By now it’s been nearly a week since I posted the last new lesson in Introduction to the Japanese Language. The second part of the series has turned out to be far more difficult to write.
My main dilemma is this. I want to keep the amount of grammar to the minimum that is strictly necessary for the upcoming Beginning Lessons (and delaying the rest until right before it is needed), but at the same time I don’t want to make any conceptual leaps, which are a major source of misunderstanding.
But I’m not liking how my attempts at getting into “desu” and “masu” and levels of formality are going. Up until now I’ve been trying to include some grammar, but since I haven’t done verb conjugation yet, determining how much to introduce as background has been extremely difficult. I think I may have to dump the grammar altogether and stick to unconjugated forms for this lesson, and go in greater depth after covering verb conjugation. The topic of politeness and formality deserves multiple sections anyway.
The question then is what to do with the other basic grammar articles, since I do know how I want to precede from the first page on sentence structure. Maybe I can separate them out into a “fundamentals of Japanese grammar series” or something similar. That would make Intro a little lame though…
I plan to start the Beginning Lessons section with a grammar-light lesson on greetings and expressions, so that gives me some time to think about it. Be on the lookout for several new lessons/articles this week.