About half of the students I tutor are doing Japanese in school, generally high school. Despite them learning Japanese for many years, due to how Japanese language programs are structured they have not learnt the basics and therefore struggle with everything to do with Japanese. If they better understood the plain form, pretty much the whole of the rest of beginner’s Japanese (up to and including JLPT N4) becomes much more logical.
I am going to introduce some tips to you on how to best understand Japanese and learn it in a better way. This all starts with learning about the plain form or dictionary form and how it interacts with the ます・です form.
What’s so important about the plain form in Japanese?
Tae Kim, one of the best Japanese teachers out there (yes I know he’s not perfect nor is he Japanese, but he has lots of great ideas) is one of the first people to introduce this idea to me in a clear way. I would highly recommend you read his introduction to his Japanese course regarding issues with Japanese textbooks and Japanese language programs. It is not a long passage to read and if you truly are serious about getting better at Japanese, you should read it.
His basic point is that Japanese has some features that are quite different from many languages, particularly for our purposes, English. I will focus mainly on the concept of ‘politeness’ and how it makes learning Japanese really hard if you do not understand this concept.
Why does Japanese teaching in school set students up for failure?
I don’t particularly blame anyone for the current state of Japanese learning in schools. Teachers have quite a hard task. Language learning takes many hundreds of hours of study and you’d be lucky to get more than a few contact hours a week at school. There is also an issue of selection bias and ignorance of successful Japanese teaching strategies. Then of course there is class size and all the issues that brings with it.
There are also some hard decisions that have to be made with Japanese teaching. When designing a Japanese program, you have to decide whether you will teach people the basics of grammar or you will teach them how to speak polite Japanese. School Japanese programs around the world have chosen the latter, they want their students to be able to speak politely to people in Japan as a priority. Although this may sound like a good idea, in reality it is setting students up for failure.
The main reason for this is that what you are taught as being “Japanese”, for example たべます, おいしいです and other such examples, is only one facet of Japanese which is in fact building on the plain form of Japanese. So if you do not understand the plain form, you have to do lots of crazy workarounds. One of the worst I see year after year in school, is teaching students to make the てform from the ますform instead of from the plain form. I’d recommend my video on learning 13 words to conquer the てform for verbs. While you’re at it, you should go through my Beginner Playlist on Youtube particularly the ます video to get an idea of what the plain form is.
But teachers or the people that set the syllabus aren’t out to get me, are they?
No, they are not out to get you. A choice was made regarding the order to teach Japanese and my argument (well, the argument I agree with) is that this choice, to focus on ます form first, is not good.
Fundamentally, the goal of a Japanese program should be to teach Japanese so that students can understand and use Japanese properly. Starting from the ます form is like teaching English by making students read academic articles from a peer-reviewed journal (OK not my best analogy but hopefully you get the gist).
You should be starting with the plain form and then adding on the ます form much later. In effect the exact opposite how Japanese is taught all over the world. If you’re wondering how you can learn the plain form, I would recommend Tae Kim’s guide as I linked above, my beginner playlist videos linked in this article and specifically this section, Polite Form and Verb Stems (as well as being across the totality of Nouns and Adjectives and Verbs) from Tae Kim’s guide/website.
Another great website to read about the barriers to effective Japanese learning can be found on imabi’s mission page.
TL;DR
Learning the ます form first is counterproductive. If your sentences always end with です or ます and たべる makes no sense to you, start learning the plain form. The plain form is the ‘true’ base of Japanese and you can learn about the ます form later.
