Hello dear all, I have one big problem. I don't know how to summarize grammar points in such way, that i have something short that i can easily memorize. What I look for is a sentence or formula that tells me, what a grammar point means or does. So i hope that someone here can help me with this.

流れ星

Use an example sentence from any source.

Alteratively, you can copy JGRAM.org. Here is a sample of JLPT4 grammar point "summaries" from JGRAM.org:
～が (subject marker)
～が but
～は 'topic marker' (also shown as 'wa')

Either you know what these points mean or you do not; you can grade yourself on them in Anki.

Others suggested cloze deletion (for particles).


Do not try to learn what you do not understand.
Do not try to memorize without having learned.

jcdietz03 Wrote:Alteratively, you can copy JGRAM.org. Here is a sample of JLPT4 grammar point "summaries" from JGRAM.org:
～が (subject marker)
～が but
～は 'topic marker' (also shown as 'wa')

I don't know about stuff like "～が" = "subject marker". I don't know what a subject or a subject marker is. And i'm not sure knowledge of those terms is particularly useful.

I'm a fan of the sentence pattern approach. I learned grammar initially as a series of cookie-cutter patterns that you can slot your desired words into. Gives you a limited production ability early, without making you sound too strange (there's less temptation to be "inventive" and say unnatural things). Add to that a lot of example sentences using that grammar and you start to build an ability to quickly understand the grammar when you encounter it, without thinking.

IMHO, the aim is to build an intuitive understanding of Japanese grammar. Memorising rules without any sort of context is just going to lead to way too much thinking and unnatural sentences.

You could get a book... either from the Dictionary of Japanese Grammar series or the Kanzen Master series.

One thing that I do with my current cards is to make a brief note on any card that I have 'marked' in Anki that has a grammar point I don't understand. Usually, after doing this a few times, I can remember the point and understand it, or its variations, when I see or hear it again. I think this is similar to the intuitive approach that Zigmonty wrote above, but with, perhaps, a greater focus on decoding sentences.

On the matter of grammar learning, I will say that I have done a lot of different things to get the grammar in to my head - we are all so different in the way we learn - but that the tradition approach of learning it from decoding one or two parts of a sentence that I don't understand has been the most effective method so far. I'm sure there are better, faster methods out there, but, once I got good at it, the amount of time put in was very minimal.

In summary, 'learn grammar, but don't do it too seriously and you will be fine' is a good approach, in my experience and opinion.

By the way, the notes I add are usually just a quick summary of what I think the point means.

Sentence:
これはねこです。

"は: It just tells you what or who the subject is."

Simple and easy to type in (most things beyond verb conjugations fit nicely in to this category, thankfully!) Avoid grammar speak and just pretend you are explaining to someone who sort of knows what you mean, but isn't quite there yet, and you'll be fine.

Thank you all, for taking the time, to answer to my call for help.

jcdietz03 I do know the grammar points. It is just that when I encounter them somewhere in a conversation, I don't seem to be able to remember what it means. When i look it up in my books, it goes like: "Oh, that's what it was!" But i cannot possibly do this all the time. Looking up such information, until hopefully some day this information sinks in. So i need a way to formulate a set of very simple rules, that i can then memorize, so i don't have to look anything up anymore. What I don't want to do is learning grammar points in isolation, or try to memorize those, as i don't see a value in that.

zigmonty I have been learning all the grammar points in Genki I + II so far. And I can say that I understand them. Both books are explaining grammar points in detail, and the explanations are very easy to understand, but to summarize those points is close to impossible for me. It is just this lack of skill in summarizing something, anything, this was never my strong suite. I can work something out in great detail, but the other way around is, what gives me troubles to no end.

I'm curious. How does this cookie cutter pattern approach of yours works. Could you give me an example, please?

caivano I do own the DoBJG / DoIJG / DoAJG, but how would it help me in what I'm looking for?

You know. I can understand what you mean, but could it be more that you are not learning the grammar points in the medium you want to use them in?

