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Grammar study advice | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Potted Plant Newbie Ireland Joined 3653 days ago 27 posts - 32 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Japanese, French | Message 1 of 10 03 December 2014 at 6:03am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Hello forum folks! I have been visiting the forum for quite some time before I joined, and before I start I'd like to thank you all for providing such great discussions and advice which I found to be of great value in my own studies.
This post is more about my own issue with my Japanese studies however I would be interested to hear the opinion of learners of other languages. I suppose giving some information regarding my Japanese learning methodology would be the best place to begin. I have been studying Japanese consistently for the last three years. I, like many others, was introduced to AJATT and I found the methodology of 'exposure + Anki` to be very effective (and one I have continued to use). Even though I only used simple front/back cards in Anki for the first year and a half, my ability in the language jumped. After which I saw diminishing returns on the simple cards, although I'd say the vocabulary I was using didn't help (vocabulary lists for the JLPT exams, which are horrifically boring), and I decided to switch to full sentences again following AJATT/Antimoon's example of using a sentence to provide context for the vocabulary to be learned. The change in card format was a success, and I still use it, albeit with a personally created deck and not one downloaded from the Anki site. Now, you may have noticed that there is no place for structured (formal) grammar study. At the moment I have begun to look up any interesting looking grammar I see while reading. This `looking up when interested` does help the grammar to remain in my head, although when it comes to produce, be it speaking or writing, it is never `actively there` and I feel that I may need some exercises/activities (or something) to help it all *click*. Unfortunately, such structured (formal) study doesn't hold my attention and I don't tend to retain it well without doing horrid things as writing it out millions and millions of times over reams of paper. Unsurprisingly, I would like to avoid that (and a return to *brr* secondary school) if at all possible. At the moment my immediate language goals for Japanese is to increase my writing and speaking skills (My long term goal is B2/C1). I can stumble through conversations (while murdering, but mostly ignoring, grammar) and survive, but for myself, being able to only do this after three years is a bit frustrating and embarrassing (Although I do understand that my `input` focused learning has lead to this). Any advice, (be it technique, methodology or materials)? Or magical spells? Magic is preferred. --- Or more generally, how do you approach your own grammar studies (in any language)? 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Nieng Zhonghan Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Antarctica Joined 3674 days ago 108 posts - 315 votes  Speaks: Portuguese*, Japanese*, Spanish, Galician Studies: Finnish, Icelandic, Armenian, Mongolian Studies: Old English, Russian, English, German, Korean, Mandarin | Message 2 of 10 03 December 2014 at 10:17am | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Potted Plant, welcome to the forum.
First of all, have you followed any textbook at the beginning of your studies? If so, let me know. I assume you have not had a chance to take a look at a website contributed by some of HTLAL most experienced members. http://learnanylanguage.wikia.com/wiki/Learn_Any_Language You can read more about techniques, practicing and improving your language, language courses and so on. I don’t see Anki is as a method, but rather a technique (SRS) which I myself don’t use more than 20 to 30 minutes a day. If you still want to continue with your SRS method (take a look at some topics on this forum or in the website above) and you may switch or use together with Memrise. Check the pros and cons to see if you can adapt to Memrise, though I personally don’t like SRS technique myself. What JLPT level have you studied? N5, N4 or N3? I may be biased, but I think N2 is about or starts at a solid B2 level, though some other users may disagree with me. At least my Taiwanese book (preparation for JLPT) say so. What resources have you been using for reading? Reading is very important to understand the grammar, words and expressions being used in a real context. What do you feel like reading? There are plenty of resources available and all you need is to pick up something that interests you. I didn’t understand whether the reason you stick with JLPT vocabulary. Are still interested in taking the exam at long term? If so, you may find useful the following website: http://www3.nhk.or.jp/news/easy/ Last time I checked the website (NHK Web Easy), I found the grammar structure very easy. Let’s say that it was around A2 level with sometimes vocabulary of N3 level (at maximum). It also provides furigana and you can click on the audio which is very slow paced. If you click on the underlined words, you may find useful because you will learn Japanese explained in Japanese, instead of relying on translations. Have you tried any Japanese podcasts so far? There is this Japanesepod101 that might be useful for you. You can learn how native speakers use the grammar by listening to cultural insight, for example. There