QuackingShoe Wrote:The hypothetical universe you guys live in with hypothetical people using hypothetical methods to learn what seems to be a hypothetical language is a weird one.

I would hazard a guess that the original post was indeed intended as a reminder of the hypotheticalness of the various theories... all of them.

Specific solutions to specific problems.
Chose not the best way to attain victory, but all the ways that attain victory.

We all seem to agree with the most important things:
1) Input before output.
2) Don't translate.

The greatest obstacle is lack of courage. You have to face that you must at least:
1) Remember at least 10.000 words to achieve fluency.
2) Grammar must be natural for you.
3) Know how to read and write it.

What of these 3 you attain first, it is all about strategy. You must respect how the brain works, how you individually work and how the society works.
Learning all the kanjis before reading, was a trick. It is alien, but it works.
Memorizing verb charts might be a waste of time. But maybe not. You have to try to see it.

In the case of Japanese, in my personal experience, the biggest obstacle is vocabulary. The grammar practice I get while mining vocabulary is more than enough. So I ignore grammar. I just listen a lot and read a lot, focusing on vocabulary and it is working fine.

Just in case, this fits very well in Krashen's theories, without clashing with Pinker's language instinct.

wccrawford Wrote:By that logic, there's no point in learning English rules of grammar, either... And yet every single one of us was required to do so in school.

I had to learn cursive in school, too, along with a plethora of other things I have never once used. Now, I'm not saying that grammar is useless in language learning, just that citing something as reasonable because public education does it is silly. Honestly, I think English schooling would probably be far more beneficial if students were simply required to read books and write about them. The only required grammar text would be the Elements of Style, because it's fun. And awesome.

Thora Wrote:

QuackingShoe Wrote:The hypothetical universe you guys live in with hypothetical people using hypothetical methods to learn what seems to be a hypothetical language is a weird one.

I would hazard a guess that the original post was indeed intended as a reminder of the hypotheticalness of the various theories... all of them.

Yes, that's what my original two posts were intended to do. Also, to underscore the essential similarities (ie learning/acquisition versus a process of assimilation) and the wide applicability to individual self-study.

Jarvik7 Wrote:Except there are only 5 verb forms and you're going to use every single one of them right from the beginning. It's nothing like memorizing an entire dictionary which has >100,000 words, most of which you will never use.

Didn't you do RTK? Didn't you invent the movie method to memorize every kanji reading before learning vocab? Those are both magnitudes more pre-study before application than verbs are.

Well, you can't assume that only 30 minutes of study will make you understand conjugations. You need much more input.

I've been into japanese for a few months. I don't have this data, but as a guess I think I'd nail these conjugation charts you talk about since my first week. Without ever looking at them. They are no need to worry.

The 10.000+ words are the real deal.
I think that Alyks preocupation is with the ilusion that knowledge of grammar will bring you closer to fluency than actual conctact with the language.

After reading your posts, I'll give you more credit. But my personal experience is different. Of the languages I learned, the only one I memorized conjugation tables was portuguese - long after I was fluent, ehehe.

I blame unproper speach on lack of reading, not on lack of memorized tables.
Input is not just more enjoyable, it is a vicious circle. The more you understand, the more you learn, the more you learn, more you understand. Like an addiction.

I suggest you: The next language you learn, try doing it without any grammar instruction.

mentat_kgs Wrote:

Jarvik7 Wrote:Except there are only 5 verb forms and you're going to use every single one of them right from the beginning. It's nothing like memorizing an entire dictionary which has >100,000 words, most of which you will never use.

Didn't you do RTK? Didn't you invent the movie method to memorize every kanji reading before learning vocab? Those are both magnitudes more pre-study before application than verbs are.

Well, you can't assume that only 30 minutes of study will make you understand conjugations. You need much more input.

I've been into japanese for a few months. I don't have this data, but as a guess I think I'd nail these conjugation charts you talk about since my first week. Without ever looking at them. They are no need to worry.