I recently have been using subs2srs only as a tool for learning Japanese. All of my sentences have natural audio taken from various sources (anime, dramas, music, etc.) where I would normally expect to want to understand that kind of vocabulary or grammar structure. This has really made it possible to understand words, grammar points, and so on, that I can't always understand in written form so well.

Why not try changing the medium you are learning the grammar points from? Take your textbook audio, cut it down and then relisten to it or add it to Anki. Test yourself based on your understanding of the audio and have a question on your card that points you to the grammar point.

Sorry, I took this from your reply to JcDeitz03. I'm not sure if it is helpful, but it sounds so similar to how I have been in the past.

On a side point, why simplify if its not something your good at? Wouldn't it be easier to find a way to use what you are good at to learn this? What could you do right now to utilize your skills to create a strong enough impression of the grammar point such that you no longer forget it when you hear or read it? Additionally, would a summary actually be useful? Could something else be more effective, efficient and fun? What would that be if you were forced to find 12 other ways?

Why summarising? (Srsly, nothing against it, but I think it's waste of precious time. As Crank, I'm persuaded Subs2SRS does work and does in fact a really good job if you do it on a regular basis. Additionally it's nice to see, instead of summarising all the same lame stuff for dozen of times, how the forms you learnt are used in real life and not in textbooks, explaining the smallest detail, sometimes even confusing the reader and learner more than helping him [my case very often].)

With me it's like I bought the 日本語能力試験　実力アップ Series - 3kyuu Bunpou Script (a link here. this guy used them, so 3kyuu and 2kyuu. listening and watching his videos makes me astonished and persuaded the books he recommend are really really useful and promising: http://thedailyyoji.blogspot.com/2008/07...eries.html) and go through the points every day, which is done more and more quickly, when you now what's written in the book/grammar used on the single pages, including my pencil written notes and comments. *

I was just too lazy to mine the thing with anki and add the Notes for the grammar points. Also I think learning grammar with paper is more efficient for me than learning it through SRSing it, like other users did f.e. with the Tae Kim deck - I can't work with stuff like that. I don't like it and it's not fun, therefore I don't use it, but for some users it might be great to have such a system.

I will probably buy the 1-2kyuu bunpou by Unicom as well (perhaps the Kanzen one's as well for reference and practice) and will read them like books. Just the sentences and I will try to understand them.

Concerning the series of grammar dictionaries called "A dictionary for Basic/Intermediate/Advanced Japanese Grammar", which every Japanese learner should own, are at times too detailed and confusing, where as the above mentioned books present necessary functions of suffixes/prefixes - forms - in short, summarised and really comprehensibly explained with a bunch of examples. On top of that, parallels are drawn to draw attention to special forms (f.e. difference between ~おかげで and ~せい).
The short explanations are given in Japanese and you *do* benefit if you know already a bit of grammar, like you Nagareboshi after the genki series, and vocab (I consider core2k as perfectly fine. It works great for me at least and going up core6k - soon again.. my computer crashed and I need to recover now. My reviews will be piled up till hell.


* Since there is the "new" JLPT.. don't give a damn about that. Just work with the old stuff, it will has the same effect. If you just wanna prepare for JLPT N3 you have to learn also the grammar presented and given in the 日本語能力試験　実力アップ JLPT2 Bunpou :x It's a great book.
@Nagareboshi: Mail me if you need a sample of the book :-) It's really *awesome*

Nagareboshi Wrote:So i need a way to formulate a set of very simple rules, that i can then memorize, so i don't have to look anything up anymore. What I don't want to do is learning grammar points in isolation, or try to memorize those, as i don't see a value in that.

Maybe you could make a sentence up with like 6 "grammar points" and memorize it, then when you see something and forget it, you could try to remember that sentence.

There probably aren't a whole lot of grammar points that you don't know well.
Just drill them. Practice making sentences with them. Look up example sentences and read them.
Do this every day. Do it enough and it will come to you naturally.

Nagareboshi Wrote:I'm curious. How does this cookie cutter pattern approach of yours works. Could you give me an example, please?

