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Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - slimmjim - 2012-02-18
I'm curious if anyone here has followed AJATT's advice not to specifically study grammar points but to absorb a feeling for it organically through lots of sentences and exposure. If so has it worked for you?
And what is everyone's thoughts on doing this?
Thanks.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - yudantaiteki - 2012-02-18
Personally I think it's a terrible idea, although you get confusing responses on this because different people mean different things when they say "study grammar".
Of course you need to read/listen to Japanese a lot, and you should be doing that a lot more than reading grammar explanations. But to completely avoid grammar explanations is failing to take advantage of the shortcuts that they can provide.
I base a good amount of this on my own experience. I had lived in Japan for 2 years (and not in a foreigner bubble) and passed JLPT 1, and then when I went back to grad school I had to teach grammar to the undergrads and I had to go back and read some of the basic grammar explanations again. I found that there was a lot I had misunderstood or just never knew, and both my production and comprehension improved a lot from those English explanations.
One of the biggest dangers of inductive/"organic" learning of grammar is that you'll learn it wrong. People will claim that you will automatically fix your mistakes or learn things the more you study, but this didn't happen for me (and it goes against the "fossilization" idea in pedagogical study).
Also, until you really get a lot of experience and then learn even more, you never realize how much of something you can fail to understand, while still feeling like you're "getting it".
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Tzadeck - 2012-02-18
Studying grammar is a must if you want to be good, pretty much. Anyone who tells you otherwise is silly (and probably is not very good at Japanese, even if they say they are).
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - HonyakuJoshua - 2012-02-18
x2 I have lived in Japan for ten days and got my uni degree without going to Japan which the 日本人teaching us described as a miracle. I am a rare case, but I have been studying languages for ten years and have never known anyone learn a foreign language to any degree of skill without using a textbook for grammar.
At uni one person had lived in Japan for over five years and started the course for beginners (the uni wanted his money). he still needed to study grammar from a textbook.
Does AJATT actually say that?!?!
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Omoishinji - 2012-02-18
Grammar is one strange creature, but you need to study it a the basic and intermediate level. However, how to study it is a different issue.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - nadiatims - 2012-02-18
Define "study grammar."
I'm tempted to jump in on the side of the no grammar crowd (though i have used textbooks in the past). If you're reading sentences and trying to figure them, look up words, compare to translations etc, I don't think that's grammar study per say, but it will teach you grammar. I also agree with yudantaiteki, that completely ignoring grammar is just avoiding shortcuts. It's all a matter of balance though. Quickly reading through a grammar guide without expecting necessarily to fully absorb it is a good idea, as is occasionally googling/asking about it. However, trying to learn all your grammar from textbooks in a highly procedural manner and spending a lot of time drilling, filling in blanks etc is a poor use of your time.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Rina - 2012-02-18
I stopped studying grammar like 1.5 years ago. From that time on, instead of studying I just added grammar sentences to anki. Making exercises is frustrating and a waste of time, in my opinion. And if you search for my posts you'll find out that I used to be a fan of textbooks.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - vix86 - 2012-02-18
yudantaiteki Wrote:One of the biggest dangers of inductive/"organic" learning of grammar is that you'll learn it wrong. People will claim that you will automatically fix your mistakes or learn things the more you study, but this didn't happen for me (and it goes against the "fossilization" idea in pedagogical study).And this is whats so fascinating about Child language acquisition. It doesn't matter where you are from, who your parents are, given ample stimulus children will learn a language more perfectly than most adult L2 learners, without ever realizing it. This is why it always baffles me that people say that adults and kids are probably on equal grounds in learning yet adults will still fumble up certain parts of the language that kids just won't do after they have had enough exposure.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - nadiatims - 2012-02-18
the thing with kids, is they get to spend their whole day on task. They also learn from comprehensible contexts; parents, and teachers speak to them at their level, the other kids don't have advanced vocabulary, they're watching sesame street and disney movies not world news. When they learn a word, that becomes the word they use in their head. It is harder for these kinds of activities to stay interesting for an adult for long periods of time, their mind wonders and they start thinking of other things (in their first language). The key is making all the input comprehensible and this is where an adult is at a massive advantage. They can make use of their worldly knowledge and literacy.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Javizy - 2012-02-18
If you buy a good grammar reference and maybe or workbook or two (necessary if you ever want to pass JLPT anyway), then you'll probably be fine. I don't think learning grammar is that much of a big deal (at least not Japanese grammar), and can often be similar to looking up vocabulary. For many words you have to remember which particle or collocation to use it with and in what situation its appropriate, in addition to its meaning, kanji etc. You do something similar when you lookup a lot of expressions in a grammar dictionary.
