I don't blame Imabi.
He had probably thought that universities are there to teach you something.
No idea if he's reading it, but there's a good book on the subject:
Allan Bloom
The Closing of the American Mind
(How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's Students)

As to free Japanese grammars: Miss Rutracker has a number of them.

As to Tae Kim - he's a nice fellow, I like him a lot.

IMABI, don't get discouraged, just smile first thing in the morning and keep smiling all day long even if your shit's Ffucked up.


Ha, ha made me laugh. I wrote bucked (FFFUCKED) and then the forum software changed it to mucked. Life is beautiful. You cannot FFFUCKK any longer. What will human beings do to survive?

Tzadeck Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:

PotbellyPig Wrote:In all this time I never looked at his site. But that "About Me" is cringe worthy. Why put that on your site at all?

I remember what it was like to be his age.

Isn't he a bit old to post something like that though? That's more 14 than college freshman.

I think you'd be surprised at how "mature" some college freshmen really are. They're not that common, but they're definitely out there.

IMABI material is still too dense for it's own good. He may know a lot about the subject; unfortunately that doesn't make him good at teaching it to others.

However his site can be useful since it is quite comprehensive. Sadly I was looking for explanation on the usage of causative+giving/receiving but didn't find it there.

buonaparte Wrote:I don't blame Imabi.
He had probably thought that universities are there to teach you something.

I am a university teacher -- I think on the whole we do our best to teach, despite the shortcomings of the institutional system.

yudantaiteki Wrote:I am a university teacher -- I think on the whole we do our best to teach, despite the shortcomings of the institutional system.

I meant no disrespect. On the other hand, you're probably young.
Anyway, as long as languages go, the best way is to do it on your own.

buonaparte Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:I am a university teacher -- I think on the whole we do our best to teach, despite the shortcomings of the institutional system.

I meant no disrespect. On the other hand, you're probably young.

In terms of the college teaching profession, yes, but I've worked with a lot of older teachers who are still passionate about their teaching. Of course there are some who aren't, but that's true of any job.

Of course you're passionate. You've been posting relentlessly, I've always admired you.
There are some other passionate people, too - Jim Breen, the Admin, Tae Kim, Imabi.

What about writing a comprehensive Japanese grammar for everybody to enjoy it - you could surely do it.
Or perhaps something else, I remember a project of yours here, but you gave up, you were not passionate enough.

buonaparte Wrote:Ha, ha made me laugh. I wrote bucked (FFFUCKED) and then the forum software changed it to mucked. Life is beautiful. You cannot FFFUCKK any longer. What will human beings do to survive?

Yeah, that's one thing about this forum that pisses me off. Is the f word a bad word?

While it's unfortunate that imabi's site is a bit dense to the point of making it hard to consume, I'm thankful that it serves as a unique, comprehensive resource out there. More unfortunate is how people (on this forum anyway) seem to focus much more on who he is than on the content of his website (I guess this is sorta relevant to the thread title though...). Whether or not what he says is true about UT is pretty irrelevant to the authenticity of his content, and no one is forcing you to read the 'About me' page.

On a side note I'd rather he spend time updating the content on his website than bothering to read books completely irrelevant to Japanese about character or the failure of the school system.

Call me crazy but I'm glad that he's still at it.

buonaparte Wrote:Of course you're passionate. You've been posting relentlessly, I've always admired you.
There are some other passionate people, too - Jim Breen, the Admin, Tae Kim, Imabi.

What about writing a comprehensive Japanese grammar for everybody to enjoy it - you could surely do it.
Or perhaps something else, I remember a project of yours here, but you gave up, you were not passionate enough.

An academic job is a lot of work so I don't always have a lot of interest in doing even more extra projects outside of my research and teaching. A comprehensive grammar is a lot of work.

Although:

Quote:Anyway, as long as languages go, the best way is to do it on your own.

If I believed that I probably wouldn't have gotten into teaching in the first place.