Both Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication and Minna no Nihongo more or less take this approach (not *quite* as cookie cutter as i said though). You don't learn a grammar point so much as a sentence that says something. There are then drills where you make your own sentences following the pattern. An example would be (if you wanted to say someone is good at something):

[Name]さんは[Activity]が上手です。

The structure of this sentence is fairly non-intuitive to an english speaker. The problem isn't just knowing how to translate the sentence "Regarding [Name], [Activity] is skilful", it's coming up with that rather unnatural english sentence in the first place so that you can actually apply rules like ”が=subject marker”. If you start with "[Name] is good at [Activity]", then the mapping to the japanese and the particles used seem pretty weird.

Lists of rules like ”が=subject marker” blow up when talking about particles like に or で if you actually want to exhaustively list every possible use of them. Consider the sentence ”[Name]に会います". Why the hell is it に and not を as would be expected from the English? Going to add a rule like ”に=object marker when used with 会う"? It's easier to just add "[Name]に会います" to the set of patterns you know and cloze delete the particle in anki.

The human brain is just way better at pattern recognition and predicting missing parts of a pattern than learning abstract, indirect rules (nestor, back me up, lol). After a while, を will just feel weird if you try to use it (or see it used) to mark a person with 会います.

Nagareboshi Wrote:caivano I do own the DoBJG / DoIJG / DoAJG, but how would it help me in what I'm looking for?

I'm not sure I completely follow your first post but I took it that you wanted to summarize grammar points. And the DOXG are basically these summaries already done, and in order... so you can learn these points and the example sentences.

If you want to summarize the points yourself as a learning exercise than I guess it wouldn't help, except to check your answers.

This link may be useful as a summary for begginers. It is in romaji.

http://www.nafai.org/japanese/grammar/nafjpphrases/

To the original poster:

I'd recommend watching Japanese TV dramas with Japanese subtitles.
You can download entire scripts for each episode and review them.

Since all of the words in the script are being spoken (it's a TV show), everything
is conversational. So if you study grammar from Japanese drama, you are learning
grammar that can be used in daily conversation (and you can pull examples from
each episode).

usis35 Wrote:This link may be useful as a summary for begginers. It is in romaji.

http://www.nafai.org/japanese/grammar/nafjpphrases/

Thank you! I love the way they organized the grammar in that doc. It would be nearly perfect if it didn't rely on romaji and also had a column for usage notes where appropriate. (edit: it does)

Let me thank you all for your valuable advice and suggestions! And please forgive me, that this is going to be a longer post to read, so please skip to your name.

Cranks I'm very happy with the books i learn with. Everything is easy to understand, and the exercises are more or less easy.

Subs2Srs would be useful indeed. If only there were any subtitles available for those Anime i would need them for. English subs are easy to come by. But i can't seem to find any Japanese ones, even though the sources for them are well known. I would really love to be able to read along, because it seems easier to have text there, in Japanese to identify parts of a sentence. Even outside an SRS prior to adding any cards.

Cutting audio seems like the way to go. The audio on the CD's ripped to mp3 are only in one direction and that is E->J. Exception is Vocabulary which is J->E only. So a little bit of cutting and having some audio on my cards would be sweet. Could you please suggest a tool that is easy to use and works with Windows 7 Ultimate?

Simplifying seemed to me to be the way to go, even though this is not my strong suit. Because I couldn't come up with any other way to solve this problem. Learning something I know when i see it in a book? Doesn't seem to be the way to go. So I thought that having a simple set of rules for each grammar point would solve it. Your comment got me thinking about what other ways there could be, that enable me to not forget a grammar point, so i can enjoy a dialogue, that I would understand if only I hadn't forgotten the grammar.

What I can think of other than trying to summarize all the grammar points is this:
I could create a mindmap for the grammar points, going all crazy with it, and go through those from time to time.

Explaining grammar points to myself, in simple words, maybe in context of a dialogue. As I know this is said to be the most effective way to not only learn, but also to remember things, if something has to be explained or taught to others.

Analyzing sentences is also something that could work for me. Picking a random sentence, and going through it, adding short notes. Something like that.

SRS i don't know about clozed deletion as has been suggested here. I know that there is a topic discussing this. But I'm a bit lost how to do it in Anki.

