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Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - undead_saif - 2009-01-31
tokyostyle Wrote:That story is really motivating thanxurpwnd Wrote:All the grammar I learned in school (in English) was for nothing.Until you realize that Japanese is not English your entire point is invalid.
My American friend just got fired from his brand new job here in Japan for, among other similar things, not being able to "properly" compose an email that is appropriate to a business setting. He will have only been there a month and is now in the process of packing for a rather unexpected move home. The Japanese written form is not some joke.
If you think you can "naturally" learn what a 20-year-old native speaker has to take classes for then I hope you enjoy your time in urpwnd-fantasy-land. Back here in the real world it is taken very seriously.
and I didn't say I learned English naturally ,I said I use it naturally like my native language (somehow lol) and explained how it wasn't easy, and after all, the foundation of my English was built by the usual grammar learning process
so I'm not in my fantasy land xD lol
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - wccrawford - 2009-01-31
tokyostyle Wrote:It's not even valid in English... Or any other language. There's a reason that every highschool and college in America teaches grammar.urpwnd Wrote:All the grammar I learned in school (in English) was for nothing.Until you realize that Japanese is not English your entire point is invalid.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - snallygaster - 2009-01-31
I'm pretty sure I was never explicitly taught any grammar after elementary school (and that was no more than "identify whether this word is a verb, noun or adjective"). I thought that was pretty normal.
But I agree that as an adult learner of a second language, learning grammar explicitly is extremely beneficial, if not absolutely necessary. It's a benefit, not a burden. Why trust simple exposure to teach you a rule over an inderterminate period of time with no guarantee that you'll ever fully get it, when that same rule might have been fully explained in a sentence or two?
On the other hand, I agree that you'll probably never get a good feel for the grammar without exposure & usage. Learning grammar explicitly isn't the solution, but it's a great tool that you're probably better using than ignoring. IMHO, of course.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - mentat_kgs - 2009-01-31
tokyostyle Wrote:If you think you can "naturally" learn what a 20-year-old native speaker has to take classes for then I hope you enjoy your time in urpwnd-fantasy-land. Back here in the real world it is taken very seriously.Did the boy read the news daily? How much of his free time he spent reading for fun?
It is against these people that he is competing.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - mentat_kgs - 2009-01-31
wccrawford Wrote:There's a reason that every highschool and college in America teaches grammar.Yes, there is. They are misinformed. There are many ways to learn how to write properly. I had many grammar teachers in my life, as here we are taught grammar since 5th grade.
The best one did not taught much grammar. He was not a young guy. He was a retired university professor, ex-catholic priest, with some phd that was having fun teaching high school students.
During half of his time in class, he talked about how the class was not as much important as we read at home. After bad results in tests (not from me) he often supplicated for us to read at home - but some students would just never open a book outside the classroom.
During the other half, he would just read for us selecting the the most interesting sentences and putting them in the black board. After writing them, he would start to ask questions about the sentences and then explaining his view about them. He only mentioned grammar for punctuation, spelling and hints on style.
He was one of the people that made me love languages.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - Mcjon01 - 2009-01-31
tokyostyle Wrote:I'm not at all confused about the chain of conversation. I simply stripped away the context to make a point. Namely, that learning is learning. It doesn't matter at all how your friend studied, when his problem was a lack of appropriate input. It would make no difference, in the end, if he got this input through learning rules about business writing or if he got it by reading hundreds of business letters, the point is that he didn't get it. It's not a matter of natural or unnatural learning, but a lack of learning.Mcjon01 Wrote:This is a forum which means when you get confused about the chain of conversation you can move backward to recall the context.tokyostyle Wrote:If you think you can "naturally" learn what a 20-year-old native speaker has to take classes for then I hope you enjoy your time in urpwnd-fantasy-land.There's a such thing as unnatural learning?
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - undead_saif - 2009-01-31
this topic turned out even better than I expected!!
I got it, After finishing RTK1 I'm gonna make a strong grammatical foundation using ADOBJG (maybe some intermediate if needed) and I may refer to A Dictionary of Japanese Particles too, vocabulary isn't a problem , it comes with kanji completion and grammar learning. after that I should have a good way to go into the spoken language and that can be learned with "fun" learning.
