How to learn grammar without hating it

Grammar has a bad reputation among language learners, mostly earned in school. The usual reaction is one of two extremes: study every rule before daring to speak, or declare grammar unnecessary and hope it arrives by itself. Neither works well for Chinese, Japanese or Korean.

Kungfucius's position is in between. Grammar is a map. You do not memorise a map before leaving the house, and you do not throw it away either. You look at it when you are lost.

Do you need to study grammar to learn a language?

A little, at the right moments. You do not need to finish a grammar book before you start listening, reading and speaking, and trying to do so is the most reliable way to stop altogether.

What you need at the start is an overview that fits on two pages: the basic word order, how questions and negatives are formed, how the past is expressed, and what kinds of small words exist. Japanese and Korean put the verb at the end and mark roles with particles. Chinese has no verb endings at all and relies on word order and a few particles. Knowing that much stops the first hundred sentences from looking like noise.

After that, grammar is best met in sentences you understand. The explanation comes second, when a pattern has turned up several times and you start to wonder about it. At that point a five-minute explanation sticks, because it answers a question you actually have.

Learn patterns through sentences

A rule is an abstraction. A sentence is something you can hear, repeat and reuse. So collect patterns as whole sentences and let the rule be the label on the box.

In practice:

1. Meet the pattern in input. Listening and reading at your level supply the examples. This is the main argument for comprehensible input.
2. Keep one clear example. When a pattern catches your attention, save one sentence that shows it, with audio if possible. The page on sentence mining explains how.
3. Swap one piece. Take the sentence and change the noun, the time or the person. "I have been to Japan" becomes "I have been to Korea", then "she has never been to Korea".
4. Use it the same week. Say it to a tutor or write it in a message. A pattern used once in earnest is worth ten read in a table.

This also solves the problem of terminology. You do not need to know what "aspect" or "topic marker" means in order to use one. The terms help when you look things up, and for nothing else.

What is actually hard in Chinese, Japanese and Korean

Each language has a small number of features that cause most of the trouble. Knowing which ones saves you from worrying about the rest.

Chinese: aspect particles and measure words

Chinese verbs never change form, which leads people to say Chinese has no grammar. It has plenty. It is simply located elsewhere.

Aspect particles show how an action sits in time, not when it happened. 了 le marks completion or a change of situation, 過 (过) guo marks experience, and 著 (着) zhe marks a continuing state.

• 我買了三本書 (我买了三本书) wǒ mǎi le sān běn shū: I bought three books.
• 我去過日本 (我去过日本) wǒ qùguo Rìběn: I have been to Japan.
• 門開著 (门开着) mén kāizhe: the door is open.

The trap is treating 了 as a past tense. It appears in future sentences too, and many past sentences have none. No single rule covers it, and learners at every level still get it wrong. This is a pattern acquired from thousands of examples, with the explanation as a rough guide.

Measure words stand between a number and a noun: 一本書 (一本书) yì běn shū, one book, 一張桌子 (一张桌子) yì zhāng zhuōzi, one table, 一隻貓 (一只猫) yì zhī māo, one cat. Learn each noun together with its measure word from the first day. The general one, 個 (个) ge, will get you understood when memory fails.

Japanese: particles and verb forms

Is Japanese grammar hard? It is very regular, which helps, and very different from English, which does not. Two areas take the time.

Particles mark what each word is doing. The famous pair is は wa and が ga:

• 猫が魚を食べた neko ga sakana o tabeta: the cat ate the fish.
• 魚は猫が食べた sakana wa neko ga tabeta: as for the fish, the cat ate it.

Explanations of は and が fill books. The feeling for them comes from input, slowly.

Verb forms stack up. From 食べる taberu, to eat, you get 食べます tabemasu (polite), 食べて tabete (the connecting te-form), 食べた tabeta (past), 食べない tabenai (negative), 食べられる taberareru (can eat, or is eaten) and 食べさせる tabesaseru (make someone eat). The good news is that there are almost no irregular verbs. The te-form is worth drilling deliberately, since half of the later grammar is built on it.

Korean: endings and speech levels

Korean puts nearly everything into the verb ending: tense, mood, the link to the next clause, and your relationship with the listener.

Speech levels are the part beginners fear. Grammars traditionally count seven. In daily life you need three. With 가다 gada, to go:

Level	Form	Used with
Formal polite	갑니다 gamnida	Announcements, presentations, the news
Informal polite	가요 gayo	Strangers, colleagues, most adult conversation
Casual (반말 banmal)	가 ga	Close friends, younger people, children

Start with the informal polite form and stay there until Koreans tell you otherwise. On top of the levels, honorific forms such as 가세요 gaseyo show respect for the person you are talking about.

Connecting and sentence-final endings are the long project. Endings such as -는데 (-neunde), -거든요 (-geodeunyo) and -잖아요 (-janayo) carry background, explanation and shared knowledge. They have no neat English equivalents and there are a great many of them. Take them one at a time, each with a sentence you have really heard.

When explicit grammar study helps

Deliberate study earns its place in a few situations:

• At the very start, for the two-page overview.
• When a pattern keeps appearing and you still cannot work it out from context.
• When the same error keeps coming back. Errors that no longer block understanding tend to harden, and only attention fixes them.
• For forms that are regular and countable, such as the Japanese te-form or Korean conjugation. Drilling these for a week or two saves months.
• Before an exam. JLPT, TOPIK and HSK test grammar points by name.
• For writing, where you have time to use what you know consciously.

Drills work on patterns you already recognise. Drilling a pattern you have never met in real use is memorising a table, and tables do not come to mind in conversation.

A sensible share, in Kungfucius's view, is about a tenth of your study time. If grammar takes half, you are studying linguistics. It is a fine subject, but a different one.

Which grammar references to keep

One of each type is enough. More is a collection.

Type	What it is for	Examples
Structured course	Introduces patterns in a sensible order	A textbook series, or Talk To Me In Korean for Korean
Look-up reference	Answers "what is this pattern?" in five minutes	Chinese Grammar Wiki, A Dictionary of Basic Japanese Grammar, Korean Grammar in Use
Spaced grammar drills	Keeps studied patterns alive	Bunpro for Japanese, or your own sentence cards
A person	Tells you which of your sentences sound wrong, and why	A tutor, or a patient exchange partner

The look-up reference is the map itself. Its test is simple: can you find a pattern in under a minute and understand the entry in under five?

What to do this week

1. Read a short overview of your language's grammar, once, without taking notes.
2. Choose one look-up reference and bookmark it. Decline the other six.
3. Pick the pattern that has annoyed you most recently, read its entry, and save one real sentence that contains it.
4. Change one word in that sentence three times, aloud.
5. Use the pattern once with a real person before Sunday, and let them correct it.