From the FFXIII thread (quoting all to make sure the context is here)

Ryuujin27 Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:

Ryuujin27 Wrote:Does it matter whether he thinks it's slang or a normal conjugation?

Yes. I may be particularly anti-"exposure is all you need", especially compared to some people here, but I think it's going way too far to suggest that someone doesn't even need to know how verb conjugations work. You're never going to be able to get to an advanced level if you're relying on simple exposure to teach you everything.

In some situations, I do agree with the idea that it's OK not to understand everything and that you're not going to find everything in books. But I would not put basic conjugations in the category of "it's OK not to understand it". Exposure to things you don't understand or understand incorrectly is tainted exposure.

But beyond study methods, claiming that 見てろ cannot be found in textbooks or grammar books is demonstrably false. Whether you think people should learn the forms from a textbook is beside the point, you can't say that they're not even there at all.

(I also think it's a bad idea to suggest that exposure to Final Fantasy XIII dialogue will teach you how to use imperative forms. See the あなた, きみ, おまえ thread.)

Call it a difference of opinions, but I can't agree with anything you say here at all. Going on a slightly reverse example here, my Japanese friends who speak the best English are the ones who don't study English. They are the ones who live here and interact with people while reading books in English.

It is also important to note that out of those who are the best at English, the ones who are almost totally indistinguishable from native speakers are the ones who read a lot in English.

If these are native Japanese speakers you're talking about, they had studied English in middle school and high school and thus had a basic command of the grammar. They didn't start from zero by picking up books written in English and talking to people.

As a general, long-term principle, I agree that exposure to the language is more helpful than textbooks. But you need the textbooks or grammar to get yourself up to a level where exposure is going to do you good.

Ryuujin27 Wrote:If they want to learn by studying grammar, that's fine.

It's not learning "by studying grammar", it's both grammar and input. Deliberately avoiding textbooks and grammar books is shooting yourself in the foot; the textbooks give you shortcuts that can help you make sense of what you see. Knowing that 見てろ is a combination of 見て + いろ and that いろ is the imperative form of いる is not vital to understanding that one sentence quoted in the other post. But it gives you information about the structure of the language that will help you when you see other imperative forms and other てる structures.

There's certainly no way I ever could have reached an adequately adept command of English if I had just exposed myself to it. I had studied grammar and textbooks before ever attempting to read an English novel, or watch a movie in English. When I read books in English, it's a constant reinforcement to the vocabulary and grammar I already know, basically acting as thousands of flash cards in an organic form. But you have to study to get that point. If I hadn't learned tens of thousands of English words, and studied the language's grammar as in-depth as I could, I would have never been able to read a novel nor watch an American movie without Japanese subtitles in the first place.

So I agree with Yudantaiteki said: exposure is the most effective form of remembering and using a language by far, but you have to get there first.

Aijin Wrote:So I agree with Yudantaiteki said: exposure is the most effective form of remembering and using a language by far, but you have to get there first.

So, you mean to tell me, I can't shortcut the shortcut? 一瞬でぺらぺらになりたい！！！！

Aijin Wrote:There's certainly no way I ever could have reached an adequately adept command of English if I had just exposed myself to it. I had studied grammar and textbooks before ever attempting to read an English novel, or watch a movie in English. When I read books in English, it's a constant reinforcement to the vocabulary and grammar I already know, basically acting as thousands of flash cards in an organic form. But you have to study to get that point. If I hadn't learned tens of thousands of English words, and studied the language's grammar as in-depth as I could, I would have never been able to read a novel nor watch an American movie without Japanese subtitles in the first place.

I felt the same way when I was studying English, and I feel this again as I'm starting to learn Spanish and Mandarin. Part of the fun of the exposure part is keeping your ears open for the word you already know. From those words, you can begin to guess other words. If I don't know they're talking about soccer, then I won't know to watch out for words like foot, ball, players, rules, and kick. But if I know one of those words, I might be able to guess the others!

I am becoming fluent through vicarious osmosis. Just reading the posts here without studying has gotten me to JLPT1 in one year.

Oh man we actually moved this to a new thread? Alright, fine. I'll make one more post but this is really a waste of time debating something like this, so after this, I'm out.

So yes, they are all native Japanese speakers that I talked to. However, the one who is currently the best is the one who said that the reason he is in America (besides liking English now) was that he pretty much failed English miserably during the rest of the time studying it.

Furthermore, I thought the same as you, at first. I though that, "Ok, but they studies English for so many years in school. That's why their English runs circles around my Japanese." So I decided to question them on that. That's when I found out both that this one guy in particular did horribly in school at English and that he remembered virtually none of the grammar rules. He could point out a subject, object, and a verb, sure. But get down to more complex things and he would say something like, "I have no idea, I just know that's right."