I wanna say that both of u made a point,IMO, Correct Japanese learning should have the right grammatical structure learning and it's not smart to keep studying through lame boring books. thnx
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - kazelee - 2009-01-31
tokyostyle Wrote:I still don't think I can comprehend the Japanese language mastery of a Top-5 university graduate.I don't think I could match the English mastery of a Top-5 university graduate. Heck, I'm hard pressed to believe Japanese graduates of the other not-so-top-5 universities have the same mastery. If they do, more power to them. At the end of the day, all that matters is being able to bitch about your job and rag on your co-workers - regardless of the language spoken. It helps boost morale while as you work till your brain goes numb. JK.
mentat_kgs Wrote:The best one did not taught much grammar. He was not a young guy. He was a retired university professor, ex-catholic priest, with some phd that was having fun teaching high school students.I was worried about where it was going for a moment, but this story is a good one. I wish I had a teacher like that.
During half of his time in class, he talked about how the class was not as much important as we read at home. After bad results in tests (not from me) he often supplicated for us to read at home - but some students would just never open a book outside the classroom.
During the other half, he would just read for us selecting the the most interesting sentences and putting them in the black board. After writing them, he would start to ask questions about the sentences and then explaining his view about them. He only mentioned grammar for punctuation, spelling and hints on style.
He was one of the people that made me love languages.
Quote:There's a reason that every highschool and college in America teaches grammar.They do? Then only thing my highschools (more than one) focused on were MLA format, 5 paragraph style, and comma use. I do remember one grammar lesson being thrown in simply because the teacher felt she "had" to do it (requirements or something). In college the only grammar we covered was comma use and making sure not to use "irregardless." Needless to say, I used irregardless simply because I was told not to do so. What can I say I'm a rebel
.Edit: Oh wait, I remember something about that/which use. I still don't get it.
tokyostyle Wrote:Those are the people with which you are competing if you want to stay here. At least until the no-Japanese-needed finance jobs come back.Are you speaking of the top five U graduates? I'm sure every single company wants one, but they'll settle for what they can get. As long a you hold some value in the field you're going for, and have the minimum language requirements, competition is not really a factor. Prior performance beats pedigree any day -to an intelligent employer that is.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - pm215 - 2009-01-31
kazelee Wrote:Oh wait, I remember something about that/which use. I still don't get it.Don't worry, it was almost certainly wrong anyway.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - Smackle - 2009-01-31
wccrawford Wrote:There's a reason that every highschool and college in America teaches grammar.I would like to say that my high school experience is that they do not teach grammar. There is a lot of reading and writing about what you read. There is no real grammar teaching. My friend's experience with college was about the same.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - undead_saif - 2009-01-31
Smackle Wrote:That's not the case here, we take grammar even in high school but it's not our native language, and our education seems to be one of the good/best systems.wccrawford Wrote:There's a reason that every highschool and college in America teaches grammar.I would like to say that my high school experience is that they do not teach grammar. There is a lot of reading and writing about what you read. There is no real grammar teaching. My friend's experience with college was about the same.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - Wisher - 2009-01-31
Just a note of caution. Tae Kim's Guide is good IF you know Hiragana and Katakana well. Or else, forget. He does this puposely because he wants students to start looking a Kanji right away. If you hold your mouse pointer of the kanji while online, the Hiragana will come up to help you read it.
If you are an absolute beginner, I would go through, Japanese in MangaLand. Then the Barron's book of Japanese grammar.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - mentat_kgs - 2009-01-31
tokyostyle Wrote:Those are the people with which you are competing if you want to stay here. At least until the no-Japanese-needed finance jobs come back.So he reads the nows or not?
The one that takes this course and enjoys habit of reading is the winner.
The one that takes that course and gets only a passing grade is doomed to fail.
The top graduates are top for some reason. If they deemed only to their curriculum, they would not be top.
The greatest Brazilian writer was a grandson of slaves, that never had formal education nor classes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquim_Maria_Machado_de_Assis
It is said that he never really studied grammar, but instead, spent his life reading.
He is known for committing grammar mistakes, which are accepted as part of his style. These mistakes are very hard to spot because they make the text flow better than its corrected version.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - undead_saif - 2009-01-31
Wisher Wrote:Just a note of caution. Tae Kim's Guide is good IF you know Hiragana and Katakana well. Or else, forget. He does this puposely because he wants students to start looking a Kanji right away. If you hold your mouse pointer of the kanji while online, the Hiragana will come up to help you read it.The Kana was the very first step, I'm good with them but I think I'm a bit far from MASTERING them.