are other podcasts available on the internet. The one I mentioned is paid version, though. Have you heard of Tae Kim grammar? It is online and free. I think you can even download its pdf which is available in the authors' website. It covers at least A1 and A2 level grammar topics. http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/ Speaking of JLPT, this website offers free exercises as well: http://www.mlcjapanese.co.jp/ You can simply pick up a grammar topic of your interest and do the exercise. There is answers for all of them. In case you have followed a textbook called “Minna no Nihongo” by any chance, then, this website provides exercises based on the textbook above. http://www.nihongo.fr/ You may check their kanji exercises as well. Do you know DLI (Gloss) materials? Give it a try. https://gloss.dliflc.edu/ I think currently is not available for Japanese, but some language enthusiast use http://lyricstraining.com/ because you can learn lots of words by listening to your favorite songs. Nowadays there are plenty of anime, Japanese dramas and movies available for free on the internet. They are fan made subtitles (most of times, I guess). You may watch them and learn spoken Japanese grammar as well. As for writing, you may try lang-8 website. http://www.lang-8.com/ I have to warn you that some corrections made by native speakers are not accurate enough. I myself have found many users not willing to correct many mistakes because either the text was very poor structured or because they were simply lazy and just willing to gain some points. It wasn’t my case so far, but I am just telling you what I have seen so far. I basically know the most experienced users for my target languages. They do provide good corrections and comments and tips in order to improve your writing skills. I don’t say anything to the lazy ones, but I just ignore them since they have not helped me improving my writing at all. Instead, they have “taught” me either wrong ways to express myself or expressions that are no longer used by many people. However, it is a good website if you can make good use of it. If you want to improve your speaking hiring a tutor, you may find Italki useful. http://www.italki.com/ There are some professional teachers and community tutors. The main difference is that the professional ones have a certificate related to your target language teaching certificate or something very similar while the community tutors are just native speakers willing to help you. They are perhaps already taking courses or studying to take educational certificates etc. It doesn’t mean that professional teachers are better than community tutors. I have had bad experience with most of professional teachers so far, but it doesn’t matter here. Just take a look at the teacher or your tutor profile and check their overall score (rated by students), their comments and if you are interested in, send messages in advance with all your expectations, goals etc and see how the teacher (or tutor) answers you. If you are not willing to pay, then, I am sure there will be thousands of Japanese people willing to practice their poor English speaking skills with you. Since you are a native speaker of English, take this advantage. You don’t need to do much. Just ask for language exchange in any pen pal communities. But make sure to make a deal. Most of Japanese people they won’t speak Japanese to you; they will probably try to speak as much English as they can. So, if you exchange language, make sure it is 50% for each. For instance, I would say that 30 minutes of Japanese and 30 minutes of English. If you have more time, then, make it longer. If one technique, method or approach is getting boring, then, it is time to try a new attempt. It is not that the previous ones are not good, but it is more how you manage your language learning process. You asked about other languages. Let me give you an example. At the moment I am thinking of adding one more language. I have recently created a new thread for that purpose asking for some advice, but in the end I may try Russian or German. Even if I would take any German or Russian proficiency test, I would start with some combination of resources. As for Russian, I would probably start with Penguin series (for grammar because as far as I noticed, it doesn't provide any audio) and one resource containing audio such as Assimil or any other course. As for German, I would choose Deutsche Welle language courses (because it provides audio) with one more resource. If I choose SRS (Anki, for example) and start memorizing A1 vocabulary for German or Russian proficiency tests, I would find it boring too at long term. So, perhaps you can reduce your amount of Anki and try other learning techniques and methods. The most important is to keep your motivation at a satisfactory level, at least, besides time management and using the best approaches based on your learning style. Edited by Nieng Zhonghan on 03 December 2014 at 10:19am 7 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6706 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 10 03 December 2014 at 12:36pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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It has to be 'any languages' because I haven't studied Japanese. But I can see that you do one thing right: you consult a grammar when you encounter some problem which seems to be of grammatical character. You could have hoped that lots of time and exposure eventually would solve your problem, but then we are talking magics.
