On grammar

When I tell people how I acquired Japanese, the first question many immediately ask is: “but what about grammar”?!?! Yeah, what about that…

So, how was I able to speak correct Japanese without ever having formally studied their grammar? Indeed, without ever having formally studied the language?

Because grammar doesn’t exist.

You see, grammar is an abstraction. Like fixed electronic orbits, the equator, and layers of the protocol stack. None of these things exist. They are make-believe. Or, to put it more gently, they exist because we say they do. They are thought-things, idea-objects, imaginary.

Grammar is all made up. There is no set-in-stone connection between words like 行く (“to go”) and 行った (“went”); They are two separate words that describe two separate things. We only join them together conceptually as conjugated forms of the same verb because we thought it would make things easier.

Most people are taught in school, and continue to believe as adults, that grammar has been decided. It’s this list of rules that’s fixed, unchanging, was set down by intellectual superbeings in the ivory tower. And that’s a bunch of bollocks. Grammar is a moving target. As we speak, it is literally in flux, shifting like the desert sands. OK, slower than desert sands, but it is on the move. To see it as a fixed thing is to see it in error.

You are probably fluent in at least one language: your “native” language. In at least this language, you almost always know when a sentence is right or when it is wrong. And although you can almost never explain why, if you were to just read a well-written grammar book, you would very quickly understand why. That’s the thing about grammar: it’s only useful after-the-fact!

Grammar is like conspiracy theories: good at explaining past events, but lousy at predicting the future. Too many exceptions, conditions, procycles and epicycles make it inelegant, much like Ptolemaic cosmology.

Grammar is an ex post facto analytical tool. It’s a tool for talking about language after the language has been written and spoken. But, as for actually learning/using language and knowing what to say before you need to say it, grammar is about as useful as an extra orifice at the tip of your elbow.

Before grammar, learn Japanese. Get fluent at real Japanese first. Learn the how. Afterwards, you can start to look at the why of grammar and be like: “oooooooh that’s why”. When you try to use grammar a priori, you only end up with verbal diarrhea for text and brain farts for thoughts. When you use grammar a posteriori, then you have insight.

Because grammar is a tool for discussing language, you first need some language to be able to discuss. In fact, you need a lot of language. You need a buttload of reference points in order for grammar to be at all meaningful. Anyone who has learned Latin in school knows this by counterexample: “decline the ablative singular of bellum”, says the teacher. WHAT? Who forking cares?! The ablative singular just doesn’t mean anything to most of us Oh, wait, it means “by/with/from/in/on/at”… yeah, thanks, that really helps: it totally makes sense now :(. The problem isn’t that Latin is dead. The problem is that almost everyone who studies it knows so little of it that a grammatical discussion has no analogue in actual experience and therefore is a form of verbal diarrhea. Make no mistake: humans are concrete beings. We talk of abstract generalisms, but we think in concrete analogies.

Patterns — repetitions of some overarching phenomenon — do exist. Grammar tries and fails to abstract these patterns. The way to master the fictional language patterns we refer to as “grammar” is by experiencing them in real life. In their natural habitat, used in sentences and phrases by real native speakers.

Since grammar is made up of speech patterns native speakers often say and find natural, the focus should be on learning the patterns, getting used to frequently spoken collocations, phrases and sentences. Focus on sentences, sentences, sentences. Learning thousands of correct Japanese sentences will build your Japanese senses. It will develop in you that child-like instinct to decide “this is the right way to say X”. And then, after that, when you want to sharpen the saw, you can read all about Japanese grammar in Japanese, written by a Japanese person who knows what the heck she’s talking about.

So that’s the deal with grammar. We recommend using grammar only as a tool to enhance comprehension. Look at a grammar book if you want, but don’t worry about the rules. Don’t waste time drilling rules or verb conjugations. You can even ignore the rules if you want. Read through the guide and focus on understanding example sentences. Focus on understanding what each structure means in a sentence. Immerse. Feed your brain the essential input.

When you see a new grammar construction, read an example sentence to understand what it means. Still don’t understand? Read another example sentence. Learn by absorbing patterns.

Avoid learning about what you can’t do… This will only confuse you. Examples of incorrect usage tend to be especially damaging. In my observation of a lot of people (including myself), telling someone not to say something a certain way tends to make them say it that way even more, sort of like a “don’t think of pink elephants shooting up heroine” thing.