Fill in the blanks is another thing i was planning to use in conjunction with Anki. And i have been looking for a way to create such cards. I have not found a way after extensive use of google, that shows a way how to do this.

This is all that i can think of right now that I could do, to counter my problem of forgetting, what's already been learned. But has not yet found it's way outside the SRS or book to other sources like sentences, movies, or anime.

zigmonty Thank you for explaining this to me. I don't own Japanese Sentence Patterns for Effective Communication, if it is good, i will try to get a hold of a copy on Amazon. I do have the Minna no Nihongo books though, so I can see how this works, even though it is not the same as what you mean when you are talking of cookie cutter method.

Thank you for explaining how it works. The way you are explaining it, it seems to be exactly that, what i've been looking for! Thank you very much for it!

caivano Thank you for clearing it up. I don't plan on reinventing the wheel, if there is something readily available. So I will be using the book to single out the short summaries of grammar points, and use it together with the method, zigmonty was outlining.

Tori-kun Yes I'm convinced that summarizing everything is not the way to go. Now that the others took their time to show me other ways, i have some more options, that i can try out. And if all else fails, i still could go back, to the original idea. It would be great if you could send me the examples, though. If you haven't already. *lol*

Zarxrax Yes, you got it right. It is all about not forgetting what they do. Not that i don't know them in any way, or them presenting any problems.

The thing with grammar is, that I don't have the slightest problem with anything that involves conjugation patterns, those have been easy for me from the get go. I know what something means, as long as i recognize the conjugated form, no matter that being　～ば、～て、potential etc. I easily remember and can understand it, when i encounter it, outside the books, in a dialogue, or in a sentence. Also I don't have any trouble with particles, production, identification etc. It's more things like ～たらどうですか or ～といい that i can't remember outside the books. Both really simple as soon as i look up their meaning, but impossible to remember, outside it.

usis35 Thank you very much for the link! This looks most interesting, even though it contains romaji, which i don't really need or like.

Now it's up to me to make something of it. I can't thank you enough, for all your input, i will make the best i can of it. And if someone has yet another idea, that could help me, please don't hold back and let me know.

流れ星

Nagareboshi Wrote:It's more things like ～たらどうですか or ～といい that i can't remember outside the books. Both really simple as soon as i look up their meaning, but impossible to remember, outside it.

for grammar points like these, in Anki I add 1 card for
～たらどうですか = Why don't you~ / What about doing ~

Which is from DBJG, then add 2 or 3 cards for the best example sentences from DBJG.

So then these are cycling through Anki and I'm conscious of them, so when I'm reading manga, watching drama, reading lang-8 or whatever if I read/hear the structure, I'll write down the sentence and add that too.

Then through anki it'll sink in and you'll know it and hear it all the time, then you can delete the anki cards

Only trouble is when you're learning rare(ish) grammar that doesn't come up in the native materials you're using very much.

During my middle stage, where I was writing from grammar points for correction - a much more productive approach - I used to write them up like this:

ば/～れば
Meaning: If…
Information: It tells you that what the person just said if you do A, B will happen.

Formation:
[U-verb] change the う to the nearest え and add ば
[Ru-verb] drop る and add れば
[irr. Verb]　＝すれば・くれば
[i-adj] drop い add ければ
[na-adj] add なら[ば]
[Noun] add なら[b]
(Commands, request, etc. OK, but S1 cannot be an action.)

Sentences:
が降れば家にいる
急げば大丈夫です
傘が必要ならば貸します

ても
Meaning: Even if, although
Information: Even if I did A, B happened.

Formation:
[Verb―て]も
[Na-Adj]でも
[Noun]でも

Sentences:
たとえ彼は忙しくても来るよ
たとえ大雨になっても私は行く
いやでもその仕事をしなければならない

みたい
Meaning:　Something seems to be (but is not)
Information: The speaker is saying that someone appears to be, but isnt something.

Formation:
[Verb]みたい
[Noun]みたい
[na-Adj]みたい
[i-Adj]みたい
(conjugates before or after みたい as a な-Adj NOT A I-ADJ!)

