I'm reading a book right now (時をかける少女) and finding that I can't really tell when I know a piece of grammar or not. Obviously if I see a verb I recognise, but don't recognise the conjugation, then I know I'm missing something. But I'm doing the "tadoku" method, which means when I encounter something I don't fully understand, I skip over it as long as I get the general meaning of the sentence. Clearly I must be jumping over a whole load of stuff I think I (mostly) understand, but probably don't at all.
One example is passive and causative. I never really studied this formally, so I roughly recognise it when it comes up, but I do sometimes get confused. Even if I mistake something for passive when it isn't, or even mix up transitive/intransitive, the following sentences and context will make the proper meaning and direction of the verbs clear, so I probably initially don't understand and then fill it in later. Thing is, I don't notice I'm doing this – it's not like I think "I don't understand this", I just glide over the sentence and it sits in my brain subconsciously where its meaning is gradually filled in over time, just like a regular English sentence (but with less understanding and no guarantee of correctness).
Another example is those long strings of kana. When a sentence ends with something like Xという思ってかしらだったのか or some other indirect, unintelligible amalgamation of random stuff, my mind just glazes over and I go "yeah she maybe thinks something something X, whatever". But I'm sure I'm losing a lot of nuance. Is this something I will naturally pick up over time, or will I actually have to sit down and properly study it?
by otah007
21 comments
Not necessarily.
Doing that just will take up most of your time for little benefit.
You should consider to read and listen more.
Your approach to reading is sound, it’s exactly what I did. However, I would recommend that you study grammar in between major books you read. After going through a whole book, you should have the framework you need to understand most of it. If there’s something you don’t understand when you study grammar, don’t worry about it and just return to it later after doing more reading. That nearly always resolved the issue for me.
It certainly doesn’t hurt to look up constructions you come across and take note of them, it’ll save you from a lot of headache in the long run
Not just from a learning perspective but to actually understand and enjoy whatever it is you are reading
Time and lots of input for sure. Eventually the easily intuited grammar becomes so easy that the slightly harder grammar stands out even more. And there’s honestly not a whole lot of “hard” grammar. After appoximately 700 hours of reading as of today, I might briefly Google something to get the general gist of its meaning. That’s usually enough. I reflect on where I’ve seen it and try to be conscious of it going forward. Sometimes I’ll have to Google it again. But at this point, you can consider this a type of SRS. Eventually, I’ll just remember it. Given even more time, I’ll master it. There’s no going backwards in learning.
Just recently, I had to Google つつある because it happened to be extremely uncommon within the particular works I had been reading until now. (It’s essentially fancy -ている by the way.)
As for your last point, I wouldn’t just “glaze over something”. Try to break it down and understand it. If it takes more than 10 seconds, move on.
You can understand most grammar without studying it, but you need to properly learn it if you want to write correctly and convey your thoughts accurately. For example, it’s pretty hard to know should you use せる or させる with some verb without studying the rules, at least for me. (You use せる with 五段 verbs like 書かせる and させる with 一段 verbs like 出させる).
Surprised at the comments here because, yeah, you do need to study it formally.
Small changes in grammar dramatically alter the meaning of a sentence in Japanese.
I used to think you can learn Japanese without formally studying grammar and guess what, I was wrong. Even if you learn sentence patterns, you need to understand what grammar to use for what, such as te form, particles etc (if we are talking basics). As my tutor told me after hearing my “brilliant” plan to just learn through conversation and listening skills because I just wanted to focus on conversation and not reading: you can learn all the vocabulary, you can copy all sentences, but it wont help you creating or understanding more complex sentences and for that, you need the grammar. After 6 months of grammar study, I can see my communication skills progress significantly.
Imho the passive and causative grammar points are really important basics that you should sit down and learn properly. Same goes for the potential and imperative forms. Maybe you get confused when you encounter the causative passive form? I don’t know. If you notice you are skipping over the same patterns or words you should eventually look them up.
I mean language is like a cipher. If you don’t have the key to the cipher your brain might eventually decode it through pattern recognition but especially at lower levels that would require way more time and input than just looking things up and learning them properly.
Once you have a very solid understanding of the basics then immersing yourself and getting tons of input becomes more important because at this point you want to pick up nuances and slight differences in meaning.
I just look into things that I’m not sure about as it comes up
The major problem with this method is that you have no feedback system. You don’t know when you are wrong, so you also never know for sure when you are right or how to use the expressions in other situations than just the ones you encounter. It is hard for your brain to learn anything when there are no right/wrong labels. Just like supervised learning needs labels to figure out what features say something about a certain thing, or are good at predicting stuff, your brain needs feedback as well. What you’re doing now is kind of like unsupervised learning, i.e. you’re finding some general patterns in the data, but you’re not entirely sure what they actually mean, or if they mean anything.
When kids learn by being exposed to the language, they have a feedback loop that is their caregivers, peers, teachers, etc. When they say or understand something wrong, they are mostly corrected or explained by other people. Thus, they have a constant feedback loop. They have labels. You have no feedback loop except for when you might get lucky and notice the pattern you thought you knew isn’t working the same way when reading another sentence. And even kids learn the grammar of their language in school in order to write it properly.
So yeah, you’re definitely missing out on a lot by not studying grammar. Honestly, I find grammar so much fun, it’s just like discovering a new little puzzle or piece of logic each time that I almost immediately can hear or recognize in speech afterwards. The hit of dopamine when it suddenly makes sense when something says something in just that way you just studied is out of this world lol.
It probably depends on what your goals are. If your main goal is reading comprehension and following along with stories then congrats you are already doing that.
