yudantaiteki wrote:

But you don't even need that to read for pleasure.  I don't understand 99.5% or even 95% of the material I use in my dissertation research.

I think dissertation research material may vary slightly from what the average person reads.

Of course you can still find pleasure/enjoyment in reading stuff when ur level isn't so high. Doesn't mean you understand 100% of it but it's likely what you don't understand is trivial. If you start missing plot elements that's another story...

People should just be aware that 95% of a language isn't actually very much of it. Even 99% isn't. 99.95% and 99.99% is. That's what I'm aiming to get to.

I'm curious JimmySeal, do you do any structured grammar study with your studies or try to pick it up from context as well? It seems like it would be pretty difficult to grasp a lot of the grammar constructs without a description of what is happening.

Edit: I wanted to add that the reason I am asking is because I seem to be hitting a wall similar to IceCream's. I spend so much time adding every little thing to anki that besides sucking motivation out of me it also leaves me with little actual study time. I've also noticed (and realized it to a greater extent after reading the linked documents earlier in this thread) that when I read, I pretty much end up reading engrish. I mentally translate most sentences stripping them of a lot of meaning in the process I'm sure. While the links earlier make a good case for this altered studying method they really leave out a lot as to "how" you can actually implement it effectively (other than perhaps the bits you've explained earlier). I can understand most of the vocabulary acquisition process, but how you could ever do something like that with grammar constructs eludes me. Without some help from something like Tae-Kim I don't see how I would have ever been able to pick up something subtle like passive verbs. Although I end up right back where I started, translating the japanese grammar into english grammar etc..

Last edited by chameleoncoder (2010 August 12, 2:03 pm)

chameleoncoder wrote:

I think you're right IceCream. Even if I go this route I'd keep my Tae-Kim or other grammar tools handy.

I actually took a look at the book "The Art and Science of Learning Languages", from which the articles mentioned earlier are taken, and even the authors devote an entire chapter to learning grammar from books. They both have differing opinions about how to use the books, but they both seem to agree that it's a topic that is difficult with context alone.

I'm horribly addicted to dictionary use and my anki deck is filled with so many similar (in english translation at least) words (ex: 下がる, 下げる, and 下りる) that my anki sessions make me want to pull my hair out. Of course I realize the sentence method provides the context to eliminate this problem but after trying it I simply found I had memorized several hundred "english" sentences that I would spout before I had even finished reading the japanese. Perhaps if I keep my brain from ever seeing an english translation I can make it store something more useful, like the actual meaning.

Monolingual look-ups instead then? Eventually it will just make sense without even thinking about a translation,I used to think that if I didn't translate it I wouldn't understand it, But eventually it all made sense.