I've been thinking about grammar some more recently, largely due to my experiences with classroom Japanese. My previous statements regarding grammar have been to forget about it and to focus instead on understanding sentences and immersing in media, because grammar will fall into place naturally. While I still believe this, I also believe that actually learning “rules” can really help to solidify the trends that are found in Japanese. Allow me to explain a bit more in depth by talking about my experiences with learning English as a child.
As as child, I read a lot of books and obviously spent a lot of time surrounded by people speaking pure English, so I was absorbing a lot of grammar forms and ideas simply by living. However, I also attended school and learned grammar rules, sentence structures, and all of those other horribly boring things. Despite having all of these rules drilled into my head, I still found myself determining if English was correct or not based purely on feel – it's an intuitive thing. I find myself in that same situation once again with Japanese. I have been learning and absorbing all of these trends by living in Japanese, and now I have an intuitive sense about what is correct Japanese and what is not.
So where does school fit into all of this? Schooling, or learning grammar to be more specific, serves the purpose to make us take greater notice of the trends and patterns that are found in language. I believe that devoting some time to actually learning grammar will make us take greater notice of particular forms, structures, and trends while we are immersed in the target language. By paying more attention, we can harness and use these same structures more easily when forming new thoughts in Japanese.
What exactly does all of this mean? Basically that grammar could use a bit more attention if you're interested in producing original Japanese faster. While using only absorption works perfectly fine for understanding Japanese (input), when it comes time for producing your own Japanese (output) you'll find that it's a completely different beast. By paying closer attention to grammar (by reading a grammar guide, doing a grammar workbook, or attending classes, etc) you'll get a better grasp of grammar in less time, so that you can improve your output faster. Absorption and simply producing Japanese will do the same, but investing some time in focused grammar study can make the process faster and easier.
In essence, I will now be looking into some grammar resources and sharing my findings with you all at a later date.
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Yeah, this is pretty much what I get out of my Japanese class, aside from random vocabulary every now and then I've yet to pick up on my own.
ReplyDelete>grammar could use a bit more attention if you're interested in producing original Japanese faster. While using only absorption works perfectly fine for understanding Japanese (input)
ReplyDeleteI like reading your posts for tidbits like this. You're amazing.
I'm a little ashamed to say that I haven't even started on my journey, though.