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I know at some level grammar practice involves lots of listening, exposure, and translating practice.
At the same time I was thinking I’d like to add a bit of grammar review/practice or something after being exposed to new grammar rules. Kind of like the Anki deck practice for vocab, but to cement the grammar rules in my mind.
I’m curious if there are any good study habits or resources to review grammar?
Hehe, Idols, that’s _your_ answer to everythiiing. :p
You know why that is? Because it can aid in almost all aspects of learning Japanese. Also with solidifying grammar.
AnonymousLang-8??
Honestly, I’m not a point where I could properly leverage either of those yet.
From what I can tell learning Japanese is a lot like trying to scale the face of a cliff. Before you seem to gain any elevation, that’s useful, you have to build a really really tall ladder. I keep building this ladder, but I’m not seeing real results. Rumor has it if I make the ladder tall enough I’ll see what’s on the other side, but right now I feel like I’m looking at the same cliff face as when I first started.
I’m tempted to speed up my pace of study, but I risk building a bad base, and foundation. Also, I’ve already sped up my study pace quite a bit over the past 6 months. I’m tempted to study more, but I already study 90 to 120 minutes almost everyday, and at least 60 minutes everyday without exception.
This leads me to one of 3 conclusions:
* I’m bad at Japanese. (Totally possible.)
* It’s a super massive ton of work up front just to get past the beginner level. (Also, totally possible.)
* There are ways I can make my studying more effective. (I’m really hoping this is the case.)That’s what this post is really about. I see one area where I’m possibly not as effective as I’d like, and I’m looking for a way to improve. Reading Idol’s blogs seems like a good free source of Japanese, but I’m so far removed from the place where I can do that, that it’s not really an option for me yet. As a point of reference, I went to translate a manga the other day. It took me 45 minutes to translate 2 pages. Now mind you these pages had maybe a total of 13 kanji a piece. Granted that’s a massive improvement of my 90 minutes to look up one kanji I had back in June, but still, I’d spend all my study time trying to get through a paragraph on a blog, and if I don’t know the grammar she uses then I’m kind of boned.
That’s why I’m looking for resources that only leverage things I’ve already covered, so I can reinforce those concepts, and move on to the next.
Does all of that make sense?
I guess this is the first time you learn another language than your native language?
Yes learning a language is tough, getting anywhere is hard, and you will be stuck feeling you make no progress all the time(especially once you reach intermediate) due to learning grammar that has very limited uses.. Though after 6 months I don’t think you are here yet.
It has taken me 8 years of learning up to this point to learn English. If your goal is fluency then you shouldn’t really expect all that much progress in just 6months. Also, of course you have made progress, it is just hard to see because you progress slow. For example me learning 20 words each day won’t really make a difference on a day to day basis, but if you can keep going for 1 month you have learned 600 words.
Anonymous“improvement of my 90 minutes to look up one kanji”
Did you walk to amazon headquarters to get a dictionary for the look up? I can’t even comprehend.
↑ lol
Yeah, it is my first attempt at learning another Language. Generally speaking I enjoy it, but sometimes I just want to be able to feel like I’ve made some real progress. I really wish there was a “leveling guide” like when you play an MMORPG that says “Expect to be about this good when you are this far into this topic.”, and “Oh if you’re having trouble with X then here is something to practice or study.” I’d totally grind adverbs if that was the case. ;)
As for my time spent studying Japanese I “took a class” about 18 months ago, and it was really just me and my wife in the class, so it was more of a private tutor thing, but the teacher wasn’t very good at English, and I question her Japanese as well. ;) Anyway it wasn’t a total wash, but it was a middling start. I kind of fizzled for about 3-5 months, and then picked it up again when I started Textfugu near the end of last year (I think), but even then it took me a few months to figure out how to be a serious student of Japanese.
Maybe I’m just being a whiny #$!@. ;)
Anyway, thanks for the insight.
@Bbvoncrumb –
“improvement of my 90 minutes to look up one kanji
Did you walk to amazon headquarters to get a dictionary for the look up? I can’t even comprehend.”Hahaha
No, nothing that bad.In my defense, I hadn’t started learning to write kanji at the time. I had just barely started learning radicals, so I would pull up jisho.org, and try to find kanji that way. Sometimes I could find a kanji real fast, but other times no matter what I did I couldn’t find it. My look up times got a little faster as I learned things about radicals, like they don’t always look like themselves, and what not. Still, my look up time has improved dramatically since I started following missingno15′s advice about learning to write the top 100 kanji. I’m up to 40 of the 100, and even after only learning 15 or 20 I knew enough about stroke order to guess a fair amount of the time.