The 10.000+ words are the real deal.
I think that Alyks preocupation is with the ilusion that knowledge of grammar will bring you closer to fluency than actual conctact with the language.

After reading your posts, I'll give you more credit. But my personal experience is different. Of the languages I learned, the only one I memorized conjugation tables was portuguese - long after I was fluent, ehehe.

I blame unproper speach on lack of reading, not on lack of memorized tables.
Input is not just more enjoyable, it is a vicious circle. The more you understand, the more you learn, the more you learn, more you understand. Like an addiction.

I suggest you: The next language you learn, try doing it without any grammar instruction.

I'd say it's not an *illusion*, since we're all saying do 'both', we aren't obsessed with a grammatical monster. I'd say it's a *delusion* that you and alyks seem to be preoccupied with.

You could say that, through pure input, you learned such and such in x-amount of time. I could suggest we have and one could learn the same thing in a fraction of the time, with a fraction of the effort by doing 'both' metalinguistic and linguistic study. I'm not interested, myself, in unprovable, unquantifiable claims of rapid success to back up arguments, I'm interested in solid logic and real results.

One thing the author of The Loom of Language (a book which for the most part focused only on Indo-European languages) points out is this: If you learn the auxiliary and helping verbs very early on in your language study, you multiply your production ability accordingly. Once you learn "I go to the store" you get "I can go to the store", "I will go ...", "I should go ...", "must", "may", "might", "have to", "want to", "like to", and so forth -- pretty much for free. Learn their negations and you get "won't", "can't", ... His conclusion is to make a list of about a hundred must-know vocabulary and grammar items which he recommends one learn first, in order that later vocab acquisition gets the largest possible multiplier. Maybe this approach seems like nonsense, or superfluous, to the folks on the "don't study any grammar" side of the argument, but it makes sense to me.

In Japanese, "auxiliary and helping verbs" are, many of them, covered by conjugation patterns. If I were to take Bodmer's approach and apply it to Japanese, I'd learn the corresponding conjugation and grammar forms very early on. Not first, because first up would be kana and RTK, but very soon afterwards. I certainly wouldn't want to have to figure out the godan conjugation pattern purely from examples (you have five subclasses, so you need five times the examples in order to draw inferences, and you have to see each example in each of its conjugated forms ... whew! and we're lucky that Japanese is a relatively exception-poor language!) when I could just have a gander at a table with explanations.

Anyway, this argument seems to be boiling down to the learn-some-grammar folks saying that you certainly can't be hurt by learning grammar, and doing so has some distinct benefits; while the don't-bother folks are maintaining that the benefits aren't worth wasting time on and can be had just as quickly by inference from a suitable corpus. I know which side seems more intuitively plausible to me, and I also know (having been around the language block more than a couple times now) which one works better in practice for me. And it may boil down to language-learning styles, as well; I've seen enough other people learning languages that I'm under no illusion that what works for me works for everyone.

Yes, I take a 'fractal' approach to language-learning. I prefer to just integrate grammar+context in foundational examples w/ explanations to supplement the sentence reverse-engineering process, in order to get that 'largest possible multiplier'. I take the same approach with going monolingual though, I prefer to learn a bunch of words with L1 definitions, then organically drop L1, just like using my own metalanguage to explain to myself the structure of sentences will become second nature, as well as referring to L2 explanations of grammar (though, just like we discard keywords/stories for kanji, the option is always there when they can be a useful augmentation to use any resource, 1st language or otherwise, one wants).

Krashen's ideas are revolutionary in the sense that less than 1% of language courses are taught based on his theories. One could argue the finer points and tweeks but from a global view the ideas are unconventional and revolutionary. His hypotheses act as an organizing principles; they determine the approach to study.

I don't believe whether one refers to grammatical explanations or not is the point. The point is how are you going to acquire this language: 1) by spending an hour in class listening to grammar be explained and doing exercises with your partner, then an hour at home reading a 10 line dialog and trying to memorize the grammatical points and vocabulary list which willl be on the test; or 2) by carefully READING for two hours 10-20 pages of REAL text your interested in. OK, spend 15 minutes studying grammar's finer points, they spend the next 105 minutes READING.

