I think people over-exaggerate the difficulty of native materials. You just need parallel e-texts with audio and a good mouse-over pop-up. There are enough tools nowadays to make such texts comprehensible.

An example.
Here's the beginning of a children’s story from a Japanese site:
　夏のある日、キリギリスが野原で歌を歌っていると、アリたちがぞろぞろ歩いてきました。

　One day in summer, when a grasshopper was singing in the grassy meadow, a group of ants walked by.
　夏のある日、キリギリスが野原で歌を歌っていると、アリたちがぞろぞろ歩いてきました。
　なつ の ある ひ、キリギリス が のはら で うた を うたって いる と、アリ たち が ぞろぞろ あるいて きました。

There are plenty of such materials available. You can find some of them here:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain

I don't say you should ignore grammar (I never do, by the way), but it's perfectly possible to acquire it after enough exposure to personally relevant texts.

I don't know, I think even in a sentence like that there are a number of things that would be confusing to a beginner -- the use of ある to mean "a certain," the use of と (beginners often have trouble with figuring out when it means "and" vs. "when"), verb + きました, the fact that there's no direct translation in the sentence for the English "group."

There's a lot of variance from person to person when it comes to how much confusion or ambiguity they're OK with -- if you take a dozen people of the same level, I think some of them are going to be OK with a sentence like that and some of them are not.

(You could make the argument, too, that textbook situations like "Buying a train ticket" or "Talking about your job" are more personally relevant than fables; I think the best argument for using children's stories is not that they're personally relevant, but because textbooks alone don't provide nearly enough input.)

buonaparte Wrote:but it's perfectly possible to acquire it after enough exposure to personally relevant texts.

I've seen this claim for years, never seen anyone who actually did it. People claim they did, but then it turns out that they say "I didn't study grammar" but they don't literally mean that they never used a grammar dictionary or textbook.

Yes, a beginner has it tough, nothing but double-double toil and trouble.

Fillanzea,
I didn't mean to say that fables were personally relevant to everybody, it's up to the learner.

yudantaiteki,
I do know such people.

I remember my niece for instance. I don't think she knew what a verb was. Any mention of grammar made her shiver. She was fifteen then, so not a child any longer.
We just read 'Tintin' (it was French she was learning), one book, then another, and so on. It went like this: I read in French, explained the meaning, and she repeated after me in French, nothing else. No grammar, no nothing. She now knows French better than I do. And I do know it quite well, from Villon to Proust. (We're Polish.)
Joseph Conrad never read a single grammar of English, he started learning English in his twenties.
I'm not Joseph Conrad, but I've never studied English grammar, either, just read and listened to books and the radio (BBC 4). I already knew French and Spanish, though, so it was easy.

As to Japanese. I didn't intend to learn it at all. I was just interested in their movies. After a while I did start to figure out the grammar, just from watching subtitled movies.
I remember for instance: au-awanai, iru-inai, kowai-kowaku nai, agare-agatte kudasai, nome, tate, ike-ikanai-ittya dame-ittyatta-ittekuru-ittekimasu-ittoide-itterassyai-tanosinderassyai, sine-sinuna-sinda-sinimasita, korosite kure, osiete kure, oisii-oisikatta-oisiku nai, kirei-kirei da-kirei desu-kirei na umi, even idioms: hara ga tatu, atama ga ii. And so on. And it all happened on its own, I didn't even try to remember anything.
Of course, it's faster with deliberate study of grammar - I always do it when I decide to learn a new language, but I skip handbooks for learners, I just read two or three grammar books and go straight to native materials.
There's one thing I do very carefully, tough - it's pronunciation, usually completely ignored by learners and !!!teachers!
I've never taken any classes to learn any language.

But there's "study grammar" and then there's using grammar dictionaries or guides such as Tae Kim's, to aid the understanding of native material on the side. Tae Kim is great for referencing to when you'd want to look up a simple pattern or particle and see some examples, and then move on.

When I first started out I wasn't using textbooks, but I was SRSing very simple sentences (due to inspiration from the-blog-which-must-not-be-named), and the example ones from initially even silly stuff like this while working upwards together with RTK and easy material was well enough to get over the beginner threshold. I don't see how it couldn't be.

If you know Steve Kaufmann and Moses McCormick's videos on Youtube, they'll suggest to get common beginner resources like Teach Yourself and Assimil, but to focus on the actual content -- the dialogue, phrases, sentences, while perusing but not trying to brutally memorize all the explanations as you go.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I've seen this claim for years, never seen anyone who actually did it. People claim they did, but then it turns out that they say "I didn't study grammar" but they don't literally mean that they never used a grammar dictionary or textbook.

