This really is the game-changer in learning Japanese.
After a few centuries of antiquated methods – finally a rational, organic approach to Japanese structure.
I don’t know why no schools or textbooks or websites ever explain Japanese in all its beautiful simplicity and logical clarity.
It doesn’t matter any more because their day is over.
Finally, the great red sun rises over the first Japanese lesson of the New Dawn!
Now you can learn Japanese from scratch the organic way.
What used to be “complicated Japanese” is now “Japanese made easy” and understandable to anyone.
Notes
If you want to do the exercise you should post it in the comment section linked here. (Not on this page).
If you need the super-basic vocabulary list, you’ll find it here.
These are the best explanations of Japanese I have come across. I have at least two bookshelves of textbooks and they pretty much stick to the structures I used in learning French and German, both of which I speak pretty well. I also speak about five others to varying degrees of fluency.
My own prefernce is to learn to speak a language first and I’ve been to Japan three times and got about pretty well with very little English. That said, I think, in adult learning, a few structures and rules accelerate the process of achieving fluency.
I have both of Cure Dolly’s books, oh and the travel journal pen, but I’m particularly impressed by her hair, which slips easily and elegantly about. I guess that’s just because I’ve lost most of mine, no, not from learning Japanese.
This learning style is the product of thought at a high level of abstraction of how best to teach the main stuctures of Japanese. Most other textbooks (and learn quick methods) are just structured lists.
お疲れ様です。
Thank you so much. Yes you are exactly right – Japanese is taught by methods that were developed to describe European languages (including the Classical ones) but completely inappropriate to Japanese.
I am also an immersionist, but I believe that the ability to learn the fundamental structures of the language as structures is the one advantage adult and teenage learners have over small children and that it should be used to the full.
The textbooks seem to me to fall between two stools in this respect. They claim to be “teaching grammar” but if by “grammar” we mean the real structure of the language they are not doing that at all. As you say they are simply giving lists of “A sentence means B sentence” – and even that is only half-true in many cases – together with some foreign (to Japanese) grammar concepts that are so ill-fitting as to do more harm than good much of the time.
So the learner is left to intuit or pick up the actual structures by osmosis. This is what can happen with real, deep immersion (and it is harder for adults – not, I believe because they are older, but because they already have the preconceived structure of their native language which gets in the way very seriously, especially with non-related languages). In any case immersion takes a lot of time and can’t happen in a few classes a week. So the current method is an odd hybrid of inadequate grammar and extremely inadequate immersion.
My aim is to teach real structure as a foundation for immersion (of course people may use it differently and it will still help them, but that is the strategy my methods were evolved to serve).
I’ve been working on this for some time – as you will know since you have been so kind as to read my books. Now I am really excited to be developing a visual metaphor which I hope will make Japanese structure graspable to a wide range of people.