I really think learning to write kanji should be added to Textfugu. I understand Koichi’s argument for not including it, but the gain from learning it far outweighs the time spent learning it. Also, it’s not really that hard. It’s not like I’m learning 12 things when I learn a 12 stroke kanji. I just need to learn what the kanji looks like, as a whole, and I know the handful of stroke order rules that I apply to all kanji, and every once in awhile I need to remember how a kanji might have an exception to those general rules.
I think one of your problems with grammar is that you are letting Kanji get in your way. Kanji and conjugation are IMO the hardest bits of learning Japanese. Translating Manga for grammar practice isn’t going to do you much good if your main focus is the Kanji, because you are dealing with a heap you don’t know.
Thus you should do the same thing, just find something that doesn’t use a lot of Kanji.
I think the best thing for this is Japanese children’s books (think of Little Golden Books in English). The grammar is very basic, which is what you need to start with and they mostly consist of kana, or will have kana wrote over top of any Kanji that are used. There should be a whole heap of them, and you can usually find them in your local libraries if you have any Asian based communities in your area.
Then you can graduate to teen, young adult, adult, etc.
Translating Manga is one of those other side of the cliff things, so you seem to be leaving your ladder and trying to free climb to the top, as far as your analogy goes.
So yeah, start off smaller and you’ll get there.
Perhaps you are already intermediate level?
http://www.alljapaneseallthetime.com/blog/the-eternal-sorrow-of-the-intermediate-learner-%E2%80%9Care-we-there-yet%E2%80%9D-syndromeI don’t really like Aikibujin’s, or rather most people’s notion of using children’s books as a starting point and then moving on. I am 19 years old, enrolled at a school of higher learning and I’m not gonna make myself feel dumb by starting with children’s books. And I never did – I just stuck with the things I want to do the entire time. In my opinion, just try everything (every method) first and don’t be afraid to do it. While I don’t agree with translating as a form of learning/practice, learning from the experience is just as important. Also don’t let it get you down too much. Most of the reason why most of my translating projects stopped completely was because I would constantly feel like I wasn’t good enough. Most of it will still not make sense but continue to learning new words and grammar. Funny enough that you use MMORPG as an example, I wouldn’t use that example but more like for each new thing you learn, I’d use any game that has a “fog” system on the map which things clear up as you go on.
@Aikibujin – I’ve heard this advice before, reading kids books, and I’ve had no real luck finding kids books in Japanese. I’ve done some serious looking too. That said, I did get lucky once and found a single kids book. Ironically, it took me longer to translate than a manga with kanji because there aren’t any spaces in the words. As a result I have to say “Is this first kana a word by itself? no. OK, are the first two a word? Yep, OK, now are the first three a word? Shoot, OK, they are, so is the intended word the first two kana or the first three kana? And depending on that will the 3rd and 4th be a word, or the 4th and the 5th.” As you can imagine it takes a lot of looking up just to get through one sentence. The same problem exists with kanji, but having kanji removes a lot of possible cases, making translating a lot quicker.
That said, I had forgotten about that suggestion, and I like the theory of it. I also like your description of me trying to scale the cliff face without a ladder. ;) I’ll try translating a kids book again, since it was awhile ago when I tried it last, and see if perhaps I was just trying it too soon.
However, if you have any resources for finding more of these that would be helpful.
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@missingno15 – Thanks for that article! It was inspiring. I’m reluctant to call myself intermediate, by any sense of the term, but perhaps I’m finally approaching it, and I wasn’t recognizing it. I must admit in my mind intermediate meant that I could understand, and speak a lot more than what I am able to do now, and as that article kind of implied. Once I get to that level I’ve kind of learned the language.
I have to say I can relate with what you’re saying about kids books too. It’s a real humbling experience going from being able to communicate effectively at a rapid pace in your native language to feeling like you’re reading and writing at a 1st grade level again.
The article you linked also has me nervous about trying kids books again because it pointed out trying to keep the learning process fun. Reading a kids book likely won’t be that fun for me. If I translate a manga it may be above my head, but I suspect it’ll be more fun. I guess I have some thinking on my best approach to keep things fun.
I do admit I’ve been focused on metrics lately. I’m trying really hard to keep up my pace with Textfugu, so I can start my JLPT N5 studying, but perhaps that’s sucking all of the fun out, and I need to sacrifice a bit of speed to ensure I don’t burn out.
I didn’t intend this thread to go in this direction, but all of your advice has been incredibly helpful, so thanks!
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This reply was modified 12 years, 4 months ago by
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