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Re:Reverse Engineering the Japanese Sentence by canjobear on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @10:36PM (#24715065)
There are very many people who have learned to speak foreign languages while never reading any material about the grammar of the language. (In fact the vast majority have learned this way, since the vast majority of languages in history have been unwritten and uncodified.) But there are very few people who can read a grammatical description like this one and speak fluently.
Re:Reverse Engineering the Japanese Sentence by presentation on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @10:49PM (#24715162)
While I agree with OP that you need to listen to a lot of source content, a reasonable amount grammatical understanding can definitely speed up your comprehension. This is a lot of what gives adult learners an advantage to learn quickly over infants.
Re:Reverse Engineering the Japanese Sentence by fenomas on Wednesday October 07, 2020 @11:13PM (#24715305)
Sure, lots of people learn verb conjugation rules without a textbook. But they still needed to learn the rules. Having a textbook just makes it easier.

I don't think TFA is claiming to be the only thing anyone needs to reach fluency. It's clearly just meant to be a learning aid. Unless you believe it's counterproductive, and that lists like that actually make it harder to learn a language, then I don't understand the complaint here.