Others disagree, but I think it slows your learning to completely avoid grammar explanations at all and only use immersion.  There's too much danger of learning the wrong thing, and it's slower to pick it up that way.

it takes a past tense dictionary form no matter what the tense of the sentence.

This is not true; you can use past and non-past forms before 時 but they have different meanings.

Can't say I know the answer to your first post, but I had a similar problem wondering how fruitful/fruitless working my way up to immersion would be. It turned out fine once I went ahead and started doing it this week.

Compare, say, spending 350 hours on active listening in a year, to 1400 hours of listening, half of which was active in some way or another. It's less efficient (which usually isn't gd), but you get double the active listening + another 600 hours of passive listening (which is gd). Those extra hours will count. Over time you'd probably start listening more actively anyway. You can't read passively but using the L-R technique puts you in a situation where reading is necessary (let alone immersion), which is also good in our cases.

I had to unlearn a perfectionist mindset of getting things done sequentially, too (i.e. RTK reviews after breakfast then shadowing then grammar then SRS), and now I do shadowing (almost literally) whenever I can, L-R whenever I can, and spend a 4-hour window in my daily routine on ADoBJG and Anki. Just a personal anecdote, hope you can take something from it

Edit: and on grammar specifically, I think it's useful to make notes in your own words when you learn new grammar points, not just reading them in an SRS.

http://www.lifehack.org/articles/produc … write.html

What this and other tests suggest is that when we write — before we write, although indistinguishably so — we are putting some degree of thought into evaluating and ordering the information that we are receiving. That process, and not the notes themselves, is what helps fix ideas more firmly in our minds, leading to greater recall down the line.

I do this for all new grammar and it definitely helps my recognition.

Last edited by Animosophy (2013 June 15, 12:17 pm)

Also the grammar guides vary a lot in depth of coverage and technical language.  Something like DBJ is low on the technical side and has a lot of examples; "grammar" doesn't have to mean pages and pages of dry, technical linguistics.

Hirakana wrote:

中国に行った時、茶を買います

What do you think this sentence means?

Read translated example sentences, but don't expect to really learn the grammar at that exact moment, or think that memorizing a grammar description is the same as internalizing (acquiring) the grammar. What your brain is actually doing when intuitively comprehending input, especially real time audio, or when speaking fluidly has very little to do with any learned grammar discription. You're relying on some other acquired skill.
So I'd suggest not mistaking grammar as the end goal, but rather as a tool that is useful in so much as it can help you understand things (text in particular). If you've never learned a language before, it mprobably is a good idea to get a basic overview of grammar. After that it's good enough to just use google/dictionaries as reference. When you don't understand something and that bothers you, look it up or ask someone.
Don't expect  to get a particulally accurate understanding of grammar from translated example sentences in textbooks though, try to find something that actually explains more technically, word by word, the basics of how particles/word order verb tenses etc work, and then learn using comprehensible content that is engaging to you. Just looking at supposedly equivalent sentence pairs often gives you very little understanding of 'why' they are equivalent or how they are only semantically the same under certain circumstances.

Hirakana wrote:

I'm SRSing Genki 1 and 2 (as in the example sentences) and my basic plan is to recognize the grammar patterns so I can solidify them through immersion. So my question is, will this work? For example, take the grammar point
時（とき）
中国に行った時、茶を買います

I would put in the sentence, learn the grammar point itself, but NOT learn off the fact that it takes a past tense dictionary form no matter what the tense of the sentence. I would hope that immersion would take care of it for me. Is this a good idea? I don't know if I explained it properly.

The sentence is wrong. Either it should be "iku toku" or kaimashita".
Right now, the sentence says something like "When i was in China, i will buy tea."

It should either say "When i go to China, i will buy tea" or "When i was in China, i bought tea."

chamcham wrote:

Hirakana wrote:

中国に行った時、茶を買います

The sentence is wrong.

For what it's worth, I happened to be sitting next to a Japanese friend of mine when I read this, and when I asked her, she said it was correct.

Animosophy wrote:

buonaparte wrote:

The best beginner-friendly and jargon-free grammar book is to be found here:
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/JCP/
J 00 Hugo Japanese In Three Months.7z
Eplanations in plain English.
Examples sentences: kanji-spaced hirgana-English + audio by Japanese native speakers.

