Learning vocabulary first then grammar?
 

I was reading this article about an effective way to learn Japanese and the author suggested that, rather than learning the grammar structure and then learning vocabulary as you go along, to instead learn as many vocabulary words as you can before learning the grammar rules.

How To Learn Japanese Words Fast

What do you think? Does it seem logical to follow the author's advice? Instead of cracking open the "How To" books, should I learn a decent amount of vocabulary words beforehand?

Also, in the bottom of the article the author linked to a site offering a mnemonic method called "Speak Japanese Fast" to learn 100 words/hr. Has anyone tried it? What do you think?

Thats basically how I learned.
I tried tediously memorizing phrases from books and online at first.
But what finally worked was taking a college class.

You should always be cautious whenever someone tells you that a certain method will help you learn "fast" because learning a language is never fast.

The program that he linked at the bottom is crap IMO. There is no way that you can learn 100 words an hour unless you have an extremely lose definition of the word "learn".
The program even promises "The amazing thing about this course is that once you have learnt the word, you never forget it." which is clearly faulty thinking. Also, the authors cannot even use proper English (you learned words, not learnt) so I wouldn't trust them to teach you Japanese.

I don't think it matters whether you learn lots of vocab before grammar or not, since the same argument can be applied to both ways of learning.

They say "How are you going to use the grammar structures, unless you know a lot of words to go with the grammar?".

Well I say, "How will you use the correct words in correct context, without correct grammar and sentences (Sentences which you need grammar to understand)".

Learning both at the same time is what most people seem to do, and it works, also like jesselt says unless you have a very loose definition of "learn" then it's not really possible to learn so many words in such a short time.

Although this thread is about the article linked in the first post, I just want to point out that both learnt and learned are valid, and both proper English.
Learnt happens to be more common in British English, there are a number of verbs that follow this same rule.
I know I say "learnt" all of the time.:)

Thanks for the reply!

Let's say I want to study vocabulary first... would you suggest I learn the kana version of the words or should I just go ahead and learn the kanji to them?

My own opinion is start Kanji as early as possible, your going to see it everywhere, so you may aswell get used to it :p

Also the kanji will help you differentiate between words which are pronounced the same but have different meaning, for example.

代える - To replace/substitute
帰る - To return
変える - To change
All are pronounced かえる

And even if you can't write them all out at least you will be able to read them when you see them, which is miles better than not being able to read any at all.

Whoops, I didn't realize that this was a British word. You will never hear "Learnt" in American English, or at least not where I'm from~

You can't end a sentence with a preposition.

If you have the patience to learn a pile of vocabulary without being able to put a sentence together, then this system might work for you. I learned both at the same time, which is how most people do it.

What Grammar Girl fails to mention is the difference between mechanics and style.

Prepositions in most compositions do not need need to be placed at the end of sentences. Although questions are asked in in compositions, especially at the college level, they are usually broad and never questions like "what did you step on?" This is why your JHS and HS English teachers (ME) hammer home the idea. Rules are made to be broken, but you need to understand where and when you can break them by learning mechanics before you attempt style.

In Texas we use learnt (more often burnt as an example of ed vs. t for past tense conjugations).

I recommend you learn Japanese grammar first, THEN learn vocab to plug in.

But you have to know hiragana pretty well and a LOT of words first..

No, you don't. Chinese is written entirely with Kanji. In fact 漢字 means "Chinese Character." Not only are there people who do study 漢字 without knowing hiragana, there are people who use a method of study where they don't even learn kun-yomi or on-yomi, but just ei-yomi: that is, they do not learn the Japanese native sound nor the sound based on the Chinese reading, but just the English meaning.

Without hiragana though, you will unable to understand conjugations, particles, as well as many common or less common words that are usually written such, even if they do have kanji. I do not recommend learning kanji by itself, nor do I recommend any regimen of Japanese language usage without kanji. The best is to study them together, practicing handwriting (shuji) by actually writing entire sentences, using kanji as needed for nouns or verb stems.

I never made a focused effort to study grammar in the beginning. I'm still not very advanced but feel that I've made good progress with my listening and speaking ability... So bearing that in mind...

What I would say is that you might want to learn a bunch of common words first, then get as much exposure to the language as you can. If you have trouble with understanding something, then look it up.

You will eventually begin to get a feel for the grammar. I'm at this point now and am actually able to hold decent casual conversations unlike a lot of Japanese students who only study Kanji/Kana and reading/writing.

My idea was always to get to the most rewarding aspect of Japanese (which was conversation for myself anyway) as fast as I could and then round-out the edges after that.

At that point, you should probably learn the grammar a little more formally so that it all makes better sense to you-- that's what I'm doing now along with my Kanji studies.

I know some people on this forum will wince at my method, but it's worked well for me so far :)

Tsuwabuki, to quote Winston Churchill,

"People telling me I can't end sentences with prepositions is something up with which I will not put."

The "stylistic" prohibition on ending sentences with prepositions was made by silly grammar teachers importing rules from Latin into English in the early 1900s, if I've got the era correct.

Nonetheless, it is true that ending sentences with prepositions separates formal writing from informal in the minds of many people who matter. Thus, it is useful to obey the rule if you want to impress with your writing in formal settings despite the fact that it's a stupid rule that only idiots adhere to all the time.

And to get back on topic, I personally think you can't just focus on one thing (for too long) at the exclusion of other aspects of language learning.

But if you must, I'd say that you need to focus on a base level of maybe 100 nouns and verbs, and then you move on to some basic grammar (conjugating, changing mood, and a few auxiliary verbs and such). Then from there you need to learn more words. After a while, you'd better have started learning kanji, becase you're going to hit a point where you will learn words more efficiently if you know 1200+ kanji for this reason: Eventually, learning new Japanese words based on kanji will explode your vocabulary like learning dis-, un-, -phobia, -philia, circum-, -scope, -phone, etc. in English explodes your vocabulary.