It's completely possible, i know I have, and probably a bunch of others have as well. So long as you use high context materials, manga/dramas/vns etc. grammar is basically superfluous as you'll pick it up from the tone or accompanying images. You won't understand exactly what's going on, but you'll understand enough to get generally what's happening which is enough to enjoy many materials. Physical comedy and kids shows are great for this in the beginning(gaki no tsukai and super sentai were amazing haha).

Quote:I'm not Joseph Conrad, but I've never studied English grammar, either, just read and listened to books and the radio (BBC 4). I already knew French and Spanish, though, so it was easy.

You went from absolutely zero English, and learned English through radio and books without ever looking at any sort of explanation of any English grammar? You sound like you have a knack for languages, first of all, and second I was specifically talking about Japanese, not a related European language.

I just think it's unlikely that the average person wanting to learn Japanese from a Western country, with no experience or exposure to the language at all, can learn Japanese with no grammar study at all just by reading and listening to stuff and picking it all up. It's certainly not something I would recommend to anyone.

yudantaiteki,
I was going to reply to your post before you edited it. It doesn't matter anyway.

I don't say I'd recommend anything to anybody, because I don't know anybody from cyberspace personally, and I don't know what an average person is, I've never met any.


I just wanted to say that IS possible to learn languages without formal study of grammar, not that grammar is unimportant. Yes, you have to learn grammar one way or another, but you don't have to know that 'to know' is a verb or that 'beautifully' is an adverb.

How I learn languages is described here:
http://users.bestweb.net/%7Esiom/martian...ssages.htm

Plenty of materials for learners of Japanese there, too - from pronunciation (pitch accent included), through user-friendly grammars with line-by-line audio to parallel novels with matching audio.

[Zgarbas]

I have to admit, I "learned" Spanish from telenovelas. As in, without ever having opened a textbook, book on Spanish, or any sort of formal or informal study material whatsoever, I went to Spain and found out I could speak it. The only time I'd been exposed to it were numerous hours as a child in which I'd watch telenovelas with my grandmother, and all the inside jokes which arose from telenovelas(not much).

But, I think there are a few important notes...
1. I was a kid. It was a critical age.
2. Spanish is ridiculously similar to Romanian. Half the time I can guess a word I've never heard before by taking a Romanian word and adding -os, -as, -a or similar endings to it. This has its disadvantages, though.
3. I was exposed to this language with word-by-word translations underneath at a time when I was learning 1-2 new languages and all its basics. I did not know what a verb was until I was 7, but I was overtly familiar with how one worked. Oh, and I was at first practicing how to read by listening to the TV whilst reading the subtitles, so I was paying attention to this by default.
4. I am illiterate. I cannot write in Spanish. I cannot conjugate non-intuitively. My vocabulary is limited, so while I can hold a conversation I will often fall behind if it gets serious. I will mistake articles, and basically talk like an idiot. I find it very difficult to study it formally without forgetting all I know. I could write the sappiest love poem in Spanish, but not talk about literature. In fact, I knew how to tell someone I was in love with them starting from the day we met and that I'm pregnant with their child (fictional situation, ofc) but not how to say "Go back and turn left".

So it does happen, if the conditions are perfect, and if you don't mind being at a pretty weird basic level.

I just feel the need for caution because I've seen (here and other places) that learners are getting the idea that day 1 (or maybe day 1 after RTK 1), they need a J-J dictionary, native books, and native TV shows/audio and they're good to go.

Fillanzea Wrote:There's a lot of variance from person to person when it comes to how much confusion or ambiguity they're OK with -- if you take a dozen people of the same level, I think some of them are going to be OK with a sentence like that and some of them are not.