Hey buonaparte, thanks for the link. I downloaded the file but there's no word document. Are the audio file names themselves the L-R material?

/not-thread-jacking

JCP in
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain/JCP/
is a folder. It contains all the necessary materials and docs.
!      JCP info folders and files.txt   lists the contents.
JCtexts.7z    all the texts are in this  file.

JCP is a sub-folder of
http://users.bestweb.net/~siom/martian_mountain
that contains more learning materials.

More about it here:
http://forum.koohii.com/viewtopic.php?id=7082

buonaparte wrote:

I didn't do Heisig. RTK is not the only way, I would never do it. I just learned all the classical bushu (classifiers, radicals) and their Japanese names, and general stroke order rules. It took me two afternoons.

How I learn languages.
! L-R the most important passages.htm
http://users.bestweb.net/%7Esiom/martia … ssages.htm

That's far more than I'd hoped for.   In fact, it's awesome.  Thank you very much.

Hirakana wrote:

chamcham wrote:

Hirakana wrote:

I would put in the sentence, learn the grammar point itself, but NOT learn off the fact that it takes a past tense dictionary form no matter what the tense of the sentence. I would hope that immersion would take care of it for me. Is this a good idea? I don't know if I explained it properly.

The sentence is wrong. Either it should be "iku toku" or kaimashita".
Right now, the sentence says something like "When i was in China, i will buy tea."

Well, my textbook (Genki 2) has that sentence in it so I'm afraid you're the one who's wrong here.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Japanese grammar is easy to see in input. You can know a word but not be able to use it in output. What I'm saying is, if I immerse for a year+ could I pick up how words are used in grammar patterns for use in output? At least for the basic (N5-N3) grammar?

Depending on how active the immersion is (watching something relaxed while having a few beers Vs watching something and listening to the dialogue very carefully and relating it to what you're learning, on the fly) in respect to the increase in comprehension. As to output it would be hard to learn without experiencing corrections, mistakes, etc.

Your mileage way vary, but without practiced output (on Japanese language forums, writing websites, speaking with people, etc.), I wouldn't expect your output to improve greatly. Comparable to your own native language and the process of creative writing: those who write various forms of literature, aside from reading probably more than the average person, they also output volumes more than the non-writer. The act of output helps re-enforce or correct learned patterns, etc. in a physical manner which has a neural involvement which immersion without output simply does not provide.

Hirakana wrote:

chamcham wrote:

Hirakana wrote:

I would put in the sentence, learn the grammar point itself, but NOT learn off the fact that it takes a past tense dictionary form no matter what the tense of the sentence. I would hope that immersion would take care of it for me. Is this a good idea? I don't know if I explained it properly.

The sentence is wrong. Either it should be "iku toku" or kaimashita".
Right now, the sentence says something like "When i was in China, i will buy tea."

Well, my textbook (Genki 2) has that sentence in it so I'm afraid you're the one who's wrong here.
Anyway, what I'm trying to say is that Japanese grammar is easy to see in input. You can know a word but not be able to use it in output. What I'm saying is, if I immerse for a year+ could I pick up how words are used in grammar patterns for use in output? At least for the basic (N5-N3) grammar?

In this case, i was wrong. But textbooks often have errors. Just search for "errata".

Last edited by chamcham (2013 June 16, 8:42 am)

yudantaiteki wrote:

What's the difference between between [past]ほうが[any adjective or adverb] and nonpast?

ったほうがいい points to a specific situation -- i.e. if you do that (if that action is completed), it will be good.  non-pastほうがいい is just a general statement of what is good.

Thanks. All the exceptions to the first were indeed things other than いい. As for the latter:

今のうちに手術をするほうがいい.　You had better have the operation before it is too late.

Also, I thought it was always "better", never just "good".

Last edited by Vempele (2013 June 16, 9:33 am)

今のうちに手術をするほうがいい

Where did you get that sentence?  Everything I've read about the structure says that should be したほうがいい since you're talking about a specific situation.

The Green Goddess.