Sentences:
いい人みたいじゃないか
彼女最近まいっているみたいだ
Janeさんは新しいボーイフレンドがいるみたいだ


てしまう
Meaning:　Have done X, finish doing X.
Information: This tells you that the speaker or someone else has finished or completed something.

Formation:
[Verb―て]しまう
(past tense can be used to say that you regret doing something.)

Sentences:
私は友達のミルクを飲んでしまった
Johnさんは三日でその本を読んでしまった。
もう宿題をしてしまいましたか

Basically, I had everything from JPLT 1-5 floating around in this format before I dumped it all off. You'll probably note that it is geared more for production than recognition. I pretty much needed a 'how to' on making the content, which is too over detailed for recognition alone. What you see above is from a rough draft I have left over.

Anyway, however you decide to learn it, you'll be fine. Just be aware it takes quite awhile before something will fit in to your head. The good news is once you get past the point where you can pretty much read through the index of the DOBJG and recognize 80% then there's not much left out there that can throw you for six as you can mostly learn on the fly.

(Probably what I am trying to say is that Khatz, as usual, was right: You suck less the more you do.)

caviano Thank you! I will surely do this, too.

Cranks What more could I've been asking for? Brilliant! Thank you for taking the time to share this! Although geared towards production, there should be no problem, to adapt the pattern and change it for recognition. With the way you've been showing me, together with the ideas of the others who were so kind to offer their advice, I will do just fine.

I still have 3 questions that haven't been answered yet:

I'm looking for a good software to cut audio with. It should be easy to use, fast and simple, if possible. It does not have to be freeware.

Is there a Genki I + II Anki deck in existence, that contains audio, for vocabulary? If so, and if anyone has it, would they be willing to share it with me?

Sorry ファブリス for not obeying the forum rules just this once. But I need to find an answer to this particular question, because I haven't been able to find a sufficient answer to it, anywhere else. What I want to know is how one can create cards that contain blanks. A type of card that's expecting me to type in the correct answer, or to write it out by hand on paper, upon reviewing them. What I would need is a general idea of card type, required fields, and how to set this type of card up in Anki. I think that this could be helpful to know for others as well. So i hope this question, above all others, gets an answer.

Thanks again to all of you!
流れ星

"I'm looking for a good software to cut audio with. It should be easy to use, fast and simple, if possible. It does not have to be freeware." - Audacity

"What I want to know is how one can create cards that contain blanks." Clozed Delete Card

Front:
1 sentences with grammar point.
1 sentence with grammar point cloze deleted.
1 sentences with grammar point.

Back:
Break down of clozed delete sentence.

Reading:
(If desired.)

CD:
(A field for the cloze delete information.)

Extra:
(Information that helps you understand the point, notes, so on.)

"Front:
禁煙するつもりだ。
そこへ行く＿＿＿＿。
新車を買うつもりだ

Back:
"Intend/going/plan to"
[Dict form] つもりだ
[Verb ない] つもりだ

Basically, in term of formation notes K.I.S.S and short is best. I barely ever read them because I choose 7 grammar points and write on Lang-8 for 1 week. Cards just remind me of everything I've learned so far. The learning happens as I study the grammar initially and when I use it again and again. I also make an effort to use the dialogue in speech (to myself or another person) during my day at least once, hopefully 10 times, in a natural way (i.e., don't just make sentences, do dialogues with yourself or talk to someone else.)"

http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=6635
http://forum.koohii.com/showthread.php?tid=5029

http://www.csse.monash.edu.au/~jwb/j_gram_summ.html

Thank you once again, Cranks! I began adding cards to my grammar deck. The layout looks like this:



I'm not sure if I should keep the example sentences on the front, hidden right now, or to move them to the back of the card to have something to read. Most likely i will delete the English translation, because they are not needed. They are just there, because i was copying and pasting them out, from my script.

I think the way this deck is set up should be ok as it is. I will also add random cards with images and sentences to this deck, taken from various sources such as native media, as caviano suggested.

What I test myself against is (1) the content of the clozed deletion field and (2) the general meaning of a grammar point.

If there is anything I can do to further improve those cards please let me know!