You'll never learn to use the grammar or even fully understand its nuance until you've had enough natural exposure to it, but learning the syntax, seeing some textbook examples and reading some notes about it (especially comparisons to similar expressions) in advance gives you a massive advantage. I just can't imagine someone being proficient in more technical areas of writing and speaking without a solid knowledge of grammar, and I'd never trust anyone to "organically" translate even simple things.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - slimmjim - 2012-02-18
HonyakuJoshua: More or less, yes. I don't think he's actually against reading up on grammar at all, because he's referred to a few grammar books elsewhere on his site. But here's the two main articles he has about it:
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/on-grammar
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/there-is-no-grammar
--------
Thanks for all the interesting comments so far.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Tzadeck - 2012-02-18
Haha, whenever I read a Khatz article I still get so angry. It's a combination of his poor writing skills, and the fact that he's really bad at considering what the flaws might be in his advice.
*Sigh*
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - yudantaiteki - 2012-02-18
I also don't agree with the idea that grammar explanations are necessary evils to be discarded as soon as you can -- as I said above, I learned a huge amount from JSL's in-depth grammar explanations even when I was supposedly at a high level. As I said, while I definitely agree that you should be reading Japanese a lot more than you should be reading about Japanese, you can get a lot of benefit out of periodically going back and reading about grammar to make sure that what you think you know is actually correct.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - mmhorii - 2012-02-18
Tzadeck Wrote:Haha, whenever I read a Khatz article I still get so angry. It's a combination of his poor writing skills, and the fact that he's really bad at considering what the flaws might be in his advice.Here's the original article that Khatzumoto cribbed from and put his own twisted twist on:
*Sigh*
http://www.antimoon.com/how/input-gramrules.htm
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - turvy - 2012-02-18
The example used in that article is really dodgy. If you are learning from a textbook written in the target language, you already know the language to a certain extent and it's all pretty much downhill from there.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - yudantaiteki - 2012-02-18
That's what I don't like about people citing antimoon -- even though the authors don't say this (and they may not be consciously aware of it), their advice is targeted at people who have studied a language in school but don't feel like they can actually do things with the language. Unfortunately some people seem to get the insane idea from that that they never have to touch English from day 1 of their study (except Heisig, of course, which is sacrosanct).
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Fillanzea - 2012-02-18
I'm pretty much in the "immersion trumps everything" camp, but even I wouldn't say that you should eschew grammar explanations.
I think a lot of people, including myself, had trouble with Romance languages where it seems like 80% of what you do in class is drill on verb conjugations. That's the kind of repetitive grammar study that I would like to find a path around, but at the same time it's really hard to learn that kind of thing just from exposure. (I learned the hard way that verbs conjugated in 1st person and 2nd person are much harder to find in reading material than those conjugated in 3rd person. Probably TV would've been a good resource, but we're getting off track.)
I don't know of anything in Japanese grammar that requires that kind of repetitive drilling, though. There are conjugations, but they're so much simpler and there's so little irregularity.
When I go back to Stephen Krashen, who is my guru for language learning and a huge advocate for exposure, he doesn't say avoid grammar entirely. He says that learning explicit grammar rules is not a part of language acquisition. Traditional language pedagogy said for a long time, if you learn all the grammar rules then you've learned the language. But my peers who learned languages that way, with the assumption that when you've learned the past perfect then you can move on to a different grammar point, have tremendous trouble carrying on a conversation. You can hear their brains scrambling for the correct conjugation. Krashen goes so far as to say, you don't acquire things that you learn in this way no matter how much you drill on them.
But Krashen also admits that the amount of exposure you need is so great that you can't rely on it 100%, especially as a beginner. (He doesn't really get into issues of fossilization, but I know from experience that can be an issue). Grammar study is useful insofar as it can give you some bootstraps, so that if you don't know intuitively how to say something, then you can at least rely on the explicit rules you've learned to get you through. For instance, he says that the -s for 3rd person singular present tense (He goes to work every day) is naturally acquired late. But you wouldn't want to go along without it just because you haven't acquired it yet! There are lots of grammar rules like that: they're essential but they won't be naturally acquired quickly, so you'll be waiting a long time if you don't learn them explicitly. (On the other hand he says that meaning-focused conversation is not the place to be consciously applying those rules and correcting errors. It takes too long.)
