Grammar and Absorption

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.

Related Articles:

• A Grammar Resource
• Overview of the Journey
• Become a Specialist in Japanese
• The Time to Read is Now!  
• Immersion is Key
• Understanding Japanese

Understanding Japanese

Today's article is in response to Jerry's question regarding understanding Japanese.

Early on in the learning process there are so many things to learn that it makes understanding things as a whole quite difficult. Even if you know all of the pieces, understanding how they fit together is another matter entirely. The primary culprits for not understanding are a lack of experience and not knowing grammar – and really the two things are about the same.

Grammar Resource

I promised an article about grammar, so here it is. The main way to pick up grammar rules is to simply experience the language by listening to or reading natural Japanese, but sometimes you can get stuck and not be able to figure out what a certain particle means or just what is going on in a sentence. When you just can't puzzle out what a sentence means on your own (using context and your knowledge of other similar sentences) then you should definitely try looking up some grammar rules to figure it out.

There are many resources for learning grammar, but I've found that Tae Kim's Japanese Grammar Guide works well enough to cover all of the main problems you'll be likely to encounter. Just go on and check out his table of contents and you should be able to find whatever you're looking for.

I'm not really going to recommend any other grammar help sources, as Tae Kim's is the only one I've ever really needed (and even then only looked at it a handful of times). I'll be taking some Japanese courses at my university for fun though, so I may learn some interesting new grammar tricks or sources that I can share at a later date.