It's your job, it is your duty, you get paid for it, you must do it well. If you don't you're a thief.

'Passion' is a vague word, it's something different: you do it as well as you can for FREE.
So Wikipedia guys are passionate, Tae Kim is passonate, IMABI is passionate, The Admin here is passionate - they do everything for free. You only get people's respect. It takes a lot of time, no doubt.

YOU, yudantaiteki, are passionate too - as long as you post replies to people's answers. They are grateful. That's it.

Dixi.

hyvel Wrote:I haven't used the Tae Kim grammar guide, so I can't comment on it specifically. But due to it being free, I think it might be hard to get solid opinions on it, as it might often just get recommended across the board exactly because it is free and a lot of people mostly want to use free resources.
Sometimes I'm really surprised that people are too parsimonious to buy a 20$ textbook and instead solely rely on free resources. If you're gonna spend countless of hours learning Japanese, that time investment dwarfs the costs for good resources anyways... so why not base your learning on the best resources - free or not?!

It's not about being cheap. The Internet is meant to have a lot of free resources on it, for people who can't afford to pay for learning materials. That's what Al Gore invented it for. And having this side of the Internet around helped us all, it's not just charity. The attitude that created all these free resources is something we should promote, by showing our appreciation for the people who give their time and effort to make it possible.

Of course, not everything should be free, people deserve to be paid for their work when it's something that furthers the body of human knowledge, but in this case we are talking about a basic guide to the grammar of a language spoken by 120 million people. My attitude is this: since Tae Kim created a good resource, and made it available for free, why should we reward someone who is repeating that same work and charging for it? If 20 bucks is not a big deal, why not just send it over to Tae Kim, as a reward for making a free resource available to kids born into poor families, who can't afford a textbook (out of no fault of their own)?

This of course assumes that the paid resource doesn't improve on the free one. If it does, then the author has created something new, that helps me more than Kim's guide, and I'll gladly pay for it. But I don't think there are that many textbooks that present the material Tae Kim's guide does, and do a better job. I've only seen one (the manga one, I forgot the title). There are of course plenty that are more complete, with more material in them, but I don't think you need anything more than what's on Tae Kim's site, as far as grammar goes.

P.S. There are two more arguments for using Tae Kim:

1. There's the fact that a free resource is instantly available, while purchasing a textbook takes a little time and effort as well, not just money. And even after you bought it, you have to put some effort into making sure you can access it, while Tae Kim's guide, just like wikipedia or any other free online resource, is accessible on any connected device, anywhere.

2. If you want to discuss your studies with others, discussing the free, instantly available resource, on a forum like this for instance, is infinitely easier than trying to discuss the contents of a textbook.

It's been mentioned time and again, another more or less good grammar resource:
http://www.gwu.edu/~eall/vjg/vjghomepage/vjghome.htm
That's what universities should do, by definition, but they don't somehow.

yudantaiteki Wrote:A comprehensive grammar is a lot of work.

I'm not event sure why you would bother with that project anyway, or why others would suggest it. We have Seiichi's book's (DO(BIA)JG) plus that other large Japanese grammar dictionary that gets mentioned. I think any projects on grammar would be best served looking for new colloquial changes in parts of the grammar and making a project on that.

vix86 Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:A comprehensive grammar is a lot of work.

I'm not event sure why you would bother with that project anyway, or why others would suggest it.

Ha, ha. My weird sense of humour again!
The project I meant:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=8822&page=1

MelonBerry Wrote:Your question started by this thread? http://www.reddit.com/r/LearnJapanese/co...android_a/

Yes.

Here's a few sample complaints:

complaint Wrote:The fact that, the majority of the time, when you see a の in written Japanese it will not mean any of the things written on that page (e.g. 30歳の私、普通の言い方、人気のある場所).

complaint Wrote:Also he conflates a bunch of different のs (e.g. he explains that the の in 毎日勉強するのは大変 stands for a missing noun, which of course it doesn't, otherwise it would mean "the thing that I study every day is difficult" - it is actually a nominaliser - and in any case he translates it as the highly non-English "the thing of studying every day is tough", and I wonder how many people actually understand what he means by "the thing of studying").

