Japanese grammar

6 comments

1. Ur really asking how to speak better rather than how to get better at grammar it seems

2. The trick is to spend more time using the grammar, instead of learning it.
   It’s easy to read about a grammar point, write it down, and understand it in the moment, but it won’t retain after that point.

   Try taking a grammar point you don’t understand, just one. Something you’ve noticed yourself struggling a bit with.
   Study it for about 30 minutes to an hour. Learn as much detail about the grammar point as you want. Just the general idea of how to use it.

   Then, write down different sentences of it being used. Let’s say 10 different sentences. Without looking at any notes. Make mistakes if you need to, just write them down.
   Then check how correct they are. Find the mistakes you made, reflect, and take a 5 min break.
   Rewrite the sentences you got wrong, again with no notebook. Repeat this until everything is correct. Make sure you’re speaking it allowed as you write, if you can.
   Do this for around maybe an hour or two, whatever works for you.

   This is something that works for me, so I recommend it!

3. Is your question *how to memorize grammar*? Or is it *how to output*?

4. There’s written vs spoken — grammar is much looser (not non-existent, but looser) for speaking, and speaking naturally in Japanese involves a lot of short cuts. For that I find it’s best to listen to a lot of native material and imitate what you are hearing in terms of the patterns of speech, how Japanese people say things, how they express themselves, what patterns they follow for natural speech flow. That’s a more pertinent way to approach that, because if you do that successfully, you will speak properly for “spoken grammar” for the most part (here YouTube and podcasts and dramas and such are much better than anime, because anime doesn’t use natural, street Japanese, often).

   For written … a good way is to look at sentence patterns. Spend some time learning the rules, but don’t spend time trying to memorize them — what you’re looking to do isn’t to think about grammar rules, but to establish a natural “flow” in your writing. The way to do that is to work with sentence patterns to see, again, how Japanese use their grammar rules to express themselves in writing — how it generally flows in Japanese writing that is written by a native. There are books and other materials available online that have sentence patterns that you can study, some people use flash cards for them but not everyone does that — more important is to get a lot of familiarity with the common patterns so that they start to just “sound right” and “feel right” in your head, so that you can then more naturally express yourself with them when you sit down to write, rather than trying to write by grammar rules, per se. You will make some mistakes (but you will also do that when you are trying to start by thinking about the rules anyway), but you’ll be closer to getting to the kind of flow you need to write Japanese. Writing is … hard. That’s “advanced mode”, to be honest (I mean writing beyond simple sentences … everyone can write simple sentences from fairly early on in their Japanese study, but really writing like you write in your native language is quite a challenge, so you should expect it to be difficult to get there).

5. To use the grammar, you have to practice the grammar yourself…studying for the jlpt is easier because you just have to punch rules into your brain…..and review with input….

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   but to speak using such grammar, the only way to get better at it is speaking, attempting specifically to use it in what you think may be the correct situation to use it.

6. If you passed N3 you might have memorized at least some grammar rules?

   Output is like a practice thing, hire a tutor on iTalki and start speaking, even if you just need to say basic stuff.