Maybe what I'm really trying to say here is this: If you are attempting to play a game in Japanese/read a book/something you have probably picked up some grammar somewhere. My main idea here is that you don't have to avoid grammar like the plague, but maybe just read over Tae Kim once. Don't even SRS it. Just read it through, obtain some basic knowledge (SRS it if you want some vocab, but don't practice grammar), and move on.

I see far too often that people on this site get obsessive with SRSing everything under the sun and less with doing what will actually get them to a really high level of functional Japanese. Do you really need to SRS an entire sentence pack from Tae Kim/Basic Japanese Grammar Dictionary/KO 2001/smart.fm? No, that's silly.

A SRS is there to give you a ton of exposure to something you found interesting. You would probably gain the same amount of exposure to the word/phrase over a longer period of time just by reading and doing stuff in Japanese, but a SRS is just a way to focus specifically on something you liked.

Bottom line: Screw efficiency, you'll get there faster not worrying about it. (I take this from personal experience)

And with that I'm done. Keep on debating it if you wish.

I haven't read the other thread, so I could be totally missing the point. But

yudantaiteki Wrote:But you need the textbooks or grammar to get yourself up to a level where exposure is going to do you good.

Need? Who wrote the first textbook then? Are you saying all the first bilingual textbooks between foreign languages have been written by people who were grown up as native bilinguals?

Dictionaries, grammar references, and similar books weren't available until recently. But obviously there were tons of interpreters, translators, and other fluent speakers who acquired foreign languages as adult learners in the world before they published the first bilingual textbooks and stuff. How do you explain this? Besides, grammar of human languages was pretty shaky before the typography era. How did they learn a language when there was no such thing as proper grammar? Back when grammar was shaky, by the time a learner finished a textbook (if such a thing existed), the grammar he learned would have been pretty obsolete. Also, regional difference was too large to communicate well. How did they learn a foreign language/incomprehensible dialect as an adult learner?

When two different cultures met for the first time, did they fail to communicate well for the first 10 years or so and wait until their kids learned to speak both languages natively?

As you said in another thread, there are a lot of languages that don't have writing systems. Are you saying no one could learn them as an adult learner if a native bilingual speaker didn't publish a textbook by employing transliteration?

There are researchers who study minor languages spoken by African tribes etc. They study those languages and write grammar dictionaries and stuff. I'm guessing not all of them are native bilinguals. Are you saying those grammar books are written by people who don't know the target language well? Are those books crap because the authors didn't learn the languages through textbooks and/or grammar?

I think grammar is helpful and a great tool if used properly, but it can't be a necessary thing... I think there is something wrong in your theory.

My situation is different than most Japanese users. I consider English to be my first language, and 8 months ago it was the only language I could speak, however I grew up around a lot of Japanese. My children books are actually Japanese, but due to family deaths and other issues, I basically spent my whole life never speaking Japanese. Even though I wasn't able to speak any Japanese when coming to Japan, I was able to listen to a lot and I think I had firm foundation.

I was able to jump into native level material pretty effortlessly, and I think it was because of being exposed for over 20 years (even if slight and passive). I do most of my studying just by exposure, but I found/find textbook knowledge very useful after I know the Japanese. I find myself somehow understanding something as I read or hear it, but after reading about it in a textbook I got lots of moments of "oh that's how it works!", or "oh I've seen that before, *that's* what it means!". Those moments really made a lot of Japanese grammar solidify more than just exposure does, however when I try to learn grammar I've never seen before... it feels very empty.

This is an interesting topic to me, and I don't have any advice. I'm currently trying to find a balance right now. I'm thinking about trying the kanzen master level 2 and 1 books, but I'm not sure how much I'll get out of it. I already know most of level 2 passively, but only some of level 1 from a quick glance. It's hard to figure out what's best because some grammar is used a lot more than other grammar. Some of the stuff just isn't used much at all (at least with what I do in Japanese), so it seems very hard to learn through only exposure.

Sorry for adding nothing to this thread

Grinkers Wrote:Sorry for adding nothing to this thread

You didn't 'add nothing'. You added proof that at least 1 person out there has learned Japanese without ever cracking a grammar book.

Yes, it -is- possible. Is it ideal? Probably not, but then... What is? Nobody -ever- attains the ideal study conditions for a language. Life gets in the way.

And beyond that, everyone is different. I know that I will learn grammar much easier if I have a book to read, and then can practice it. Many people are the opposite and need to experience it being used first, then read the book to lock it in. Still others can use just the book or just the experience and be done.

wccrawford Wrote:

Grinkers Wrote:Sorry for adding nothing to this thread

You didn't 'add nothing'. You added proof that at least 1 person out there has learned Japanese without ever cracking a grammar book.