(You could make the argument, too, that textbook situations like "Buying a train ticket" or "Talking about your job" are more personally relevant than fables; I think the best argument for using children's stories is not that they're personally relevant, but because textbooks alone don't provide nearly enough input.)

day 1 after RTK, i wouldn't have been comfortable at all with that. a

new vocab, new kanji readings, new grammar, slow reading speed... i would be staring at that sentence for a long time.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I just feel the need for caution because I've seen (here and other places) that learners are getting the idea that day 1 (or maybe day 1 after RTK 1), they need a J-J dictionary, native books, and native TV shows/audio and they're good to go.

well technically there are native material that is accessible to beginners ie
atarimae taisou, kaeuta (oh there's chinese crap over it... music in general), the 3 line letter thing on fukaii hanashi, zotto suru hanashi (it's not as subbed as other stuff and for me it's easy and i feel like they're just using daily conversation japanese for the most part and it's really interesting. but it would be hard for a beginner. i just mention it because i like this show a lot. an important part of learning a language is that you find something that really interests you and to also have a transcript /native persno or something to enable you to learn from it. you can ask people on lang-8 or whatever. i found trasncripts for oriental radio this and this ). ( there's probably better letters on other eps but this was the link i found), some shows are SO SO SUBBED, there's youtube etc etc you can definitely learn soething from watching it- probably most of them are, there's lots more like people said so it doesn't hurt obviously. there's the whole chicken and the egg thing with the native media... i say go for it. if you don't know the word you look it up, you forget, you see it again in some other media in another context that might be more clear or memorable or whatever. for me i used talk/variety shows and that's every day conversational japanese so the words, the grammar, etc ,etc REPEAT. not to mention they have japanese subs on it so it's pretty accessible for looking up stuff.

Of course you have to listen a lot of japanese to get used to it.... so that you can catch what they say and it doesn't sound damn fast etc etc.

I'm not sure it's useful at all to compare how you learn languages that are fairly close to your own to how you learn languages that are vastly different. I never took Spanish or German but when I see people speaking them in context I can figure out some of what they are saying. But take Chinese or Arabic or something and I have 0% comprehesion.

Except in the case of reading tzadeck, then your comprehensions probably higher than that of similar languages. That's the reason for RTK, on top of it making the kanji old friends, you can at least get the very general meaning of high context native material right away. VNs are great for bridging the gap between reading/listening.

To the OP: Normally, I would just recommend reading your way to fluency (be it textbooks, educational websites, or native literature). It's what I did for several languages. But, with Japanese, the writing system is such a huge hurdle that I have to say focusing on listening comprehension first, reading comprehension second is really helping me (I didn't do it on purpose, I just happened to like a bunch of stuff I've been watching and listening to so much that it happened by itself).

I don't mean that you should be fluent before you touch written material, I just mean that it's a good idea to be ahead with listening comprehension. That way, when reading manga for instance, you can use furigana to your advantage, and you can focus on learning the writing of words you already know the reading of, rather than the reading and the writing together.

But the "RtK first" principle still stands. Keep reviewing the RtK deck, don't neglect it.

As far as what to do regarding listening comprehension, I won't write a huge essay again, you'll have to search around for details, but:
- repeated listening to audio you've studied (watched with subs and then ripped, or songs you studied the lyrics of, etc.)
- watching stuff with and then without subs;
- SubstoSRS
etc.

There's massive amounts of Japanese media out there to pick from. Key is to watch them while paying attention to the language, and re-watching or ripping suitable audio from them for further study.

yudantaiteki Wrote:

Quote:I'm not Joseph Conrad, but I've never studied English grammar, either, just read and listened to books and the radio (BBC 4). I already knew French and Spanish, though, so it was easy.

You went from absolutely zero English, and learned English through radio and books without ever looking at any sort of explanation of any English grammar? You sound like you have a knack for languages, first of all, and second I was specifically talking about Japanese, not a related European language.

I just think it's unlikely that the average person wanting to learn Japanese from a Western country, with no experience or exposure to the language at all, can learn Japanese with no grammar study at all just by reading and listening to stuff and picking it all up. It's certainly not something I would recommend to anyone.

I doubt English grammar is more similar to Polish grammar than Japanese is. Second, it's not rare for people to learn new languages without ever paying attention to or studying grammar. Third, Japanese grammar is not more difficult than the grammar of other languages. If anything, it's relatively easy.

Yes, paying attention to grammar helps certain types of people (people who are used to analytical thinking, like to have a reason for where everything is) in learning a new language. But the notion that it's a must is just wrong.

stratzvyda Wrote:Except in the case of reading tzadeck, then your comprehensions probably higher than that of similar languages. That's the reason for RTK, on top of it making the kanji old friends, you can at least get the very general meaning of high context native material right away. VNs are great for bridging the gap between reading/listening.

Err, not really. I find that with Germanic or Romance languages if you basically know what the major pronouns look like, and what the to be verb looks like, after that there are so many cognates that you can actually figure out what certain things mean if the context is well established. Go to a museum or something and look at the English explanation and then some Romance/Germanic language explanations and you can generally figure out what's going on with little effort.

