Name: Why You Still Can't Understand Basic Grammar
Uploaded: 2024-10-31T14:08:56.000Z
Duration: 13 min 39 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Adverbs of manner

The reason there's basic words and grammar structures you still can't understand is that they're actually not basic at all.

Adverbs of degree

You see, in every language, there's a subset of words and grammatical structures that are extremely hard to grasp despite being some of the most common elements of the language.

Transition words & phrases

Assuming these elements should be easy just because they're frequently used is an extremely common mistake that ends up causing language learners a lot of frustration.

Now, make sure to watch to the very end of the video because I actually have a completely free gift for anyone learning Japanese.

It will help you fix your understanding of Japanese grammar, which actually contradicts the content of this video.

So, make sure to watch the entire video to get the proper context.

Do not skip to the end or you might actually end up worse off than you started.

So, I call these extremely common yet difficult to grasp words or structures persistent puzzles.

They're persistent in the sense that, right from day one, you come across them all the time.

If you're doing a lot of immersion, you probably come across most persistent puzzles multiple times every day.

Yet, despite coming across these particular words and structures so frequently, you just can't seem to really figure them out.

And, in this sense, they're also persistently unsolvable.

You might kind of get what one of these words mean in some sentences, but then in other sentences, you're completely lost.

And even if you read multiple articles explaining the given word or structure, you only end up feeling more confused.

Now, to clarify, not all frequently used words and structures are persistent puzzles.

In fact, many common words and structures are relatively easy to grasp.

In cases like this, although the word or structure itself may be persistent, the puzzle presented by the word or structure is not.

By persistent puzzle, I'm specifically referring to words and structures that are both extremely common and nearly impossible to grasp until reaching a relatively high level in the language.

Now, before I go on, I want to give a few examples to help make things more concrete.

So, in Japanese, some of the most common persistent puzzles are wa vs ga, wake, and ki.

Now, these are also some of the most common elements of the Japanese language in general.

In fact, they're taught in one form or another in most Japanese 101 classes.

Yet, each of these elements are notorious for regularly giving Japanese learners trouble.

For example, despite the particles wa and ga being taught on probably the very first day of most Japanese 101 classes, most intermediate to advanced Japanese learners probably still don't feel like they 100% understand exactly what the difference really is.

Now, unfortunately, I can't provide examples of persistent puzzles for every target language, so if you're studying a language other than Japanese, please leave a comment with the persistent puzzles that you've struggled with the most.

So, like I've been alluding to, the thing about persistent puzzles is that despite them coming up all the time, it's not actually possible to fully solve them until you actually reach a high level in the language.

And this aspect of persistent puzzles makes them very counterintuitive.

Because they show up so often, on the surface, persistent puzzles often seem basic.

I mean, after all, many of them are taught in college 101 classes on the language.

The problem is that this illusion of basicness leads many intermediate language learners to falsely assume that these persistent puzzles are something that they should have mastered a long time ago.

They end up beating themselves up for not being able to understand them despite having been learning the language for X amount of months or years.

And this leads them to feeling like they're dumb or bad at language learning and constantly feeling frustrated because of it.

Now, I am going to explain exactly how to deal with persistent puzzles, but before that, it's important to understand why the phenomenon of persistent puzzles occurs in the first place.

The majority of persistent puzzles occur due to a target language word or structure having a meaning that can't be directly translated into English.

This might sound a little abstract, but essentially, what language really is is a way of dividing the world up into concepts and then making statements about how those concepts relate to one another.

The specific way in which the world is divided up into concepts is fundamentally different for each language, and because of this, it's inevitable that there are some concepts that are simply not possible to translate from one language to another.

To make this more concrete, take the word kakeru in Japanese.

From the perspective of a Japanese person, kakeru is a simple word that represents a single core concept.

Although kakeru has many specific usages, each of those individual usages can be understood as fundamentally meaning the same thing.

Now, in English, we simply don't have a word that means kakeru.

In fact, we could even say that the English language doesn't contain the concept that kakeru represents.

Now, if you look up kakeru on the Japanese dictionary website jisho.org, 25 different English meanings are listed, including to put on in the sense of to put on glasses, to spend in the sense of to spend time or money on, and to deliberate in the sense of discussing something in a meeting.

So, on the surface, it would appear that kakeru simply has 25 different meanings.

And depending on the situation, kakeru can indeed mean each of those 25 different things.

But once you fully grasp the underlying concept behind kakeru, you realize that, at its essence, the word really only has one single core meaning.

In reality, all of those English translations are simply that same core meaning viewed from different angles.

But because English doesn't contain the specific concept that kakeru represents, there's no way to use English to directly communicate the true essence of what kakeru really means.

