I'm pretty much in the "immersion trumps everything" camp, but even I wouldn't say that you should eschew grammar explanations.
I think a lot of people, including myself, had trouble with Romance languages where it seems like 80% of what you do in class is drill on verb conjugations. That's the kind of repetitive grammar study that I would like to find a path around, but at the same time it's really hard to learn that kind of thing just from exposure. (I learned the hard way that verbs conjugated in 1st person and 2nd person are much harder to find in reading material than those conjugated in 3rd person. Probably TV would've been a good resource, but we're getting off track.)
I don't know of anything in Japanese grammar that requires that kind of repetitive drilling, though. There are conjugations, but they're so much simpler and there's so little irregularity.
When I go back to Stephen Krashen, who is my guru for language learning and a huge advocate for exposure, he doesn't say avoid grammar entirely. He says that learning explicit grammar rules is not a part of language acquisition. Traditional language pedagogy said for a long time, if you learn all the grammar rules then you've learned the language. But my peers who learned languages that way, with the assumption that when you've learned the past perfect then you can move on to a different grammar point, have tremendous trouble carrying on a conversation. You can hear their brains scrambling for the correct conjugation. Krashen goes so far as to say, you don't acquire things that you learn in this way no matter how much you drill on them.
But Krashen also admits that the amount of exposure you need is so great that you can't rely on it 100%, especially as a beginner. (He doesn't really get into issues of fossilization, but I know from experience that can be an issue). Grammar study is useful insofar as it can give you some bootstraps, so that if you don't know intuitively how to say something, then you can at least rely on the explicit rules you've learned to get you through. For instance, he says that the -s for 3rd person singular present tense (He goes to work every day) is naturally acquired late. But you wouldn't want to go along without it just because you haven't acquired it yet! There are lots of grammar rules like that: they're essential but they won't be naturally acquired quickly, so you'll be waiting a long time if you don't learn them explicitly. (On the other hand he says that meaning-focused conversation is not the place to be consciously applying those rules and correcting errors. It takes too long.)
Krashen's book on principles and practice in 2nd language acquisition is interesting: Start from chapter 4, or if you really want to get to the meat of it, page 89.
http://www.sdkrashen.com/Principles_and_...index.html
Quote:The place for Monitor use is when the performer has time, as in writing and in prepared speech. As stated earlier, simply giving performers time does not insure that they will use the conscious Monitor; hence, condition 2 in Chapter II: The performer must be thinking about correctness or focussed on form. When given time, and when focussed on form, some people can use conscious grammar to great advantage. In the case of the second language performer who has acquired nearly all of the grammar of the second language, but who still has some gaps, the use of the conscious grammar can fill in many of the non-acquired items. This can, in writing at least, occasionally result in native-like accuracy.
Quote:Indeed, in the advanced second language class, providing such polish may become the main goal, one that is quite justified for many students. "Advanced" second language acquirers, especially those who have been in the country where the target language is spoken for a few years, may have acquired a great deal, but not all, of the second language, enough to meet communicative need, but still short of the native speaker standard. Their chief need may be conscious rules to use as a supplement to their acquired competence, to enable them to appear as educated in their second language as they are in their first.
I do not object to this sort of grammar teaching. What is unfair is to emphasize accuracy on communicatively unessential, late acquired items in beginning language classes, with students who are unable to understand the simplest message in the second language.
(I should mention that even though I'm in the immersion camp, I have had WAY more explicit grammar instruction than somebody like Khatzumoto would advocate: 5 years of pretty traditional Japanese classes plus a year self-studying for the JLPT 1kyuu plus I sometimes read books like "Hey, your keigo is WRONG!" for fun. Plus I hang out here.)
Edited: 2012-02-18, 9:17 am
