is what you’ll find as you poke around. And everyone has an opinion about these resources which one person might agree with but another will not. I would suggest looking at everything yourself and making a decision. In terms of your learning, there’s no ONE definitive source so even if one place gets it wrong you have the means to review/check elsewhere. Which is to say that you shouldn’t rely on one grammar resource anyways as you get further along…

5 Likes
23

Also take a look at Japanese the Manga Way. I am using it (I have only covered the first few chapters till now) and I think it’s great for me as a beginner. It’s not recommended frequently because of its use of romaji but I feel that it’s less of a problem because you are already learning kanji and you should be getting reading practice other than grammar textbooks anyway.

24

I am curious as how you set up your anki flash cards? Could you elaborate a bit on that, please.

25

Sure! So basically for each grammar point, I take 5-15 example sentences from either the grammar explanation section of the textbook or the exercises. How many sentences I use depends on the difficulty of the grammar point and how well I know it already.

I do E-J sentences, meaning the English meaning shows up and I have to translate it into Japanese. I do this for one main reason. I initially tried J-E, but when I did, I was just memorizing the card itself and not the actual grammar point, if that makes sense. By doing it E-J, it’s testing my ability to produce the answer rather than recognize it. It’s much more difficult to produce rather than recognize, and doing it this way ensures that I genuinely know how the grammar point works.

For the Japanese translation, in order to avoid unnatural language, I almost never create my own sentences from scratch. I use sentences that I find in the textbook or from other credible grammar resources. If I have to create my own, I’ll check on HiNative to make sure what I’m saying sounds correct.

As for the English translation, that’s not as important since I really just need to be able to express the English idea in Japanese. From the English translation, I mainly need to be able to recognize what grammar point is being asked. Sometimes that results in pretty unnatural, literal English translations, but it’s most important that I understand the core meaning so I can produce the Japanese.

As for reviewing and scoring and whatnot, this is what I do. When I see the English prompt, I will try to produce the Japanese in one shot. I give myself three tries to get it right. Usually when I screw up, I’ll know immediately, before I even flip the card, so as long as I haven’t flipped the card, I will try again. Once my three tries are up, I’ll flip the card and see the answer. If I answered word for word, I answer “good”. If I gave an answer that is correct but not exact, I will answer “hard”. If I completely missed the mark, I’ll answer “again”. I only answer “Easy” for grammar points that become too simple, such as XはYです and basic ます forms.

Here are a few pictures of some of my sentence cards:

ankiexample ankiexample2

In the front section, I have the English translation. On the back, the Japanese. In the tags section, I label the grammar point, that way I can search specific grammar points if I need to do a review. My cards are pretty basic honestly. I’ve been looking into plugins such as MIA Japanese which automatically adds audio to your cards, but I just haven’t gotten around to it.

As for my intervals for sentences, I go a little crazy because I want to make sure I really know the material. My intervals are 1m (initial learning), 30m, 1h, 3h, 4h, 6h, 1d. Once it hits 1 day, it graduates at a 200% ease. I only usually add 30-40 new sentence cards a week, so this keeps my workload manageable while still ensuring I retain all the material. I’ve had almost no issues with forgetting content, and when I do, the SRS usually takes care of it.

Once I finish Genki II in a few weeks, I’ve been thinking about sharing my sentence cards on the forums for anyone who is using Genki to use, but I’m not sure about the legality of it since many sentences are taken word-for-word from Genki.

12 Likes
26

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.

5 Likes
27

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.

2 Likes
28

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.

3 Likes
29

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)

2 Likes
30

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)

31

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:

3 Likes
32

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)…

1 Like
33

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.

34

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

2 Likes
35

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

1 Like
36

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!

1 Like
37

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…

1 Like
38

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:

39

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:

1 Like
40

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 )

1 Like