Chris Forno (jekor) wrote:
The idea is that I spent years studying different languages, generally with a textbook. The textbooks tend to focus on teaching rules and grammar, with a little bit of vocabulary and dialog each chapter. I think the focus should be reversed.
This varies wildly by textbook, with some bias for the language being taught. Personally I've found too many vocabulary textbooks and far too few grammar textbooks (that is, actual *grammar* textbooks not sentence-sized-vocabulary textbooks).
Obviously grammar is very important. But is reading about it effective for everyone?
In my experience learning and teaching languages, this too varies wildly by learner. Some people do better with an "examples first" or "vocabulary based" style where they must come to an intuition of the grammar rules; other people (such as myself) do better with a "rules first" or "grammar based" style where they must come to learn vocabulary on their own. Neither variety of person is superior nor, as far as I can tell, more common at large; so any good teacher or textbook should balance these "bottom up" and "top down" approaches. IMO vocabulary is easy to learn, it just takes time, whereas grammar is harder to figure out on one's own, and so is the better thing for a teacher to focus on. However, this says little about reference material (as opposed to learning material), and study guides walk a line between reference and teaching. JGram http://jgram.org/pages/viewList.php is an interesting study guide that takes a middle path, treating syntactic patterns the same as it does lexemes. This is particularly appropriate for a language like Japanese where it's not always immediately apparent whether something belongs to the "grammar" vs the "lexicon".
The only way I successfully became fluent in a language (Esperanto) was through immersion,
This is, hands down, the best way to learn any language. For it to work, as you say, some vocabulary is necessary; however, I think the amount of vocabulary needed at first is not so large as some think. Daily small-talk for getting/giving directions, ordering food, and the like comprise a large portion of beginner's language and requires remarkably little breadth of vocabulary (a couple hundred words or so). Small-talk also includes some of the most obscure and difficult-to-master grammatical patterns like greetings, getting the right tone of politeness/familiarity, and knowing what sorts of sentence fragments and other "ungrammatical" patterns are perfectly acceptable.
And of course it has very forgiving sentence and a rather simple grammar, but I'm finding the experience to be very similar with Japanese so far.
That being said, Esperanto, and even Japanese sentence structure perhaps is not as different as an agglutinative language like German. I'll need to study it more to find out.
Actually, Japanese is agglutinative too (moreso than German is). The basic structures of Japanese are quite simple, however the details needed for fluency are quite intricate. Phrase order is rather free, though it is not entirely free and it is easy to reorder things so that they no longer make sense to native speakers. Aside from a few of the common mistakes beginners make, if you mess up the cases/particles you'll end up with gibberish. -- Live well, ~wren