Er, Grinkers said:

Quote:I do most of my studying just by exposure, but I found/find textbook knowledge very useful after I know the Japanese

so clearly they did 'crack a grammar book' at some point, and found it useful...which I expect applies to most people (there's a reason that they exist, after all, and second language learners of Japanese have been writing and using them for hundreds of years).

I would have a lot more respect for textbooks if they didn't tell so darn many lies to children. I swear every time some well-intentioned fool writes that 'small つ indicates a glottal stop,' or ' "desu" means "is," ' or "sh is like in English" God is sorely tempted to smite a kitten.

Text books need to stop giving useless exercises ("Which sentences are wrong?" I assure you, I am quite capable of making my own mistakes--don't even give me the idea of what other ones are possible.), stop substituting fuzzy terminology like "emphasis" for precise "topic/comment," and give the student a hard push out of the textbook bubble and into real media.

If textbooks were written for students it would be best if they played to their strength: boosting passive knowledge with precise explanation (in source or target language). Unfortunately, textbooks are written to people who prepare curricula--thus the attempt to be all-in-one programs with lots of exercises to keep the students busy, and what I call the "Pimsleur Rush:" trying to get the students to say something, anything, as quickly as possible to prove that the course is worth their money.

That said, there is a lot of value you can extract from textbooks, you just need to be prepared to strip out most of the junk from a very expensive book. When the decision comes down to 2 semesters of college Japanese texts or 15+ volumes of 漫画, smart money is on the native material--especially since all the grammar explanation you need to get started is in Tae Kim's free book.

The problem is still that if you lack basic grammatical knowledge, exposure isn't a lot of help -- and it may harm more than good. Back in the other thread, there's actually a debate over whether そこで見てろ means "look at that" or "look from over there" and people seem to think context is necessary to know which one it means. It's that sort of mistaken belief that I think can be created by a lack of emphasis on grammar in the early stages of learning.

Yes, you're right. People will make mistakes along the way. So do native children.

The issue is not whether people make mistakes now. Learners not yet proficient will make mistakes--that's what it means to not yet be proficient. Those mistakes may be irritating to those with higher proficiency--but you have to remember that current inability is not a damnation to perpetual suckage. People improve.

I'm not just pulling these ideas out of nowhere.

Stephen Krashen Wrote:Some have interpreted this position as a claim that all grammar teaching is forbidden. Not so. There are two good reasons for including grammar in the EFL curriculum.

The first is for "language appreciation," otherwise known as "linguistics." Linguistics includes language universals, language change, dialects, etc. The second is to fill gaps left by incomplete acquisition and places in which idiolects differ from the prestige dialect. Society’s standards for accuracy, especially in writing, are 100%: We are not allowed "mistakes" in punctuation, spelling or grammar. One public error, in fact, can result in humiliation. Even well-read native speakers have gaps, places where their grammatical competence differs from accepted use.

Consciously learned rules can fill some of these gaps, which are typically in aspects of language that do not affect communication of messages. The place to use this knowledge is in the editing stage of the composing process, when appealing to conscious rules will not interefere with communication.

I recommend delaying the teaching of these rules until more advanced levels. I would first give acquisition a chance, and then use conscious knowledge to fill in some of the gaps. There is no sense teaching rules for Monitoring that will eventually be acquired.

Grammar, thus, is not excluded. It is, however, no longer the star player but has only a supporting role.

http://www.sdkrashen.com/articles/eta_paper/index.html

I would like to see grammar texts written for that supporting role, not the star role they've traditionally taken. Beyond that I have nothing to say on the subject.

Magamo,

I think that comparing passive exposure with grammar rules ahead of time (what Yudantaiteki was talking about) to learning a language by being in the region with interaction with the natives to spur learning (what you're describing) is radically different. The latter is the main reason the myth "You must go to that country to learn that language" comes about. It works, but it's a myth in that we show you can learn a language quite well outside a country thanks to media exposure being widely available. However, if you only have that media, there's no way that'll translate to fluency on it's own (personal experience speaking here). You got to have a "Rosetta Stone" of some sort at least to make the jump, be that in the form of the actual Rosetta Stone, natives, books with rules/patterns.

On the other hand, I think plenty on this board have seen what no exposure and/or over reliance on systematic learning can lead to (guilty here also). That's why now I advocate getting the systematic portion to the bare minimum that makes the exposure route much more fun and fluid. Though I would never suggest one should SRS grammar rules, I don't mind doing it with grammar sentences on the idea I should be able to recognize what that sentence means.

