掲示板 Forums - prioritize kanji/vocab or grammar

my goal as a vocaloid addicted chud is to be able to understand jp works without translations.
i'm focusing my kanji more on understanding/definitions than the actual readings (kunyomi/onyomi), to be able to translate for myself
so i've been edging away from grammar a bit as i simply wanna understand texts given to me rather than speaking/listening

it's been lowkey working well tho as the kanji lets me get some keywords when it comes to sentences

honorable mention: i am like completely self taught, i use websites and renshuu lol

will this study flow hinder my progress?

personally, i wish i'd done more grammar early on, rather than focusing on kanji and vocab.

but then, as a self-learner, vocab and kanji are easy. you point an srs at the problem, put in the grind, and you learn them. grammar is... i still don't really have a good method for learning grammar. i keep returning to volume: read lots, listen lots, and then when i get an explanation for the grammar i already have tons of examples in my mind. but maybe that's also just what's been working for me.

​grammar is essential to understanding texts! grammar is all the stuff which glues the words together, whatever writing system you're using. also, with vocaloid, you're wanting to understand songtexts. in other words: poetry. and poetry often does *weird* stuff with grammar. it rearranges bits, uses uncommon grammar, uses "wrong" grammar. and to really understand the weird grammar, you need to know the "correct" grammar.

​this! so much this!

Learning the ins and outs of Japanese takes more than learning kanji. In fact, kanji isn't the thing that holds up grammar at all. It's not like Chinese.

To really know how Japanese works,g rammar is usually the stuff that gets spelled out in hiragana, and they are particular terms and words which actually make up the grammar of Japanese. They tell you how words are being used and they tell you what the sentence means. There are other layers where certain patterns are used, or even the lack thereof, which dictates how to interpret the sentence. Because of this, Japanese is a pretty context-dependent language, as outside of the question/answer dialogues you'll often see being taught, a typical dialogue in Japanese often loves to contract in some sort of way. Like starting off a conversation about a dog, but in the rest of the back and forth, you will hardly see "dog" being mentioned.

And sometimes when a sentence seems to be some kind of mouthful, like some kind of flowery language? This is another side to Japanese which shows the difference between a casual conversation to a formal discussion. This dynamic is a social one, which is something to be culturally aware about and learn to use.

As for kanji, as it's not grammar, there are still more things to it far beyond the meaning. In fact, meaning isn't everything. Some kanji are selected apart from their meaning and more rather for using their pronunciation. That's why some words might turn up pronounced a completely different way. Or in the inverse, where kanji could be cheekily chosen for certain meanings, but could be used for expressing homonyms and such, which is also cultural. Some kanji could be used for a much different meaning than what you think. For this, it actually helps to know the pronunciation, so you can get the right meaning. On top of that, this also has a layer where spelling might be pretty important to know because pronunciation may change.