If you are an absolute beginner, I would go through, Japanese in MangaLand. Then the Barron's book of Japanese grammar.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - undead_saif - 2009-01-31
mentat_kgs Wrote:so are u saying grammar books can be totally negligible? at least for the basics grammar, it makes learning faster and shows u the guiding lines, maybe the intermediate grammars can be learned through reading. but u have to start from something IMO.tokyostyle Wrote:Those are the people with which you are competing if you want to stay here. At least until the no-Japanese-needed finance jobs come back.So he reads the nows or not?
The one that takes this course and enjoys habit of reading is the winner.
The one that takes that course and gets only a passing grade is doomed to fail.
The top graduates are top for some reason. If they deemed only to their curriculum, they would not be top.
The greatest Brazilian writer was a grandson of slaves, that never had formal education nor classes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joaquim_Maria_Machado_de_Assis
It is said that he never really studied grammar, but instead, spent his life reading.
He is known for committing grammar mistakes, which are accepted as part of his style. These mistakes are very hard to spot because they make the text flow better than its corrected version.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - pm215 - 2009-01-31
tokyostyle Wrote:(As a complete aside I find it really amusing in intermediate courses when teachers try in vain to get students to stop translating things into English to understand them. They don't seem to realize that the previous 2+ years of doing exactly that have instilled that kind of bad habit.)That would be a problem with the basic course, then :-)
(The absolute-beginners course I took was very seriously no-English, to the extent that they insisted that I drew little drawings when doing vocab lists rather than write anything in English... The first abstract noun took a while for them to communicate the meaning to me, but on the other hand I'll never forget 種類 now.)
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - mentat_kgs - 2009-01-31
Yes. That's what I think. When you are acquiring the language, grammar has little effect. It fades away in front of quality input.
I blame my bad English on input from the internet, written mostly by foreigners and listen to German people singing heavy metal. I can copy them perfectly well.
I feel need to improve my English, but I'd never do that trough grammar study. I'd try reading the classics. Btw, what English teachers require you to read other than Shakespeare?
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - mentat_kgs - 2009-01-31
tokyostyle Wrote:Well, if you say that he reads a lot, I'd be puzzled on how someone that reads for fun can be that bad at writing its own language.mentat_kgs Wrote:So he reads the news or not?I don't understand the relevance of this which is why I ignored it the first time.
If you say that he almost never reads the news, nor anything else besides 2chan, I'd keep on believing that I am right, blaming his poor writing skills on his own lack of interest for the written language.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - Mcjon01 - 2009-01-31
mentat_kgs Wrote:I feel need to improve my English, but I'd never do that trough grammar study. I'd try reading the classics. Btw, what English teachers require you to read other than Shakespeare?Usually we ended up reading things drawn from three general groups: English "classics", books pivotal in the development of their genre, and books pivotal in the expression of a social movement. Just glancing at the stuff on my bookshelf that I still have from school, I've got Catch-22, Slaughterhouse-Five and assorted other books by Vonnegut, a metric ton of Edgar Allan Poe, the Invisible Man that's about racism and not refraction, and the obligatory Dickens here and there. Of course, while reading something was always required, we were given flexibility to read pretty much whatever interested us, as long as it had some kind of cultural weight behind it.
Catch-22 and pretty much anything by Vonnegut are awesome, by the way, and I violently recommend them to everybody. I wish I could find Japanese translations, though, simply because I think it would be neat.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - pm215 - 2009-01-31
mentat_kgs Wrote:Btw, what English teachers require you to read other than Shakespeare?(assuming you meant 'what do')
Heinemann have a handy set of lists of the set texts for GCSE and A-Level English (that's the UK exams taken at 16 and 18). Might be worth browsing through.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - pm215 - 2009-01-31
Mcjon01 Wrote:Catch-22 and pretty much anything by Vonnegut are awesome, by the way, and I violently recommend them to everybody. I wish I could find Japanese translations, though, simply because I think it would be neat.BK1 has Japanese versions of Slaughterhouse 5 (and a pile of other Vonnegut, search for ヴォネガット) and also Catch-22 (volume one and two).
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - Thora - 2009-01-31
mentat_kgs Wrote:It looks like Tokyostyle did answer this (BROKEN LINK) heretokyostyle Wrote:Well, if you say that he reads a lot, I'd be puzzled on how someone that reads for fun can be that bad at writing its own language.mentat_kgs Wrote:So he reads the news or not?I don't understand the relevance of this which is why I ignored it the first time.
