Grammar focus

Recently, I've been beginning to notice the importance of focus in study. I think it's important to keep yourself focused on a certain point or structure for a period at a time in order to learn efficiently.

In the past, I've been in a hurry to learn, and when I think to myself, "I must study some Japanese tonight" or something like that my inclination is to take on the whole language, as if I'm going to be able to devour the whole thing in one sitting.

This may sound unrealistic, and of course it is, but I think this is my subconscious telling me I've started learning too late, or I'm not going to be living here forever, and I need to get a move on if I'm going to succeed.

Anyway, in recent months I've begun to notice the benefit of remaining focused on a certain point for a period of time—mainly thanks to the fact that I now have a good teacher who isn't allowing me to talk and talk making wildly inaccurate sentences as some of my past teachers have been willing to do (but perhaps this is a topic for another post).

So recently, we have been focussing on the てくださる、ていただく、てくれる、てもらう、constructions. I have been learning Japanese for nearly five years now, and of course I have come across this construction before. But I have never given it enough time or thought to truly master its usage. Now I realise what a big mistake that was. I've been spending a lot of time on this recently and now feel pretty confident using these combinations and it's like massive new areas of Japanese have been opened up to me, and I find it hard to believe I went for so long without really getting to know it well enough.

My approach in the past has always been to hope that this kind of structure would sink in eventually, I guess through a combination of time and exposure. Of course, this takes a) time, and b) you need a lot of exposure, two things that I have complained about lacking in the past. My reasons for thinking like this can probably be put down to laziness on my part, and having teachers who were not strict enough with me.

Anyway, I think it's important to really spend some time trying to get to know a structure or language point like this to get the benefits sooner rather than later.

I think one of the benefits of  focusing on one point over a period of time like this is that it becomes something that you begin to go over in your head when you don't have your books in front of you. This is great "free extra study" that you don't even have to put any energy into. It just starts to go round your head as you're doing the dishes or something like that.

So recently, I've been trying to put this into practice with my Chinese. With my teacher we are currently going over directional complements,  like 进去 - go in, 下来 - come down; and completion complements like 修好 - fix (good), and 买到 - bought. Already I can tell that this part of the language is going to be coming up a lot in Chinese, and I think my past approach would be to hope that it sinks in at some point. I think this is possible, but now my thinking is that to become proficient and familiar with these structures as soon as possible is the better way to go.