I remember going into a French bookstore in Paris once and I decided to see what philosophy books they had. The section name was philosophy spelled differently, and books like 'The Critique of Pure Reason' were usually something like 'Le (word that looks like critique) de (a word that looks like pure and a word that looks like reason, perhaps inverted).' So it was easy to figure out where the section was and what all the books were right away. It took a very long time for me to be able to do that in a Japanese bookstore with anywhere near the same speed, even after knowing the kanji to a fair extent.

(Funny anecdote about that bookstore--there was a manga section and the whole area had Japanese written all over the walls. But when I say Japanese, I just mean the katakana vowels written all over the walls randomly. アオオウオウオウオオエエエエエウウウウウアアアオアエオウイ)

Tzadeck Wrote:I'm not sure it's useful at all to compare how you learn languages that are fairly close to your own to how you learn languages that are vastly different. I never took Spanish or German but when I see people speaking them in context I can figure out some of what they are saying. But take Chinese or Arabic or something and I have 0% comprehesion.

Why use Spanish and German as an example (languages that are very common and you hear all the time), and compare them with Chinese and Arabic?

Why not pick two languages that are just as similar to yours as German, but aren't as common. For instance, Swedish and Icelandic, two other Germanic languages. That way, we can eliminate the incidental familiarity you have with German as a factor, and objectively look at only the role of the similarity between languages in how well you comprehend them.

I guarantee you, it won't be well at all. If you've never studied Swedish before, you will understand about as much Swedish as you understand Arabic, thus proving your theory wrong.

Stansfield123 Wrote:Why use Spanish and German as an example (languages that are very common and you hear all the time), and compare them with Chinese and Arabic?

Why not pick two languages that are just as similar to yours as German, but aren't as common. For instance, Swedish and Icelandic, two other Germanic languages. That way, we can eliminate the incidental familiarity you have with German as a factor, and objectively look at only the role of the similarity between languages in how well you comprehend them.

I guarantee you, it won't be well at all. If you've never studied Swedish before, you will understand about as much Swedish as you understand Arabic, thus proving your theory wrong.

Huh? You really can learn most Germanic and Romance languages faster than Japanese (and Chinese, and Arabic), if you are a native English speaker. That's not just my opinion. Whether or not you can understand Germanic languages or not to some degree without studying doesn't seem that important to me, although that's the point I made. I think it's reasonable to assume that a strategy to learn French might not work the same way with Chinese, regardless how much exposure to French before studying might give you a leg up on the task.

Tzadeck Wrote:You really can learn most Germanic and Romance languages faster than Japanese (and Chinese, and Arabic), if you are a native English speaker.

In the post I was replying to, you were comparing German to Arabic, not to Japanese.

The reason why Japanese is the hardest language to learn is the Japanese writing system, not the language, or its supposedly different grammar, or anything like that.

The same does not apply to Arabic. In fact, I bet Arabic/Hebrew is easier to learn to a Polish or English speaker than German. German is pretty tough. I don't have experience with Arabic, but I looked into Hebrew, and seemed like a piece of cake compared to German.

Obviously, if you speak English, French is easy. That's however not because French is a Romance language. That's because, as the English language was forming, England spent three centuries under Norman occupation. Half of English vocabulary is actually French. Not Latin, mind you, but French. That's a different kind of connection than the superficial connection English has with other European languages.

I think you'll find that you'd have a significantly harder time learning some other Romance and Germanic languages you're unfamiliar with. The supposed similarity would help you very little.

Tzadeck Wrote:Err, not really. I find that with Germanic or Romance languages if you basically know what the major pronouns look like, and what the to be verb looks like, after that there are so many cognates that you can actually figure out what certain things mean if the context is well established. Go to a museum or something and look at the English explanation and then some Romance/Germanic language explanations and you can generally figure out what's going on with little effort.

I remember going into a French bookstore in Paris once and I decided to see what philosophy books they had. The section name was philosophy spelled differently, and books like 'The Critique of Pure Reason' were usually something like 'Le (word that looks like critique) de (a word that looks like pure and a word that looks like reason, perhaps inverted).' So it was easy to figure out where the section was and what all the books were right away. It took a very long time for me to be able to do that in a Japanese bookstore with anywhere near the same speed, even after knowing the kanji to a fair extent.

