Every language has its own particularities. It’s a well-known fact and anybody willing to learn a new language knows he has to be prepared to face what will seem at first weird patterns and vocabulary.
But one thing that gets pretty much everybody worried is when a language has a different structure pattern.
More than the rest of the grammar, the idea of putting the verb at the end of a sentence, not to have spaces or even simply to have sentences written from top to bottom or right to left is just plain scary for anybody who hasn’t attempted it before.
However, on the contrary, anybody who has already learned one such language in the past considers this as the “easier” part of learning such a language.
So why is it that we get to widely opposite sides of the spectrum on one single aspect of language-learning?
It all comes down to the first experience breaking preconceptions of how difficult it is to adapt.
Learning a language means creating sentences
If you’re learning a language, it certainly isn’t just to say the word “bathroom”, “money” or “tired” on their own.
This means the first thing to approach when learning a language is how sentences are structured.
Luckily, the internet is a vast databank and finding how any language is structured is a matter of minutes.
For this reason, the first step — even before learning how to say “Hello” — is to learn how each sentence is constructed.
Is it going to be Subject-Verb-Object (SVO)? Is it going to be Subject-Object-Verb (SOV)? Is going to be a rarer VSO, OVS or such? Are there particles for each part of the sentence?
Learning how to put into practice those is not easy but it isn’t really that hard either. It is a matter of getting used to it through slow and organized practice.
“Complicated” structures may be easier!
Japanese has an SOV structure and no space. Sounds fun right?
Well, I actually ended up finding this the easiest part of learning the language.
As luck would find us, most languages with what speakers of English, Spanish or such would call “complicated” structures have a rather easy grammar system in comparison.
For example, If you’re having trouble with getting a hang on where to insert the time aspect of your sentence in Japanese, you can remind yourself that there’s no conjugation nor gender for words at least.
What if you don’t recognize a word in Japanese but see the particle へ after? Well, you’ll have probably learned rather early that this particle means the word preceding is a location towards which “something” is happening.
What steps to take?
So, you’ve accepted that learning a new language with a different sentence structure is doable. Awesome. That’s the first step.
Now let’s see the other ones:
- Find the sentence structure pattern
- Check whether the language uses mostly prepositions or postpositions
- Learn the most common ones
- Make a list of about 20 words (including verbs) and create as many sentences as you can with the particles learned previously. This should be without looking at them.
- Get corrections on platforms such as HiNative or Lang-8 for instance.
- Write the corrections down on paper and read again each sentence.
- Take 30 or so words and create sentences with 2 objects. For instance, “I go to the office today.” (location and time).
- Get corrections again and write those down.
- Observe which patterns are not sticking and create more examples with these ones.
- Rinse and repeat until the basic ones are good.
If you do the above steps from scratch once every two weeks, you will make those become a part of you in no time.
Obviously, as you practice and learn more about the language, what originally seemed impossible will become easier and you’ll naturally stop having to think about those.
And since it’ll just be the beginning of a long journey to language mastery, enjoy it of course!
Yuhakko 语학子 