The best the English language can do is take each individual situation that kakeru tends to be used in and list out what English expression would be used in a similar sort of situation.

A good analogy for understanding this idea is the parable of the blind man and an elephant.

According to Wikipedia, the parable broadly goes like this.

A group of blind men heard that a strange animal called an elephant had been brought to the town.

But none of them were aware of its shape and form.

Out of curiosity, they said, we must inspect and know it by touch, of which we are capable.

So they sought it out, and when they found it, they groped about it.

The first person, whose hand landed on the trunk, said, this being is like a thick snake.

For another one, whose hand reached its ear, it seemed like a kind of fan.

As for another person, whose hand was upon its leg, said, the elephant is a pillar like a tree trunk.

The blind man who placed his hand upon its side said the elephant is a wall.

Another who felt its tail described it as a rope.

The last felt its tusk, stating the elephant is that which is hard, smooth, and like a spear.

In the context of language learning, we start off blind in the sense that we begin from a position of ignorance with regards to our target language.

All we have to rely on is our sense of touch, which, in this case, responds to our native language.

Because our target language is fundamentally different from our native language, trying to interpret our target language through our native language leads to partial, seemingly contradictory understandings.

Basically, trying to understand what kakeru means through the English language would be like trying to understand what an elephant is through touch alone.

In this way, the core reason that persistent puzzles occur is that when target language words or structures are sufficiently foreign from anything we know from our native language, they become impossible to fully grasp through translation.

So, if this is the case, then how can persistent puzzles actually be solved?

Using the language of the elephant parable, how can we learn to see?

Well, through learning to understand everything else besides the persistent puzzles, and then using inference to fill in the remaining gaps.

I think a good analogy for understanding this is, funnily enough, jigsaw puzzles.

You see, when you first start off solving a jigsaw puzzle, initially you don't have a very good idea where most of the pieces are going to go.

For some pieces, the color or design might make it immediately obvious, but for most others, you won't have much clue.

As you assemble more and more of the puzzle, pieces that you were previously confused about start to become more clear.

Now, imagine a puzzle piece so vague and indiscriminate that right up until the very end of solving the puzzle, you have no idea where it's going to go.

This is essentially what persistent puzzles are.

In this situation, the only way to figure out where that problem piece is going to go is to first solve the rest of the puzzle.

Only once all the other pieces are in place will things finally become clear.

In this way, when a given word or structure simply has no equivalent in your native language, the only way to figure out what it means is to infer from context.

Strictly speaking, this isn't only true for persistent puzzles.

When talking about languages that are vastly different from one another like English and Japanese, the number of words that have true one-to-one counterparts in each language is fairly small.

Even for basic words such as table or blue, the underlying concept will have slightly different nuances and connotations in each language.

And in these cases, it's only possible to grasp the true nuance of the target language counterpart through contextual inference.

What's unique in the case of persistent puzzles is that they occur when the conceptual gap between your target language and native language is so large that it becomes difficult to intuit the meaning of the word or structure in question.

In this way, persistent puzzles are the equivalent to maximally indiscriminate puzzle pieces, which don't become clear until everything else in the puzzle is already in place.

This is the reason persistent puzzles are not possible to fully grasp until reaching an intermediate to advanced level.

The only way to infer what they really mean is to see them in countless contexts in which you already perfectly understand everything else except for the problematic word or component.

And naturally, the only way this is possible is to already understand a majority of the language.

So now that we understand how persistent puzzles work on a theoretical level, how do we practically apply these ideas to become better language learners?

Well, if you're taking an immersion-based approach to learning a language, then you don't really have to do anything.

As long as you keep immersing, every persistent puzzle will eventually become clear on its own.

Although the name persistent puzzle might suggest that you have to do something to solve them, in reality they solve themselves through immersion.

Once all the surrounding pieces are in place, the solution will become self-evident.

And once a persistent puzzle finally clicks, it won't be long before you'll become able to use it yourself in output.

On the other hand, until you reach the point where a persistent puzzle solves itself naturally, it simply won't be possible for you to fully grasp what it means.

Unfortunately, there are no magic cheat codes to let you bypass this reality.

In fact, trying too hard to grasp the meaning of a persistent puzzle before your brain is ready can actually be counterproductive.

As I explained earlier, persistent puzzles simply can't be grasped through your native language.

So reading lots of English explanations can actually lead to developing a warped, English-based understanding of what the given word or structure means, which can actually get in the way of properly acquiring it.

Basically, you can end up like a blind person who thinks elephants are shaped like thick snakes.

Instead, it's better to simply read a single bare-bones English explanation of what the word or structure means, and after that, not make too much of an effort to understand it.

Just notice it each time it comes up in your immersion, and allow your understanding to be vague and blurry.