I don't get the above complaint because the paragraph right before that example sentence says this (Boldness added by me):

tae kim Wrote:However, the 「の」 particle is very useful in that you don't have to specify a particular noun. In the next examples, the 「の」 particle is not replacing any particular noun, it just allows us to modify verb and adjective clauses like noun clauses. The relative clauses are highlighted.

rich_f Wrote:Maybe some people object because he's not a professor, or he's not charging $100 a pop for it? Beats me. It's not like you need a Ph.D. to teach a foreign language, you just need to be good at explaining stuff.

To digress and to contrast, some people object to the "A Guide to Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar Books" (which are not free, quite the contrary, they are expensive) here. I wonder why is that?

Maybe haters hate Tae Kim and AG(BIA)JG because they are popular? Are these the linguistic varieties of hipsters?

john555 Wrote:According to Tae Kim's Amazon page, he was born in South Korea and immigrated to the USA in 1971. So where's the native Japanese background?

Is his knowledge of Japanese as good as that of a native speaker? For me to feel totally comfortable with a course/book, at least one of the contributors/authors should be a native Japanese speaker.

I saw a Modern Greek course advertised at the local university, and the teacher is a man with a German name, which put me off a bit. I thought, for a Modern Greek course, I'd have more confidence if his name were Zorba Popadopolis.

Not to be personal but your recent posts/threads regarding the Japanese language and your learning of it (eg. using a 60 year old grammar book and taking advice from 20 year old forum threads) don't inspire confidence in me either. I'd listen to Tae Kim's advice on the Japanese language before I consider your concerns regarding Tae Kim's capability of teaching Japanese as a non-native.

yudantaiteki Wrote:Most of his "about me" page is a rant against the UT Japanese program and how awesome he is. I don't know the UT faculty but I have a hard time believing they hate him for his Japanese ability and are scornful of anyone who is too good at Japanese.

PotbellyPig Wrote:In all this time I never looked at his site. But that "About Me" is cringe worthy. Why put that on your site at all?

Hilarious. "About Me?" More like "About how much UT sucks ass!"

qwertyytrewq Wrote:

john555 Wrote:According to Tae Kim's Amazon page, he was born in South Korea and immigrated to the USA in 1971. So where's the native Japanese background?

Is his knowledge of Japanese as good as that of a native speaker? For me to feel totally comfortable with a course/book, at least one of the contributors/authors should be a native Japanese speaker.

I saw a Modern Greek course advertised at the local university, and the teacher is a man with a German name, which put me off a bit. I thought, for a Modern Greek course, I'd have more confidence if his name were Zorba Popadopolis.

Not to be personal but your recent posts/threads regarding the Japanese language and your learning of it (eg. using a 60 year old grammar book and taking advice from 20 year old forum threads) don't inspire confidence in me either. I'd listen to Tae Kim's advice on the Japanese language before I consider your concerns regarding Tae Kim's capability of teaching Japanese as a non-native.

The book I use which you dismiss as a 60 year old grammar book (actually 56 years old) can speak for itself. It was first published in 1958 to excellent reviews and was reprinted several times (my copy is from 1968). It was issued in paperback as recently as 1985. This attests to the book's continued usefulness and demand for it over the years.

What else does Teach Yourself Japanese say for itself? Well, it's on the shelf of various universities; e.g., the University of Toronto keeps a copy on its shelf; likewise Oxford University.