Magamo, it's not because some people have been able to learn languages without grammar guides and textbooks in the past that it means that it's the best way to learn a language. Learning grammar is the basis of language instruction in most languages. Simply relying on exposure means that one will probably make many mistakes at first that will, perhaps, be corrected at some point in the future. It's much more efficient, in my opinion, to simply learn things correctly the first time. Plus, the kind of advice that you are providing on this forum is in good part, grammar instruction, and I think that it is useful to many people. So, I agree with Yudan.

Wildweathel: Some books may perhaps be providing simplified explanations but they usually fall short of lying. Good reference books, such as the dictionary of Japanese Grammar series usually provide accurate information. Genki might be too expensive but that's another topic.

wildweathel Wrote:Yes, you're right. People will make mistakes along the way. So do native children.

Indeed, but the way one responds to mistakes can have a big effect on recovering later. If you're having trouble understanding a fine point of usage, then it makes sense to say "Here's an explanation, but if you don't understand it, don't worry too much -- try to see if you can learn it from exposure". However, this does not apply to basic particles.

I'm always suspicious of claims like "I understand it but I can't explain it" or "I understand how it works but I don't understand the grammatical explanation". I'm certainly not saying that no one can ever be correct in saying this, but it seems to me that there may be an underlying problem if you think you understand something but can't explain it or understand an explanation (I'm not talking about technical linguistic papers here but things like DBJG or All About Particles).

I've said this before, but a lot of my position on this is based on my own personal experience -- after I had passed JLPT 1-kyuu and believed I pretty much knew how Japanese worked (largely from exposure), when I went back and had to teach the grammar from Japanese: The Spoken Language I found out that a good deal of what I thought I had picked up from exposure was actually flawed or completely incorrect, and there was plenty of stuff that I had just never even noticed.

Stephen Krashen Wrote:The first is for "language appreciation," otherwise known as "linguistics." Linguistics includes language universals, language change, dialects, etc. The second is to fill gaps left by incomplete acquisition and places in which idiolects differ from the prestige dialect. Society’s standards for accuracy, especially in writing, are 100%: We are not allowed "mistakes" in punctuation, spelling or grammar. One public error, in fact, can result in humiliation. Even well-read native speakers have gaps, places where their grammatical competence differs from accepted use.

Consciously learned rules can fill some of these gaps, which are typically in aspects of language that do not affect communication of messages. The place to use this knowledge is in the editing stage of the composing process, when appealing to conscious rules will not interefere with communication.

What I don't like about this idea is that the mistakes made by native speakers and by 1st or 2nd year learners are totally different. When you're looking at "mistakes" by native speakers (which usually really means "different dialect from the prestige standard"), it often does require very technical and difficult explanations or rules to figure out what's going on. But when a 1st year learner says 図書館に勉強する the rule is very simple and there's no point in avoiding or delaying it. Some people would claim you should show the learner 20 sentences with　に and で and let them figure it out for themselves, I prefer giving them the rule of に vs. で and then giving them the 20 sentences to read. (There's a frequent straw man of just showing the rule with no sentences, but I don't think anyone is suggesting that.)

It seems to me that part of the difficulty of this debate comes from a failure to recognize different stages of learning -- it's not like there's one fixed formula that shows how someone on day 5 and someone on year 15 should study Japanese.

yudantaiteki Wrote:there may be an underlying problem if you think you understand something but can't explain it or understand an explanation

Not knowing descriptions is extremely common among native speakers of every language. Very few English speakers know why a person who runs is a runner, while a person who retires is a retiree. It doesn't matter; they understand the difference unconsciously and use that grammar and related ones correctly.

Quote:when I went back and had to teach the grammar from Japanese: The Spoken Language I found out that a good deal of what I thought I had picked up from exposure was actually flawed or completely incorrect, and there was plenty of stuff that I had just never even noticed.

To paraphrase Feynman, when ornithology disagrees with what birds actually do, who is wrong? The scientists or the birds? I'm not saying that students are automatically right when they disagree with a grammar, but that they should test received wisdom against observation of the language itself. Language is imitation and communication, not religion.

(That's why it's unlikely I could be a language professor. I can't take academic dogmatism. I like my religion dogmatic and my science experimental.)

Quote:What I don't like about this idea is that the mistakes made by native speakers and by 1st or 2nd year learners are totally different.

You're comparing people at different levels. It's better to compare 1st/2nd year students to children. The most common errors among both young native and L2 learners are false generalizations or missing nuance...