If you say that he almost never reads the news, nor anything else besides 2chan, I'd keep on believing that I am right, blaming his poor writing skills on his own lack of interest for the written language.
I'll add that newspapers, novels and business writing have different styles. Reading one wouldn't really help you write the other.
Similar to the business email example, I worked at hotel in Osaka during university, we all had to take lessons in telephone Japanese. I'm sure the Japanese girls had spent many hours having fun on the phone, but that wasn't enough to get the polite phone Japanese right. (I must have been hopeless - someone always rushed to answer the phone before me....)
People find ways creative ways to motivate themselves through the un-fun stuff. There's always a bigger picture.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - mentat_kgs - 2009-01-31
Sorry, but you should read that again more carefully.
He does not answer my question in that post.
The Japanese girls that talk a lot at the phone and read the news and literature regularly (manga is only an appetizer) would do fine answering the phone in a hotel.
Btw, I heard Mac Donald's offer training to sweep the floor. But that doesn't mean one cannot learn how to sweep the floor on its own.
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - nest0r - 2009-01-31
I believe in using what Costas Gabrielatos calls 'condensed reading' to supplement one's learning--using corpora, bodies of examples based on representative samples (both general and specific) of actual language use, condensing both extensive reading to develop one's intuition with specialized, intensive focus on specific language features. That way you're not focusing on the same old dry textbook recommendations, nor taking a purely arbitrary approach. As we develop new software in the context of self-study, it becomes easier for learners to become researchers and developers of their own materials as they try to develop their own native-like intuition based on a mental corpus. See zort's instructions for making Anki decks from your favourite media, or the capabilities of iKnow to create and share one's own lists for just two of many examples.
I also agree with Gabrielatos on using descriptive grammar sources based on ongoing research as objective, open-ended guidelines for language usage, swifter and more reliable than just pure intuition. But of course, it should be a supplement to actual input, but that's what we've been arguing for all along, learning through context and using the adult brain to make it more efficient, rather than infantilizing yourself and hiding from the grammar bogeyman.
Links here: http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?pid=40741#pid40741
Tae Kim's guide, A Dictionary of basic Japanese grammar or AJATT?? - Thora - 2009-02-01
mentat_kgs Wrote:Sorry, but you should read that again more carefully.Hi Mentat. At first I thought you might have just missed his answer. I now understand you were hoping for a yes/no type answer. I would suggest that a "The question is irrelevant b/c" is just a different type of answer. Repeating the question got you the same answer: the question is moot.
He does not answer my question in that post.
I think the misunderstanding may have been that you're seeing it as a general language competency issue, while he's seeing it as a language specialization issue.
Quote:Well, if you say that he reads a lot, I'd be puzzled on how someone that reads for fun can be that bad at writing its own language. If you say that he almost never reads the news, nor anything else besides 2chan, I'd keep on believing that I am right, blaming his poor writing skills on his own lack of interest for the written language.*Not being familiar with business style does not mean one writes poorly generally. It's not a matter of difficulty, but of conforming to accepted standards.
*Japanese has fixed formats, expressions and levels of politeness in some business (and other) situations. Your assumption that b/c no special knowledge is required for business English therefore nothing is required for business Japanese is not correct.
*Reading news and literature has no bearing on whether someone is good at this kind of writing. A person with sufficient business vocabulary and good language skills will still want to familiarize themselves with business writing conventions.
(This was the gist of Tokyostyle's first answer.)
Quote:The Japanese girls that talk a lot at the phone and read the news and literature regularly (manga is only an appetizer) would do fine answering the phone in a hotel. Btw, I heard Mac Donald's offer training to sweep the floor. But that doesn't mean one cannot learn how to sweep the floor on its own.Well, despite what you assume, people do feel the need to study and practice polite phone Japanese.
I can see how this would be hard to imagine without experiencing just how formalized polite hospitality Japanese is. Again, news and literature has nothing to do with it. This is entirely about being able to use keigo perfectly. People use some form of keigo in their daily life, but not everyone has reason to use the high level used for customers and hotel guests. Whether they do it at company lessons or on their own with any of the many books is irrelevant. The point is that people supplement their regular language with specialized materials for a specific purpose.
I hope this was of some help - apologies for butting in.