Also according to a search, the following British universities have a copy of Teach Yourself Japanese:

http://copac.ac.uk/search?&author=dunn&t...f+japanese


Teach yourself Japanese. / [By DUNN, Charles James and YANADA (Senji)]
AuthorDUNN, Charles James and YANADA (Senji)
Series
PublishedLondon : English University Press 1958
Physical descriptionOther names
Format Printed


Held At:
British Library Printed

Title
Teach yourself Japanese / C. J. Dunn and S. Yanada.
AuthorDunn, Charles James.
Series

PublishedLondon : English Universities Press 1958
Physical descriptionOther names
Genre
Format Printed


Held At:
Cardiff University Printed

Title
Teach yourself Japanese / by C. J. Dunn and S. Yanada.
AuthorDunn, Charles James.
Series

PublishedLondon, [c1958]
Physical descriptionOther names
Genre
Format Printed


Held At:
Edinburgh University Printed

Title
Teach yourself Japanese / C.J. Dunn and S. Yanada.
AuthorDunn, Charles J.
PublishedLondon : English Universities Press 1958
ISBN
Notes
Other names
Format Printed


Held At:
Exeter University Printed

Title
Teach yourself Japanese / by C.J. Dunn and S. Yanada.
AuthorDunn, Charles James.
Series
PublishedLondon : English Universities Press 1958
Physical descriptionNotes
Other names
Format Printed


Held At:
London Library Printed

Title
Teach yourself Japanese. / [By Dunn, Charles James.]
AuthorDunn, Charles James.
Series

PublishedLondon, 1958
Physical descriptionNotes
Other names
Format Printed


Held At:
National Library of Scotland Printed

Title
Teach yourself Japanese / by C. J. Dunn and S. Yanada.
AuthorDunn, Charles James.
Series

PublishedLondon : English Universities Press 1958
Physical descriptionOther names
Genre
Format Printed


Held At:
Oxford University Printed

Title
Teach yourself Japanese / by C.J. Dunn and S. Yanada.
AuthorDunn, Charles J.
Series

PublishedLondon : English Universities Press 1958
Physical descriptionOther names
Genre
Format Printed


Held At:
School of Oriental & African Studies Printed

Title
Teach yourself Japanese / C.J. Dunn and S. Yanada
AuthorDunn, Charles J.
PublishedLondon : English Universities Press 1958
ISBN
Notes
Other names
Format Printed


Held At:
School of Oriental & African Studies

john555 Wrote:It was issued in paperback as recently as 1985. This attests to the book's continued usefulness and demand for it over the years.

Back in my day I used dial-up and LIKED IT gosh darn it.

Flamerokz Wrote:

john555 Wrote:It was issued in paperback as recently as 1985. This attests to the book's continued usefulness and demand for it over the years.

Back in my day I used dial-up and LIKED IT gosh darn it.

Guess it's too early to come up with a halfway intelligent response.

If you think Teach Yourself Japanese is no good, say why. Cite some pages, say what's wrong with it.

Some info about grammar stuff here:
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?p...#pid121723

Saying that a book is in a university library isn't really a point in a book's favor; university libraries are often pretty big and have a lot of books, good and bad.

john555 Wrote:

Flamerokz Wrote:

john555 Wrote:It was issued in paperback as recently as 1985. This attests to the book's continued usefulness and demand for it over the years.

Back in my day I used dial-up and LIKED IT gosh darn it.

Guess it's too early to come up with a halfway intelligent response.

If you think Teach Yourself Japanese is no good, say why. Cite some pages, say what's wrong with it.

To use your own argument C. Dunn isn't native speaker.

Here's a the first half of a 1959 review from Cambridge University. This is not as you would say an "excellent review"
http://journals.cambridge.org/action/dis...id=3815576

As far as being published, it has been out of print since the 1992. The last updated version was in 1979. and the 1989 version of Teach Yourself Japanese is a completely different book

As far as the methodology goes, I'm just gonna copy and paste:
Reply #9 - July 24, 12:44 am

RandomQuotes Wrote:I'm not going to argue with you, but the the "Teach Yourself" book series tends to rely heavily on the grammar translation method. The grammar translation method is not the best way to learn a language. Using the language and being able to translate are completely different skill sets. If you want anecdotal evidence. Japanese students are required to take six years of English in school. This is almost entirely translation based and almost no one graduates with any real ability to use English.

