I know other users here are familiar with Yuyu’s Japanese Podcast (if you aren’t I recommend checking him out!), and the episode I was listening to today was really neat, so I thought I’d share it here. Then maybe people can discuss how they feel about it. Sorry in advance if it’s a kinda long post:
April 9th, Vol. number 266, starting from the \~36:00 mark
The gist was:
Japanese children learn words naturally, and when they do, they learn the word and its particle (は・が・に・を・で) as a set. Then when speaking Japanese, they sort of follow a basic script of は+で+を and just change out the words as needed.
Things like: 私はレストランでビールを飲みます、私は学校で漢字を勉強します. It takes \~3 seconds to fill in the blanks when you just swap out the words
But Yuyu found that students in his Japanese classes almost always form their sentences the opposite way. They think of the words they want to use and spend like 20 seconds debating on what particle they need to use, leading to confusion and a lack of ability to progress in their conversational skills.
He compared it to learning Spanish. Kids in Latin America don’t learn “taco” and then think “it ends in an ‘o’ so that means the particle must be el”, but rather just learn the word as “el taco”, hence why they don’t make mistakes with el/la the way people learning Spanish as a second language would.
So in Yuyu’s opinion, textbooks should not do those exercises where you look at a bunch of sentences and only fill in the particles. But rather, you should see blanks for all the other words except particles, and learn how to construct sentences from that.
Now for the discussion… what do you think? Did you learn particles the way most students do (so opposite of what Yuyu recommends)? Do you struggle with particles? What have you done to master them?
by Sayjay1995