Unfortunately you have to know your grammar well to find the right place in the grammar right away - and of course also to understand the explanations it gives. And how can you get there without looking the whole grammar through? Reading a grammar through is not the same as studying it from A to Z with the intention of learning everything in it. You basically need two things: 1) getting an overview over where different kinds of problems are mentioned, and 2) learning the terminology. So my first advice would be to look the book through and make your own collection of notes about the terminology. And only the terminology. It is fine if there already is an index, but it is easier remember things when you have written them down yourself. And while studying terminology you shouldn't let yourself get bogged down with concrete linguistic details, no matter how tempting it is to start memorizing them. At a slightly later stage you can do the same things with tables and rules: make a lists or tables with the essentials and only them - leave out the rare cases and exceptions and concentrate on finding a concise and robust presentation. I normally construct such personalized overviews on white paper first, and when find I'm content I transfer the systems to thick green sheets which I can use for easy reference later on instead of the whole grammar. If you find yourself looking the same grammatical issue up again and again then you have found a candidate for such a green sheet. And finally: when you have found some relevant explanation that solves an acute problem, then write the solution down. Even if you never consult that piece of paper or digital note again you still have tried to formulate the solution in your own words, and that's part of the learning process. Edited by Iversen on 05 December 2014 at 1:12pm 6 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5535 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 10 03 December 2014 at 12:38pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
OK, I'm going to offer you two suggestions: the "AJATT answer" and my own suggestions. The "AJATT answer" Khatzumoto's original "10,000 sentences" method definitely failed for quite a few people. This is partly because he never described in sufficient detail, partly because people creatively misinterpreted it, partly because not everybody is Khatzumoto, and partly because input-only methods are insufficient for some people. Input-only methods do work for some people. But for other people, massive input may lead to weak active skills. This can also happen with bilingual kids: I know people who have near-native comprehension of their parents' language (in the C1+ range), but who doubt they can put together an actual grammatical sentence. Now, when Khatzumoto started selling his very expensive Silver Spoon/Neutrino product, which comes with a "fluency or your money back" guarantee, he substantially revised his method. The current version seems to be based on: 1. Really massive exposure to input. They don't call it "All Japanese All The Time" for nothing. 2. MCD cards created using special Susuru features that are hard to recreate in Anki. Khatzumoto gives few public examples of how Susuru MCD cards actually work. But as far as I can tell, they're very grammar-focused and they each require a small chunk of ouput. I've seen two principal types, which I'll explain below. But first, we need a demonstration text. Let's imagine that you're an English-speaker learning Spanish, and that you start out with the following bilingual text from Avatar:
Next, a bit of Anki notation. In Anki, the string "Foo {{c1::bar}} {{c2:baz}}" will create two cloze cards:
OK, now we're ready to talk about Susuru cloze cards. :-) The two types I've seen are: 1. Closing every word separately. If you start with a 24-word text, this will generate 24 cloze cards, each of which has a single hidden word:
Obviously, many of these cards will be useless or annoying. This is probably one of the reasons why Khatzumoto believes in deleting cards very aggressively. 2. Clozing grammatical particles and inflections. For this format, we start out with a long list of prepositions, articles, particles and word endings. For example, here's a short list for Spanish:
We then apply apply this list to our text, generating 9 cloze cards:
Notice that card #4 will have two blanks, each of which needs to be filled in with the same text "a"! This just leaves one big question: What's the end-game here? Well, Khatzumoto doesn't talk about it much, and I've only seen one older, possibly "obsolete" conversation which might apply:
Will this work? Personally, I have no idea. But as the example I linked up-thread suggests, really massive amounts of reading and watching may not be sufficient. My own suggestions I have two children at home, and I get to observe lots of other monolingual and multilingual children (and compare notes with their parents). And yeah, some kids really do wait a while, and then start speaking in complete, mostly correct sentences. Other kids, meanwhile, start speaking as soon as possible, and butcher their grammar horribly. I've even seen kids with "fossilized" grammatical errors that lasted for almost half a year, just like a typical adult language learner. And, of course, I've seen several kids who can understand a home language, but who can't speak it. So even among actual children, the whole input/output situation is pretty complicated. One thing all these kids have in common: If they actually need to speak a given language every day with other children, they'll eventually learn to speak it fluently and grammatically. So my recommendation is to take a hint from the kids: If you want to be able to speak, start speaking! Some things you can do to get started: 1. Consider trying some MCD cards, particularly format #2 above. This will force you to pay close attention to prepositions and particles. 2. Try to write 100 words per day, and get them corrected. Detailed suggestions here. 3. Find a tutor, language exchange partner, or willing victim, and start speaking regularly. Anyway, I hope one of the suggestions in this thread points you in a useful direction. Good luck with your studies! Edited by emk on 03 December 2014 at 12:41pm 9 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6600 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 5 of 10 03 December 2014 at 3:13pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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Nieng Zhonghan has recommended pretty much everything that I would recommend :) If you're not convinced, see the famous threads about the multi-track approach and listening from the beginning.