Krashen's book on principles and practice in 2nd language acquisition is interesting: Start from chapter 4, or if you really want to get to the meat of it, page 89.
http://www.sdkrashen.com/Principles_and_Practice/index.html
Quote:The place for Monitor use is when the performer has time, as in writing and in prepared speech. As stated earlier, simply giving performers time does not insure that they will use the conscious Monitor; hence, condition 2 in Chapter II: The performer must be thinking about correctness or focussed on form. When given time, and when focussed on form, some people can use conscious grammar to great advantage. In the case of the second language performer who has acquired nearly all of the grammar of the second language, but who still has some gaps, the use of the conscious grammar can fill in many of the non-acquired items. This can, in writing at least, occasionally result in native-like accuracy.
Quote:Indeed, in the advanced second language class, providing such polish may become the main goal, one that is quite justified for many students. "Advanced" second language acquirers, especially those who have been in the country where the target language is spoken for a few years, may have acquired a great deal, but not all, of the second language, enough to meet communicative need, but still short of the native speaker standard. Their chief need may be conscious rules to use as a supplement to their acquired competence, to enable them to appear as educated in their second language as they are in their first.(I should mention that even though I'm in the immersion camp, I have had WAY more explicit grammar instruction than somebody like Khatzumoto would advocate: 5 years of pretty traditional Japanese classes plus a year self-studying for the JLPT 1kyuu plus I sometimes read books like "Hey, your keigo is WRONG!" for fun. Plus I hang out here.)
I do not object to this sort of grammar teaching. What is unfair is to emphasize accuracy on communicatively unessential, late acquired items in beginning language classes, with students who are unable to understand the simplest message in the second language.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - undead_saif - 2012-02-18
Even if one can learn without grammar, it can be used as a shortcut! Hundreds (to nail it right) of examples or a grammar rule then tens of examples?
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Tolerence91 - 2012-02-18
in many dictionarys grammatical endings and such as shimau show up as single words so I've studied a lot off grammar as mere vocabulary if that makes any sense
example: られる
(aux-v,v1,hon) indicates passive voice (inc. the "suffering passive"); indicates the potential form; indicates spontaneous occurrence; used as an honorific for others' actions
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - dtcamero - 2012-02-18
I think 'don't learn grammar' is one of the biggest points the 反ajatt crowd uses, in a way that is much more extreme than originally intended. As nadiatims says, studying sentences means studying grammar... but it is an issue of studying in a context vs. studying grammar bullet-points and tables in some book of artificial bubble-learning.
Moreover I would parrot Stephen Krashen here and say that for a language learning adult, effective language study is at MOST 5% learning (grammar a fraction of which) and 95% input.
krashen furthers this point to say that the "principle of grammatical sequencing" of learning can actually be harmful... (starts at 11:35 in the video). Not to be rude but this is a man with a lot more empirical study and evidence than anyone in the forum...
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Zgarbas - 2012-02-18
People who say kids don't have to learn grammar to know their native tongue confuse me. Didn't everyone have grammar lessons in primary school?
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - kusterdu - 2012-02-18
Zgarbas Wrote:People who say kids don't have to learn grammar to know their native tongue confuse me. Didn't everyone have grammar lessons in primary school?I think you're confusing categories.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - blackbrich - 2012-02-18
Zgarbas Wrote:People who say kids don't have to learn grammar to know their native tongue confuse me. Didn't everyone have grammar lessons in primary school?I'm not sure learning the names for things you already know is quite the same thing.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - Fillanzea - 2012-02-18
Yes, but grammar lessons in school are mainly focused on things that are part of
-written language
-formal language
-the language of the middle and upper classes.
So, you learn where to put the comma, you learn not to write run-on sentences and sentence fragments, you learn not to say "ain't" or end a sentence with a preposition (which, by the way, linguists generally agree is a pretty silly rule.) It's important to learn that kind of thing, especially if you want to go to university or get a white-collar job, but it's not fundamental to the grammar of the language.
For example: movement of wh-clauses in English is incredibly complicated. Why is it that I can say "Whom does Carl believe that Bob knows that Mary likes?" but I can't say "What did you go home because you needed to do?" I don't know one native English speaker who was taught this explicitly without taking a college-level linguistics course, but I don't know one native English speaker who would get it wrong.
(I do know one native English speaker whose dialect doesn't include wh-movement at all, but her dialect is Caribbean.)
The grammar that you have to study is maybe 2% of the language.
Has anyone NOT studied grammar and succeeded? - caivano - 2012-02-18
CarolinaCG Wrote:I stopped studying grammar like 1.5 years ago. From that time on, instead of studying I just added grammar sentences to anki.I think this is where a lot of the 'I don't study grammar' myth comes from, if you're learning sentences based on grammar you're learning (studying) grammar...
imo of course
