should I study these separately, or just keep mining sentences and eventually it'll click?

hachi Wrote:should I study these separately, or just keep mining sentences and eventually it'll click?

You'll get contrary views. Some swear by passive learning only. I am not one of those people. Passive learning will only work with an enourmous amount of immersion.

Learn grammar, but don't overdo it. SRS examples, not grammar rules themselves. You don't need to remember what the technical term for the を particle is but you need to know when it's used.

Verb conjugation is grammar, and it's definitely a good idea to obtain a basic understanding of Japanese grammar while studying Japanese in any format.

Read through a grammar guide to get the basics. You'll want to know how to get back to the dictionary form of the word so you can look words up. Beyond that, just read/listen a lot and ask questions. It might be useful to print out some tables to use as reference, though I never did it.

Learning purely through exposure would be impractical. Sure, you might eventually pick up the patterns and nuances, but if you're trying to understand something you can't infer from context, would you rather wait for it or look up a detailed explanation? That's what grammar is for.

That said, I'll be the first to admit I haven't studied it systematically.

You may as well look at it in a grammar guide. Just know that you shouldn't and you won't nail it down in a day, or a week(as in like being able to automatically conjugate it in your head or something). You'll probably learn to recognize it fairly soon though.

You definitely want to study the basics. Struggling with verb conjugations just slows you down, and there are so few of them in Japanese that it's worth just spending a little time studying them.

Unless you are only going to read online where rikai-chan can deconjugate verbs and i-adjectives for you, you pretty much -have- to study grammar in order to be able to look up unknown words. You'll be restricted to sentence mining already translated texts if you can't work backwards and get the dictionary form from a conjugation in front of you.
(Plus the meaning changes when the verb conjugates, of course, so again you need to know it - rikai-chan will usually name the transformations, but that may not help understand what they mean without a ton of exposure.)

You don't need to study grammar to the point of being able to -produce- correct conjugations, just to recognize them in front of you. If you can recognize them, exposure will make them familiar enough to easily produce, although a refresher study is well worth doing after a bit - the explanations make much more sense when you have examples you can easily call to mind.

When I was learning English I practised conjugations of all irregular verbs until I knew them by heart. For example:
go, went, gone
do, did, done
get, got, got

and so on...

With japanese it is a bit different but not so much. You will need to know by heart irregular conjugations of only two:
来る（くる）
する

Then you will need to know what is a pattern of conjugation for verbs from group 2. (Some of verbs from group 2 will seem to belong to group 1 and you will need to know those.) For example:
食べる（たべる）
寝る（ねる）
見る（みる）

Then you will need to develop similar pattern recognition/production for verbs in group 1 - the minor difficulty being that there are several subgroups. For example:
歌う（うたう）
行く（いく）
分かる（わかる）

HTH