I largely agree with emk too, but I need to insert my obligatory remark: heritage learners often don't read in the family language, some even can't read it at all (especially if it has a different writing system). If you're bored by writing sentences like "the grass is green" when you can comprehend much more complex stuff, make your own exercises. Or try what I call playing with the vocabulary. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Ari Heptaglot Senior Member Norway Joined 6585 days ago 2314 posts - 5695 votes Speaks: Swedish*, English, French, Spanish, Portuguese, Mandarin, Cantonese Studies: Czech, Latin, German | Message 6 of 10 04 December 2014 at 9:09pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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I am a strong believer in massive input, but I do believe it has diminishing returns. After a while, the amount of input needed to improve gets impractical. Here's what I suggest for improving your grammar. This assumes you've got a pretty solid listening and reading base through massive input.
1: Read through a grammar book. Not necessarily cover to cover. Skip around, learn to find your way, reread some interesting passages. You ought to have some aha moments figuring out grammar stuff you already kinda know and at least can understand, but not reproduce. 2: Go through the grammar book with Anki. I find Anki great for memorizing vocab, but even better for memorizing grammar. My speaking ability in Spanish took a great leap forward when I memorized all endings to all irregular verbs. It's a finite amount, and having it memorized is great. In the beginning, you might have to pause and think to come up with the correct ending, but through speaking practice (use iTalki for this) it'll soon get automatic. Compare this to not knowing at all, which means you can't say it and it will never become automatic. You should also look for example sentences that illustrate certain grammar points. Then use cloze cards to memorize the relevant part. For example, in Portuguese, I might memorize a bunch of sentences that use the different subjunctive forms. Like this: Front: Por mais que {tentar}, ele não conseguiu. As hard as he tried/Try as he might, he did not succeed. Back: Por mais que tentasse, ele não conseguiu. As hard as he tried/Try as he might, he did not succeed. Grammar CAN be learnt with input only, but I don't think it's a very efficient method. In my mind, massive input should be used in the middle of your learning. First, learn the basics, then massive input, then work with intention towards mastery. For example, massive input will teach you lots of mid-frequency words without the need for SRS, but for the low-frequency ones, the amount of input you need to learn them becomes impractical. So SRS is a more efficient approach. 5 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||||||||||||||||||||
| Snowflake Senior Member United States Joined 5962 days ago 1032 posts - 1233 votes Studies: Mandarin | Message 7 of 10 04 December 2014 at 10:06pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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While Khatz places heavy emphasis on tons of input, his approach is not input-only.
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| ScottScheule Diglot Senior Member United States scheule.blogspot.com Joined 5231 days ago 645 posts - 1176 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Latin, Hungarian, Biblical Hebrew, Old English, Russian, Swedish, German, Italian, French | Message 8 of 10 04 December 2014 at 10:29pm | IP Logged | |||||||||||||||||||||||
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My way of learning grammar is stuffy, but simple. If there's a rule of grammar I think necessary to know, I make a flashcard for it. Simple example: In Spanish, the phrase "para que" is followed by the subjunctive.
Card Front: Does the indicative or subjunctive follow "para que"? Back: Subjunctive. Now the alternative to that is, I suppose, reading (hearing, etc.) a lot of Spanish and getting a feel that the subjunctive tends to follow "para que." But just learning the rule directly seems more direct to me. Of course one can debate at what level of generality one should learn rules (perhaps the card should be "Does the indicative or subjunctive follow expressions of uncertainty?"), but I prefer to "atomize" rules. And then I do that for every grammar rule that seems important. Not the most fun part of language learning, but the best I've come up with, and it's let me feel fairly confident in my grasp of grammar. One thing that gives me pause about this is it's quite different from how I learned my first language. I don't know any rules regarding the English subjunctive, for example, but I use it frequently and generally without any fault. I learned Engilsh grammar by exposure, the very method I pooh-poohed* above. But at the end of the day, I'm not convinced that the way we learn second languages should or can be the same way we learn first languages. * I had to look up the spelling of pooh-pooh. Obviously exposure has its limits! 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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