MisterM2402 [Michael] wrote:

I don’t see why Koichi suggests using Lang-8 so early – what good are corrections if you can’t (at least vaguely) understand them? When your Japanese is so basic, there’s only so far the helper can simplify it while still trying to make it sound more natural/correct. It’s not always easy to determine how much a learner knows so you can never be sure which grammatical structures and vocabulary to use.

Just out of interest, what did you write originally? Were there other corrections?

I’m a bit embarrassed to post it as I now understand better alot of where my mistakes came from. I’ve made a couple of other posts as well and the majority of my mistakes are coming from verb forms.

Speaking of verbs…..

I just ran into a wall with verb forms and the conversion to dictionary forms. Textfugu teaches with ます for starting out, but from looking around in jisho.org and other sites (Tae Kim’s) a lot of people seem to teach dictionary form first. Earlier Joel mentioned that both ways have merit and I was wondering what those merits are.

I’m starting to use resources like Memrise and WaniKani to expand my vocabulary and I’m noticing alot of verbs are in anything expect ます　form. This is the first part of learning the language that has seemed really difficult for me to grasp, so I’m just looking for advise on what the best way to scale this verb wall is. These different forms are really causing me headaches.

Stupid grammar question: What’s a Nominaliser? Should I know that or have I just not gotten there yet.

So much to learn on all these forms…. I’ve been waiting to learn the vocab lists before moving on so far. Now I’m starting to wonder if I shouldn’t just power through and give myself a “basic” understanding of the grammar so I can at least understand why I screwed something up.

Thanks for the feedback.

Any suggestions on what learning tools/sites I should use? I’ve been looking at JapanesePod101 and Livemocha. I’ll add Lang-8 once I’ve got enough kanji/vocab to actually write something.