To begin Japanese do I start vocabulary or grammar?? I finished studying hiragana and katakana - Feed Post by miadesu
To begin Japanese do I start vocabulary or grammar?? I finished studying hiragana and katakana
posted by miadesu
Comments 4
learning vocab would be a good start as it will make you more excited when you hear or see it being used so that you will study more in future. @miadesu
This is a good question. Just like Haidashira said I would start with some vocabulary but not for that exact reason. Both vocabulary and grammar make up sentences. If you have vocabulary you can speak and understand a kind of caveman Japanese, but with grammar alone this cannot be done. This allows you to communicate but maybe not very detailed. This is were grammar comes in. As an English teacher living in Japan I see many of my students learning patterns and I have noticed that students who are afraid of making mistakes in grammar tend to study it more than their vocabulary. This can slow their learning in the long run. I have found that when students first build up a usable vocabulary about a topic, lets say sport names, and then are introduced to different grammar it makes it easier for them to learn. Here is an example. On day one, hour one, we learned the vocabulary for soccer, baseball, basketball, volleyball, table tennis, dodge ball, and I to refer to oneself. That leaves us with the potential for 0 perfect sentences as there is no grammar but 7 vocabulary words. The next lesson we learn like and don't like. This now gives us 12 perfect sentences that we can say but we have only increased vocabulary to 9. Next we learn the word play. Our sentences have once again gone up by 12 to make 24 sentences but our vocabulary is only up to 10. Then we learn the grammar for "You" "He" "She" "It" "We" and "They" along with the rules of when to add "s" or change to "doesn't." We just increased our vocabulary base to a large 16 words but our sentences have gone from 24 (like/likes, don't/doesn't like, play/plays, don't/doesn't play) to 168 sentences. As you can see this makes grammar a compounding factor when coming to the amount of sentences you can create but you still need the Vocabulary to multiply by. If I now learn a new word, Rugby, my sentences increase by 28 to 196. As you can see both Vocabulary and grammar help to increase ones potential sentences but if you try and study the grammar point of I like vs he likes before learning any object (in this case sport names) you will have a difficult time forming sentences in the future. I guess what this whole rant is saying is start with vocabulary to a point and then switch to grammar for a while and then back to vocabulary, rinse and repeat.
Excelent tip Shirokitusne, thank you- I agree @shirokitsune
