School teaches you how to be a commentator: “Charles Barkley, taking it down the center with a strong GODAN VERB in abrupt-plain form, switches it up to an imperative and he CONJUGAAAAAAAAAAATES!!!”.
With AJATT, your body learns to play the sport.
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I don’t even know the different kinds of verbs, I just know how to use them. 😛
I learnt how to conjugate verbs in school. But when I started sentences I realised I didn’t need to know that, because my head stores verbs in their already pre-conjugated form as I learn them, on a case by case basis- for fast access.
In school it would take me up to 20 seconds to go through the steps of identifying ichidan or godan then the rules of conjugation. Such a waste of time.
I don’t know all the organs in my own body and how they work….but I know they work…and I know how to breath.
Hey, this is great. in russian we have type I, II, etc or something or another verbs, and I NEVER pay attention to these, or even try to classify the verbs in my head. I just have the verbs in their conjugated forms all around my head and get them when i need them so naturally.
Knowing the difference might help you pass a test in a foreign language class. At the end, you get a certificate you can refer to on your CV, and impress your friends who don’t know any better.
In real life, it means you’ll have to remember the “steps” to produce whatever you want to say, while your conversation partner waits impatiently, and worst of all, everything you hear will seem so fast while you try to figure out that 行った is the past and plain form of the “ikimasu” you learnt in Beginner Lesson 8: Sumisu-san goes to Tokyo (ostensibly to watch kabuki, although we all know there were some shady business deals involved) and wonder why native speakers don’t speak more slowly for poor foreigners like you.
I lmao’ed at the commentator thing XD
Sadly, I wish AJATT was a school or something. Right now it really sucks being on my own and learning a new language. I’m not sure on what methods to use or what would be good and I feel really lost.
I felt like that at first, had a little rough road with kanji and stuff. Great motivation until 1100, fell into a ditch. Though the whole time, i was doing it in secrecy. Then when my dad found me doing RTK, i explained everything and stuff, which is truly when i flourished. For the last 700 I just pwned it with huge motivation. Now i’m at 3000 sentences 😀
What i have to say is just choose one and stick with it. If it gives results, stay, if not, find another one, and repeat until you find a way of learning that is best for you.
Well, right now I’m using the Lazy Kanji method. Well kinda. I’m still not sure about the format really so I tried and made my own. Lately it’s been getting on my nerves though. I keep getting angry when I can’t get a certain kanji right..mostly with writing though. I was going to switch to RTK but I have trouble with how to remember where to place primitives. I’m not sure how to make stories with them so I’m pretty stuck. Did you have problems with primitive placement? : o
Only on a few kanji like 累 and 細 where the primitives are. I use a plain keyword to kanji deck on my PC where I started, and use Lazy Kanji with Ankidroid for my Droid X. What I like about lazy kanji is the word doesn’t have to be exact. There are times when I forgot the english keyword but used the japanese so much that I had a sort of japanese meaning for it, or just a true understand without any english, but still gets wrong in plain RTK !!
What did you do to help you write out the kanji in RTK ? And can you give me an example of the format you use for Lazy Kanji ? I’m still not sure if I have the format correct in lazy kanji. Maybe that’ll help me out some. x3
Well, I would sit down and learn like my 20 at once. Creating stories and then writing them into a log. I would devour notebook papers, cuz I would write every single rep, which I guess could be inconvenient for some, but I was a middle schooler with a lot of free time back then. I would have like 250 reps a day which would take me maybe 45 mins to an hour tops.
When I got my android phone in the summer, I got ankidroid and lazy kanji just to try out the lazy kanji deck. Though I guess I don’t use it like it was intended, because what I do is I just look at the kanji and do keywords. My plain RTK deck was creation (writing kanji) and the lazy kanji was only used for recognition, So i don’t care for the stories.
I just use the lazy kanji mod deck (i think it’s called that) that was created by some dude. He set his cards like
Front
賄
you _____ for some SHELLS so you could POSSESS them (just made that story xD)
Back
bribe
Kanji + story with primitives capitalized on front, keyword on back.
Then again, I don’t use lazy kanji like it was meant to be used, I just wanted a quick deck for recognition 😛
I find this really inspiring! How long did it take you to get to 3000 sentences?
Sadly, around 9 months. I’m pretty inconsistent to be honest. There were multiple weeks in a row when I got ~20 or more, but then times when I felt only like doing 5 a day because I couldn’t be bothered. I would say my worst time was last year at the end of 8th grade, when I kept going around 5 a day, but finally got my act together at the start of this school year xD
That actually sounds pretty impressive though! You’re a third of the way there, and by the sounds of it, you’re also picking up steam!
For the first few months of my sentence phase, I didn’t get very far; I had a bad game plan. Essentially, every few days, I’d shove a bunch of sentences down my throat, choke on them for a few days, and once it appeared that I had finally digested them, I’d repeat the process. This worked, but my growth was very slow.
Then, about a month ago, I made a new deck for fun. I decided to add only five sentences to it each day. It wasn’t long before I noticed that this new deck was growing faster than my old one, and on top of that, I was retaining more too.
Now, both decks are on the five-a-day plan, so I suppose I do 10 a day.
Anyway, I mention this because I feel like I’m now on track, and hearing of your success is really giving me motivation to keep going, no matter what the pace. (My brain: “Alright! Now that we’re on track, one day, we’ll be as good as ライトニング!”) 🙂
Thanks a lot! 😀 ^^
Well, um do you do anything to help you form the Kanji together on paper? I can’t really write it correctly on paper but I do know what the primitives are. Not sure how to make a story that’ll help that. :C
Well, as of now, I sort of forgot all the stories and just know how to write them and the meaning, but during RTK I uhh
I never really had any problems with writing the primitives in the correct place. If you look at a lot of kanji daily it will also help knowing where they go.
Oh…I haven’t been looking at a lot of kanji at all. It’s a bit overwhelming since I’m a beginning. ^^;
beginner* ><
I never really found it overwhelming but I guess it’s different for each person. How many kanji have you learned? I started playing games and stuff around 300
Oh, I’m not sure of exactly but I know a few of the basics. Like Day and Moth. I had to start over though because I think I’ve been using the stories wrong. I haven’t been visualing the image of the story and only been looking at the primitives in the sentence..
Oh really? To be honest I never visualized xD
I always wanted to know what a Godan or Ichidan verb is, so I looked it up now – it’s actually quite interesting to look at grammar explanations once you know the real stuff “by heart” – You go like 「ああ そうなんだ」…
This reminds me of a scene from a Japanese class I took for 1 month (expensive as hell, and left with a big ‘I’ll never be able to do this’ after each lesson) The teacher was explaining something about ‘consonant’ and ‘vowel’ verbs and then we took turns conjugating them. When it was my turn, I had ‘to meet – あう’. I figured since it had only vowels it MUST be a vowel verb – HOW could it be a consonant verb it there is no consonant in it whatsoever??? It was frustrating… I so wanted to take this case to the highest Japanese grammar authority – how could something be a consonant verb if it doesn’t have consonants???
Yeah, grammar is stupid, it does not always make sense, it just describes the language as it is naturally used – it should only be used to explain a language, it’s not a vehicle to learn it.