You'd be better off in Japanese, take your examples, philosophy is 哲学 philosophy study, easy enough to figure out . Even "the critique of reason" is easier in japanese than it's native german "Kritik der reinen Vernunft"=critique of something something even reading the author as Kant you will have to think a bit working only from the criticism part.
純粋理性批判 =genuine logic sex criticism judgement combined with Kant(カント？） you've got both the genuine~=true logic~=reason criticism and an easy connection.

Kanji feels weird for a long time, but the meanings get you a lot farther than you'd expect. As for speed, that's largely just a matter of exposure.

Stansfield123 Wrote:In the post I was replying to, you were comparing German to Arabic, not to Japanese.

The reason why Japanese is the hardest language to learn is the Japanese writing system, not the language, or its supposedly different grammar, or anything like that.

The same does not apply to Arabic. In fact, I bet Arabic/Hebrew is easier to learn to a Polish or English speaker than German. German is pretty tough. I don't have experience with Arabic, but I looked into Hebrew, and seemed like a piece of cake compared to German.

Japanese is not the hardest language to learn. I'm basically just going by the language program made by the US military, but it seems that Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are all very difficult to learn for native English speakers. They are of similar difficulty, and German is considerably easier. There have been threads about this before, and you can look them up if you want.

I'm not gonna argue my point about understanding those languages to some extent without studying them, because I don't think it's really an important one so I'm not willing to put the time in.

stratzvyda Wrote:"Kritik der reinen Vernunft"
純粋理性批判

It still seems to me like I would figure out which one was the Critique of Pure Reason faster in German, even though I've lived in Japan for five years. Despite the fact that Vernunft looks like gibberish to me. (I also happen to already know the name of almost any philosophy book in the early modern period, which helps.)

Also, to clarify, I'm around N1 level and I did RTK like four years ago. I know how far the meanings will get you.

Tzadeck Wrote:Japanese is not the hardest language to learn. I'm basically just going by the language program made by the US military, but it seems that Arabic, Chinese, Korean, and Japanese are all very difficult to learn for native English speakers. They are of similar difficulty, and German is considerably easier.

So the claim is that a person who never heard German or Arabic in his life, will learn German faster than Arabic, because German is related to his own language, English? How on Earth did the US military determine this?

Could it be that they just looked at the success rate of learning the two languages among soldiers, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that German is related to English? Or did they rule out all the other, far more likely explanations, such as:
1. German culture is closer to American culture than Arabic, making it more enjoyable to study German than Arabic, thus ensuring a higher success rate.
2. German is a more popular language in the US than Arabic.
3. Soldiers see no real use for learning Arabic in civilian life, so many of them never even tried to learn it. Meanwhile, German is a very useful skill to have once you leave the military.

I submit to you that, in an alternate universe where everything is the same as in ours except for one difference: in Germany, people speak Arabic, and in the Arab world, people speak German, suddenly Arabic would become the easier language to learn for Americans and other Westerners.

Stansfield123 Wrote:So the claim is that a person who never heard German or Arabic in his life, will learn German faster than Arabic, because German is related to his own language, English? How on Earth did the US military determine this?

Could it be that they just looked at the success rate of learning the two languages among soldiers, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that German is related to English? Or did they rule out all the other, far more likely explanations, such as:
1. German culture is closer to American culture than Arabic, making it more enjoyable to study German than Arabic, thus ensuring a higher success rate.
2. German is a more popular language in the US than Arabic.
3. Soldiers see no real use for learning Arabic in civilian life, so many of them never even tried to learn it. Meanwhile, German is a very useful skill to have once you leave the military.

I really don't care about this argument dude, and I wasn't arguing that the only reason German is easier is due to pure linguistic similariy. Maybe someone else wants to argue with you.

Stansfield123 Wrote:So the claim is that a person who never heard German or Arabic in his life, will learn German faster than Arabic, because German is related to his own language, English? How on Earth did the US military determine this?

Could it be that they just looked at the success rate of learning the two languages among soldiers, and concluded that the only possible explanation is that German is related to English? Or did they rule out all the other, far more likely explanations, such as:
1. German culture is closer to American culture than Arabic, making it more enjoyable to study German than Arabic, thus ensuring a higher success rate.
2. German is a more popular language in the US than Arabic.
3. Soldiers see no real use for learning Arabic in civilian life, so many of them never even tried to learn it. Meanwhile, German is a very useful skill to have once you leave the military.

http://www.effectivelanguagelearning.com...difficulty

Apparently Japanese is actually the hardest to learn for english speakers, wasn't expecting that. There's a lot of research on the topic, you can look up the full FSI report if you want probably has more explanations but i'm too lazy haha.