If you want research here's a paper publish by Harvard about foreign language acquisition: http://dash.harvard.edu/bitstream/handle...sequence=1

a study contrasting the grammar translation method with the direct method: http://www.ccsenet.org/journal/index.php...10755/7604

Advantages and Disadvantages of Different methods
http://www.jcjykc.sdnu.edu.cn/english/unit2.html

Examination of the Grammar-Translation method: faculty.mu.edu.sa/download.php?fid=35886

If you want to use that book, it's fine. I'm partial to the 2nd revision of the Teach Yourself series, before they added the complete moniker, myself. If you want to use only romaji, have fun. If you want to practice translating ridiculous sentences, go ahead. But realize what you are doing is contrary to the last 30-40 years of research on memory and second language acquisition. The people who are giving you advice aren't doing it to be dicks, they're doing it because they have more experience with Japanese than you do. So, when I say that the grammar-translation method is an extremely inefficient way of learning a language, I'm saying it because it's relevant to my job, so I read research and essays regarding the various methods of teaching and acquiring languages. So when you say that grammar-translation is the best way to learn a language, I know for a fact you don't know what you're talking about.

RandomQuotes Wrote:If you want to practice translating ridiculous sentences, go ahead. But realize what you are doing is contrary to the last 30-40 years of research on memory and second language acquisition. The people who are giving you advice aren't doing it to be dicks, they're doing it because they have more experience with Japanese than you do. So, when I say that the grammar-translation method is an extremely inefficient way of learning a language, I'm saying it because it's relevant to my job, so I read research and essays regarding the various methods of teaching and acquiring languages. So when you say that grammar-translation is the best way to learn a language, I know for a fact you don't know what you're talking about.

I have friends that are currently getting their masters/PhD in fields related to second language acquisition, and when I asked them they basically said that modern researches don't really talk about it in a way that favors or disfavors certain methods anymore. Thoughts on this? I don't know much about it myself.

I'm also very skeptical about all the old debates about learning methods for other reasons--mainly because I question whether you could really call the studies that were done scientific. Then again, I even consider fields like psychology as not-quite-science.

Tzadeck Wrote:I have friends that are currently getting their masters/PhD in fields related to second language acquisition, and when I asked them they basically said that modern researches don't really talk about it in a way that favors or disfavors certain methods anymore. Thoughts on this? I don't know much about it myself.

I'm also very skeptical about all the old debates about learning methods for other reasons--mainly because I question whether you could really call the studies that were done scientific. Then again, I even consider fields like psychology as not-quite-science.

Basically, there are no double blind studies, but what has been shown to work the best under tests is the direct method, which is more or less what Michel Thomas or Language Transfer does. I don't have the studies off hand. What most of the current research shows is that each of the methods is good at certain parts and bad at other things. For example grammar-translation was the way you taught latin and ancient greek. There was no production component, and it's really good for that. It's also good for working out the brain, in the same way that writing essays dissecting topics are. However, the general goal of a modern student of a foreign language isn't usually to translate literature, and therefore it falls flat.

http://books.google.co.jp/books?id=9mQ9l...&q&f=false

if you read pages 6 and 7 of that book it'll give you the current(more or less) thoughts on grammar translation. As to what I believe, I tendto find Krashen the most convincing. A lot of the ideas on this forum come from him: i+1, extensive reading, comprehensible input, and so on.

Basically anything works, as long as you continue with it.

As for me personally, I think the most efficient way to to learn an language is to study the basics of linguistics, followed by using a memory palace to memorize the core grammar, use something like Assimil or Linguaphone, then getting cover your gaps to get to 95-98% of words, frequency list based, from either a vocabulary list or preferable a text written in a way that teaches these words, followed by extensive reading.

Edit:
Link for language transfer

(edit: Will reply when less tired, haha)