Grammar, going monolingual, and thinking in Japanese

Conjugation tables. Hours and hours of them. I’d love to tell you I slammed my head against them until enlightenment came and that’s how I passed the JLPT. Nope. What worked was a lot less painful, and that’s what this chapter is about.

Where memorizing grammar breaks down

A lot of people think that if they memorize enough vocab and enough grammar points, they’ll be able to understand and build sentences. And at first, it kind of works. Then you hit the intermediate stage and run into grammar with overlapping meanings and little shades of feeling that textbooks don’t capture well. 渡る and 越える both translate to “cross,” so 橋を越える should mean crossing a bridge, right? Except 越える has this image of getting over an obstacle, so it sounds like the bridge is in your way and you’re climbing over it. You want 橋を渡る. No flashcard tells you that, but hearing both of them used a hundred times does. And in a real conversation you don’t have time to stop and build the perfect sentence in your head anyway. Awkward silence is awkward. If you’ve ever seen those Death Note clips with the inner monologue cut out, you know what I mean.

Grammar is mostly just more words

SevenStop put it in a way that stuck with me: the vast majority of Japanese grammar is just more words. If you learn words in context, you pick up conjugations, sentence structure and particles along the way. So I skim a grammar guide once (chapter 4) and then immerse, and when something unfamiliar shows up, like 〜ようになる or 〜ものの, I look it up and mine it just like a word. Right now that’s five grammar cards a day on top of my ten words. When a grammar point still feels fuzzy, I search it on Immersion Kit and watch it in five different anime. Running into a pattern I didn’t get used to bug me. Now it feels kind of good, because I know each time I see it, it clicks a little more.

I do still study grammar explicitly sometimes. Transitive and intransitive verbs (動く versus 動かす) broke my brain in high school, so I studied the table in Genki 2 once, and then immersion did the rest. Now when I see a new verb I can usually guess both versions. And if you need to speak soon, like you’re going to Japan in three months, go ahead and drill the conjugations you’ll need for the trip. Long term, they come to you.

Most of the time, you don’t say “I”

Textbooks teach 私 on day one, so learners put it in every sentence, but Japanese leaves out whatever’s obvious. In 昨日ラーメンを食べた it’s already clear who ate. When you do need one, the word says something about you: 私 is the safe, polite default, 僕 is mostly guys and a bit casual, and 俺 is for close friends, since with your boss it sounds like you want to fight. Then there are the fun ones from fiction, like 拙者 for samurai, 吾輩 from Natsume Sōseki’s cat, and 朕, which literally only the emperor uses.

Stop translating in your head

A lot of learners get stuck in a loop of hearing Japanese, translating it to English, thinking of a reply in English and translating it back, and by the time you answer, the moment’s gone. I used to hear 私はジャレッドです and go “watashi is I, wa is… Jared, I am Jared,” like a robot. Translating helps early on. But eventually you hit words where English can’t keep up:

Is かける to hang, to wear, to sit, to pour, to spend, to call? Yes. All of those. That’s usually the moment you realize English has stopped helping.

The trick that helped me the most is picturing the scene. When I hear a sentence, I close my eyes, repeat it a couple of times, and visualize it instead of translating it. When I hear 犬に足を噛まれた, I don’t hear “the dog bit my leg.” I see a dog. A leg. Ouch.

Short phrases work the same way. When I hear 行かなきゃ, I don’t think “verb stem, negative, conditional, contraction, means I have to go.” I just see someone grabbing their bag and rushing out the door. I don’t know a shortcut to that. What worked for me was easyish content, full of words I knew well, and a lot of reps.

Going monolingual

For your first two or three thousand words, English definitions are fine. After around 3,000 core words you can understand most simple Japanese definitions, so that’s when I’d add Japanese–Japanese dictionaries to Yomitan and put them first (TheMoeWay has a good collection), with an English one lower down as a backup. People worry it’ll eat into their immersion time. Think about it, though: reading a definition in Japanese is reading Japanese. When one doesn’t make sense, mine the words in it or look up example sentences instead.

Thinking in Japanese

Start small, with little thoughts during your day rather than full sentences. You’re hungry: お腹すいた…. You can’t find your keys in the morning rush: 鍵どこだっけ？. The weather’s nice: いい天気だな. Then try narrating your day to your cat or your plants, or pretend you’re a Japanese YouTuber explaining how to make onigiri. It feels silly, but your inner voice slowly switches languages, and the less you translate, the faster you react in real conversations.

Translating under pressure is how you end up like me at a konbini. The clerk asked if I needed chopsticks, お箸いりますか？, with いる meaning “to need,” and my brain heard 入れる, “to put in,” and decided the clerk was offering to put the chopsticks… somewhere. I froze. Now I just hear “chopsticks?” and say お願いします. So here’s your homework: next time you’re hungry, think お腹すいた before you think anything in English.