I personally don’t think it’s necessary to follow any structured grammar plan or textbook. I think you can just follow your curiosity and look specific things up that you want to know more about.
In my experience, learning grammar in isolation without reading is like hard mode. It’s way easier for me to review grammar that I have already encountered naturally.
Any language you are going to have to have grammar deep dives at some point; immersion just isn’t going to cover all the nuance, rules, etc. I don’t think you necessarily need a textbook or tutor, but you will need something (YouTube, Podcasts, a native) to explain it to you in detail.
For me I usually learn the basic grammar I need to function, stop, then learn vocabulary to the point where its comfortable, then really dig into grammar points. It always takes several iterations; at least for the complicated stuff.
It’s pretty essential to know at least the fundamental stuff. る versus れる versus られる can be the entire difference between doing something to someone, someone doing something to you, or being able to do something.
Not knowing this stuff will leave you with a bunch of nouns and actions, but no idea of how they’re relating to each other, and that’s missing so much of the meaning that I don’t think it can even really be said to be understanding the sentence.
Need? No, but it’ll certainly be faster.
> Obviously if I see a verb I recognise, but don’t recognise the conjugation, then I know I’m missing something. But I’m doing the “tadoku” method, which means when I encounter something I don’t fully understand, I skip over it as long as I get the general meaning of the sentence. Clearly I must be jumping over a whole load of stuff I think I (mostly) understand, but probably don’t at all.
Truth be told, from the way Japanese is often translated and the way even many advanced Japanese readers whose own sentences when they produce them seem entirely lacking in onomatopœia, normal sentence ending particles, things such as ending sentences on “〜んだ” or “〜ちゃった。” I honestly gain the feeling that there are many people who when they read Japanese simply treat whatever they don’t understand as “noise” and ignore it’s existence and approach the sentence as though it were not there. The issue with many parts of speech is that the sentence will still make sense that way so they never really think about the meaning and they just ignore it and in my experience people can get quite far in Japanese while still not having gained an appreciation of these things at all.
If you ask me this method is hurtful and you should when you encounter some piece of grammar or sentence ending probably look up what it means. Looking it up in words won’t give one a proper feel for it the first time around, but it will allow one to build a feel better each time one encouners it when one cognitively, though not intuitively sort of knows what kind of function it’s supposed to fulfill.
> Is this something I will naturally pick up over time, or will I actually have to sit down and properly study it?
Maybe one will “eventually”, but I’m going to say that even professional translators of Japanese very often just treat these things as complete noise judging from how they translate and the subtitles rarely cover the correct nuance in my opinion and they’re evently quite far in.
I would say yes. Think about sports. You can just start watching and playing to get some idea about it, but isn’t it better to at least get the rules first before you try yourself? You can learn through practice, but rules at the outset will make your practice easier.
Yes you do. Especially because certain constructions are not intuitive at all in their use of negatives, passives, past and -te forms, or of common nouns. Sometimes there are similar constructions with an entirely different meaning depending on small details (a basic example would be -te kara vs -ta/-ru kara, or the several constructions involving wake).
yes you need to learn grammar
no you don’t necessarily need to do sentence diagrams or study the formal breakdown of japanese grammar like distinguishing renyoukei from rentaikei
but you’ll be making things extremely hard understanding anything beyond basics if you never learn what passive voice is or how verb phrases can directly modify nouns
all further sentence patterns, which constitute most of japanese learning by volume, hinge on being able to understand at a minimum what kind of thing can connect to what kind of thing and roughly why
while reading, it’s totally fine to skip something you don’t know and keep plugging away… BUT… DO actually go back for it, don’t just ignore it forever. learning purely by osmosis with no direct lookup ever is extremely inefficient
***”unintelligible amalgamation of random stuff, my mind just glazes over and I go “yeah she maybe thinks something something X, whatever”.*** **But I’m sure I’m losing a lot of nuance.”**
I genuinely don’t want to come across as harsh, but from the perspective of someone that spent years doing translations in an academic setting this is a *really really* bad way of looking language. You’re not missing ‘nuance’ you’re just not understanding fundamental aspects of the language. It’
If you’re *okay* with not understanding that’s cool. I’m a big fan of immersing in stuff where I’m only getting 30% of it provided I’m having fun. But I do this in full awareness of all the vocabulary and grammar I’m ignorant of. I’m aware of my own ignorance and I don’t refer to in my head as ‘random stuff.’
My personal opinion on this is that how much grammar study you need to do to an extent depends upon how much metalinguistic knowledge you’ve got. I managed to blast through tae kim in a week. But I’ve got years studying grammar in other languages in an environment where I’d get verbally decapitated if I failed to render a passive correctly. If you’re coming at Japanese without a lot of knowledge of linguistics I’d definitely do Genki 1+2 or Tae kim – something like that.
Edit: Oh, if you love games there’s also a series up on Youtube on every JLPT grammar point up to N2 you can watch. That’s a great solution if you hate text books (or they give you PTSD like they do me)
I don’t know how tadoku works exactly, but if I were to do it without looking things up or formally studying it (which does sound like a good idea, though it’s too late for me for that), I wouldn’t exactly just skip it. I would read it, but not dwell on it. I mean, if it’s just a void in the text for you, how do you ever fill the void?
My opinion- studying grammar creates a level of efficiency to speak and understand but you don’t need to study every point since once you know a few examples of a few basic constructions its not hard to acquire the more advanced constructions through listening.
Grammar is not something you should put too much effort into, but having basic understanding of it is good. The only grammar I studied was Tae Kims, then from there it was just pure immersion. Passed N1 scoring around 150.