Quote:But when a 1st year learner says 図書館に勉強する

...like that. The student is missing the distinction between "place of an action" used with most verbs and "place of being" which is a special target of いる、ある、住む、result ～ている／～てある、and probably a few others I'm missing. The student is probably generalizing from sentences like 本は図書館にある not having yet developed a feel for the difference between locations with ある and する.

Is that mistake enough to make the student incomprehensible? Probably not, though it does sound strange. Will further exposure clear it up? I'm sure it will. Would it help to note that Place-atに is a special case only used with some verbs when you introduce it, and gently remind people who forget? I'm pretty sure that's a good idea, too--especially if you use it as a chance to model the correct pattern.

(I wonder if total physical response sidesteps this particular issue. "に=target" is pretty well ingrained from the beginning if 「立って、ここに来て、座って」 is the first lesson.)

Quote:(There's a frequent straw man of just showing the rule with no sentences, but I don't think anyone is suggesting that.)

That has been exactly my experience with foreign language classes in American public schools. I'm glad you don't sink to that level, but please be aware that yes it does happen--and too often not only fails to teach, but convinces people that they're "just not good at languages."

Basically, I don't think that grammar instruction is necessarily bad, just that it too often is and shouldn't be seen as the only or even most important method for gaining live grammatical proficiency. It's especially important for students to try to find exceptions to the rules--that'll get them examining real texts closely and thus honing their grammatical knowledge, whether or not the received grammar is correct.

wildweathel Wrote:

yudantaiteki Wrote:there may be an underlying problem if you think you understand something but can't explain it or understand an explanation

Not knowing descriptions is extremely common among native speakers of every language. Very few English speakers know why a person who runs is a runner, while a person who retires is a retiree. It doesn't matter; they understand the difference unconsciously and use that grammar and related ones correctly.

Yes, they're native speakers. We're not.

Quote:

Quote:when I went back and had to teach the grammar from Japanese: The Spoken Language I found out that a good deal of what I thought I had picked up from exposure was actually flawed or completely incorrect, and there was plenty of stuff that I had just never even noticed.

To paraphrase Feynman, when ornithology disagrees with what birds actually do, who is wrong? The scientists or the birds? I'm not saying that students are automatically right when they disagree with a grammar, but that they should test received wisdom against observation of the language itself. Language is imitation and communication, not religion.

I was definitely wrong and JSL was right. I figured this out by reading and listening to Japanese after I had read the new information from there.

Quote:Basically, I don't think that grammar instruction is necessarily bad, just that it too often is and shouldn't be seen as the only or even most important method for gaining live grammatical proficiency. It's especially important for students to try to find exceptions to the rules--that'll get them examining real texts closely and thus honing their grammatical knowledge, whether or not the received grammar is correct.

Right, but I don't think this is something that beginners should be doing. When you're still at the level where で vs. を is a problem, you should be trusting the grammar books more than your own intuition. Later you can get your own feel.

Going back to the initial example in the other thread (not to pick on the person but I think it's a good example for this), そこで見てろ was interpreted as "look over there", thus incorrectly understanding both the で particle and the use of the ている form. This is not an example where textbook language is coming into conflict with real usage or anything like that, it's just plain misunderstanding. And if something like that is being misunderstood, it's likely that many more sentences, more complex than that one, will also be misunderstood -- and I don't think that's a good formula for being able to discover for yourself the way the language works. You can't discover how Japanese works if you don't understand (or misunderstand) the Japanese you're reading or hearing. That's where you need the grammar books or textbooks for help. Of course they're never 100% correct, but it's a necessary evil.

Just to reiterate here, I'm not discounting exposure or saying that only grammar is important. But remember that we're not talking about subtleties or complexities of the language, but basic particles and conjugations that have no ambiguity whatsoever and that completely follow the explanations given in books. (見てろ might be a bit tough; JSL does explain that ている->てる contraction when -te iru is first introduced, but I don't know if other books do as well.)

I think it's all about feedback really. It's all useful, whether it's somebody saying "hey, that's not quite right" on a web forum, the guy behind the counter going はぁ?, corrections to your Japanese homework, or a textbook's explanation of something that you kinda sorta understood but not quite. Passive exposure provides a kind of feedback, as you match the constant stream of new data against what you already think you know. But it can be kind of slow and it's not very directed and it doesn't generally give you 'X is wrong' answers, only 'Y is right, and Z is OK, and ....'. Shorter feedback paths typically mean faster convergence, which is a Good Thing here. (A feedback loop with no input, of course, doesn't get you anywhere useful...)

Posting an incorrect statement on a forum is usually a pretty fast way to get feedback; on the other hand if you do it too often it stops working. My grammar dictionary doesn't care how many times I go and ask it stupid questions :-)