The ideas are revolutionary in that a language instructor doesn't stand up in front of the class and say, "Whatever you do, increase input. Everything else is secondary. Read, listen, read, listen...do that and you will acquire this language."

One can certainly argue against Krashen's theories and the approach but the results of the traditional approach are clear.

musigny Wrote:Krashen's ideas are revolutionary in the sense that less than 1% of language courses are taught based on his theories. One could argue the finer points and tweeks but from a global view the ideas are unconventional and revolutionary. His hypotheses act as an organizing principles; they determine the approach to study.

I don't believe whether one refers to grammatical explanations or not is the point. The point is how are you going to acquire this language: 1) by spending an hour in class listening to grammar be explained and doing exercises with your partner, then an hour at home reading a 10 line dialog and trying to memorize the grammatical points and vocabulary list which willl be on the test; or 2) by carefully READING for two hours 10-20 pages of REAL text your interested in. OK, spend 15 minutes studying grammar's finer points, they spend the next 105 minutes READING.

The ideas are revolutionary in that a language instructor doesn't stand up in front of the class and say, "Whatever you do, increase input. Everything else is secondary. Read, listen, read, listen...do that and you will acquire this language."

One can certainly argue against Krashen's theories and the approach but the results of the traditional approach are clear.

I agree that his methods are useful in regards to counterbalancing traditional teaching approaches (traditional for some), that's why I posted the first links and that's what they talked about, and that's what I was getting at in my third comment. The thing is, we're not in a classroom, and there's no need to rigidly apply his hypotheses--turning the counterbalance into an overreactive dogma, as much of what his models say is stuff most of us already knew (I 'figured out' the 'Krashen' approach when I was in elementary school [or earlier, I forget ;p]), and there's plenty that he's unfounded in declaring. Far better to stop reacting against the straw man of some grammar-obsessed, jargon-spewing chimera and just get down to brass tacks.

joxn_costello Wrote:If you learn the auxiliary and helping verbs very early on in your language study, you multiply your production ability accordingly. Once you learn "I go to the store" you get "I can go to the store", "I will go ...", "I should go ...", "must", "may", "might", "have to", "want to", "like to", and so forth -- pretty much for free. Learn their negations and you get "won't", "can't", ... His conclusion is to make a list of about a hundred must-know vocabulary and grammar items which he recommends one learn first, in order that later vocab acquisition gets the largest possible multiplier.

I have been learning kanji and vocab without learning grammar specifically. (Except for the last couple weeks, where I've been slowly reading Japanese The Manga Way.) The only grammar I knew 2 weeks ago, I learned from Pimsleur. That pretty much only includes past tense.

Any time I am trying to read a manga, the grammar trips me up. Some of the time I can recognize the root word, but I have no idea how they are using it. I have to just sort of guess. If I had studied conjugations, I would just -know- and not be guessing any more. I have seriously considered making an Anki deck with various conjugations of verbs and learning them by rote so that when I come across other conjugated verbs, I'll know what makes them different from the dictionary form. I haven't had time yet to do that, though.

If anyone has a list like that, or even an Anki deck with that, I'd much appreciate a link to it.

For what it's worth, the grammar lessons I've seen would be useless for a lot of manga. The difficult forms are the ultra-casual ones, which are covered approximately nowhere (because then we couldn't stay safely in polite form all our lives!).

~J

I recommend Japanese Verbs at a Glance and All About Particles, from the Power Japanese series.

Just want to add to the overview links: http://www-writing.berkeley.edu/TESL-EJ/ej32/a1.html

The author of this work discusses here and elsewhere (http://www.gabrielatos.com/Grammar-Intuitions.pdf) the differences between prescriptive and descriptive grammar, the roles of intuition and native materials and a 'mental corpus', and integrating these things, using language corpora to shift materials towards more flexible, user-empowering areas.