Quote:
Originally Posted by Nyororin
I think it would probably have made more sense if I`d replied to you sentence by sentence...
You said first that you thought a lot of books were doing a poor job because "they try to teach you how to JUMP right into talking to Japanese people"... And you expressed unhappiness with this because it`s difficult.
But immediately after that, you complain that they don`t teach you how to jump in and talk because they start with formal styles instead of conversational... And then later go on to say that you also don`t like books that are simple and start out without giving you the means to jump in because they are "dumbed down" to allow more time to acquire bit by bit.
To me, that is contradictory. I have absolutely no idea what kind of book you think is good, as you rule out pretty much everything I can think of. Your post left me lost, which is why I replied at all.
|
Here is what Tae Kim wrote, essentially putting everything I wanted to say into perspective.
Introduction - Tae Kim's Japanese grammar guide
Quote:
The problem with conventional textbooks is that they often have the following goals.
1. They want readers to be able to use functional and polite Japanese as quickly as possible.
2. They don't want to scare readers away with terrifying Japanese script and Chinese characters.
3. They want to teach you how to say English phrases in Japanese.
Traditionally with romance languages such as Spanish, these goals presented no problems or were nonexistent due to the similarities to English. However, because Japanese is different in just about every way down to the fundamental ways of thinking, these goals create many of the confusing textbooks you see on the market today. They are usually filled with complicated rules and countless number of grammar for specific English phrases. They also contain almost no kanji and so when you finally arrive in Japan, lo and behold, you discover you can't read menus, maps, or essentially anything at all because the book decided you weren't smart enough to memorize Chinese characters.
The root of this problem lies in the fact that these textbooks try to teach you Japanese with English. They want to teach you on the first page how to say, "Hi, my name is Smith," but they don't tell you about all the arbitrary decisions that were made behind your back. They probably decided to use the polite form even though learning the polite form before the dictionary form makes no sense. They also might have decided to include the subject even though it's not necessary and excluded most of the time. In fact, the most common way to say something like "My name is Smith" in Japanese is to say "am Smith". That's because most of the information is understood from the context and is therefore excluded. But does the textbook explain the way things work in Japanese fundamentally? No, because they're too busy trying to push you out the door with "useful" phrases right off the bat. The result is a confusing mess of "use this if you want to say this" type of text and the reader is left with a feeling of confusion about how things actually work.
The solution to this problem is to explain Japanese from a Japanese point of view. Take Japanese and explain how it works and forget about trying to force what you want to say in English into Japanese. To go along with this, it is also important to explain things in an order that makes sense in Japanese. If you need to know [A] in order to understand [b], don't cover [b] first just because you want to teach a certain phrase.
Essentially, what we need is a Japanese guide to learning Japanese grammar.
|