KenjiSama, Don't feel too on-the-spot, I'm the same way with grammar… - Feed Post by Ketoujin
KenjiSama,
Don't feel too on-the-spot, I'm the same way with grammar though I completed three years of Japanese in university and have had conversation partners up the waz over the years grammar is still my Achilles heel. I can often "see," especially if it is explained to me carefully, how grammar in Japanese works, and sometimes it is more elegant and more efficient than in my own language, yet translating that into my actual speech is another matter entirely. When push comes to shove, in talking to a native-speaker especially, it seems that, in my nervousness, all the grammar points that I have been assiduously studying just desert me and leave me entirely making me revert to the dozen or so hackneyed and monotonous grammatical devices that for some reason have stuck with me more from way back in the past.
Writing is better for me and I really have been improving my grammar within the realm of written compositions more recently, however integrating what I have learned through reading and writing into my attempts at speaking. You, like me, may well have much more of a visual-learning style, which makes grammar in a spoken context obviously much harder for you yet makes learning kanji and vocab quite easy. I'm the same way. We just have to muddle through and expose ourselves to the language as much as possible. With great effort and time we shall both improve. My very best to you!
Don't feel too on-the-spot, I'm the same way with grammar though I completed three years of Japanese in university and have had conversation partners up the waz over the years grammar is still my Achilles heel. I can often "see," especially if it is explained to me carefully, how grammar in Japanese works, and sometimes it is more elegant and more efficient than in my own language, yet translating that into my actual speech is another matter entirely. When push comes to shove, in talking to a native-speaker especially, it seems that, in my nervousness, all the grammar points that I have been assiduously studying just desert me and leave me entirely making me revert to the dozen or so hackneyed and monotonous grammatical devices that for some reason have stuck with me more from way back in the past.
Writing is better for me and I really have been improving my grammar within the realm of written compositions more recently, however integrating what I have learned through reading and writing into my attempts at speaking. You, like me, may well have much more of a visual-learning style, which makes grammar in a spoken context obviously much harder for you yet makes learning kanji and vocab quite easy. I'm the same way. We just have to muddle through and expose ourselves to the language as much as possible. With great effort and time we shall both improve. My very best to you!
posted by Ketoujin
Comments 2
Meh, so what you suggest I do? I can't sit here and do nuthin
Well, go to this site: http://www.guidetojapanese.org/learn/grammar if you haven't already. I would also suggest finding a receptive native speaker to talk to fairly regularly. At least a couple hours a week is necessary to get the grammatical concepts - and it will likely be rough on you initially - to start saturating your speaking and writing with time. The "Yokoso" textbooks are pretty good at basic grammar although I like the slightly dated, yet quite complete, "Learning Japanese" by Oreste Vaccari. It is many decades out of print but, both it and the ancillary books done by the same compiler, are very much worth it and they all have incredibly detailed and, I believe anyway, clear explanations Of grammar . SImply one of the decent readers that otherwise emphasizes kanji is would work to learn better grammar as quite a lot of the reading selections in such works tend to be easier than what you'll see in something printed in Japanese on-line or elsewhere. One can work through one of these kanji readers and start to have grammatical forms click without doing too much too fast and draining one's confidence yet while still learning.
