I'm on ell.stackexchange.com and actually the question about articles comes up often - especially since languages like Russian and Chinese don't have them.

The thing is, English really wants all singular nouns tagged with a determiner - that can be an article, possessive such as "my, your," etc., demonstrative such as "this, that,", or other determiners such as "any, all, one, some," etc.

Exception is when the noun is referring to its concept in the abstract (think type of X instead of instance of X).

So, "the X" means the speaker has a particular X in mind and is expecting you to know which X he/she is talking about it - either from previous conversation, assumed shared experience/culture, or rarely the speaker intentionally wants you to feel like you're missing out on something. "A/an X" means the listener isn't expected to have been tracking X.

IMHO more difficult than articles is explaining the perfect aspect of verbs - e.g. difference between "I X'ed" and "I have X'ed".

English has something like particles too - often called phrasal verbs. E.g. knock and knock out mean two completely different things.

> Exception is when the noun is referring to its concept in the abstract

You need an article here.

If there's only one exception, it should be, "The exception is when...", and if there are multiple exceptions, say, "An exception is when..."

In this case, it's grammatical, just for a different reason. You can sometimes drop the leading article or pronoun of a clause -- don't know why, just happens sometimes.

("I" don't know why, "it" just happens sometimes.)

Or for instance, if you're viewing a house on the market: "Kitchen is to the left, sitting room to the right; office is upstairs." It's certainly a casual register, but it's no less grammatical than including the articles explicitly.

In the ancestor comment's "Exception is when ...", the article is implied but elided, in the same way. (I inferred "the".) You could argue whether it's effective to drop the article there, because it's ambiguous in the way you noted, but it's still grammatically valid. (Chomsky's "colorless green ideas" is the usual example where semantic sense diverges from grammatical validity.)

This is a good defense of it, but as a native English speaker I still found the sentence jarring.

It’s possible that my sensitivity to this kind of error (or causal register, if you prefer) is due to experience learning other languages that don’t have articles like those in English. I doubt it, though. Many others probably also find sentences stripped of articles as jarring, and that’s useful for anyone learning English to know.

As I learner, I generally want it to be understood by speakers of the language as easily and with as little friction as possible.

Yeah, you can't always drop articles -- like I said, it usually happens at the very start of a clause, and not at all interior to one. And whether it's advisable to do this is up for debate; you make a good point about accessibility, and it's not always even natural. But it does happen, so it's worth cataloguing the existence of this phenomenon at least :)

My favourite example of this in English is adjective order.

Native speakers learn that it should be "big red bus" rather than "red big bus", however most couldn't list the ~7 adjective types and order they should be used in, yet will know straight away when they're wrong.

The idea that there are "adjective types and order" is a bit misleading; the underlying order is primarily semantic/pragmatic. The order is, roughly, extrinsic to intrinsic, situational to innate, contrastive to contextual; how closely attached a descriptor is to the head noun generally implies how "essential" a property it describes. This isn't really an English thing, either—English just happens to be the language most frequently taught to non-native speakers—but adjective order actually correlates pretty well across languages.

The oft-repeated opinion-to-purpose order of adjectives has decent descriptive power, but is easily oversold; the classes described do not have consistent ordering across contexts. The same woman may be an "old American woman" when interviewed for his opinions on global politics, or an "American old woman" in the context of comparing healthcare for the elderly across countries.

The "big bad wolf" is a fairy-tale villain; a "bad big wolf" is a failure at being a big wolf.

> adjective order actually correlates pretty well across languages.

Maybe a certain extended family of languages, but not, as far as I'm aware, the language being discussed in this thread, which has no particular preference for adjective order.

Can I call it a green whittling rectangular little silver French old lovely knife? This makes no sense.

Clearly it's the lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. Any minor reordering of these adjectives just sounds innately wrong.

What's interesting to me is that I'm not a native, I don't know the exact rules for these things, and yet, the first one somehow sounds wrong to me.

"Innately"? If that were true all languages would be the same.

Whatever you do, never flash your lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife in front of Crocodile Dundee. He'll give you a sharp rejoinder.

> just keep practicing and it should fall into place eventually.

You just have to train your skull-housed neural network with lots of examples.

>This is not something we can really put into words easily since we never intentionally learned it themselves; just acquired it.

I'm from America and this was taught in primary school. At school you learn a lot about English grammar. I'm sure it's similar in Japan with Japanese grammar.

The grammar I was taught in school was basically linguistic phlogiston theory. The 20th century might as well not have happened.

Well, you get told it in primary school.

In practice, we don’t get tested on identifying the proper grammar structure much, and so probably the vast majority of people forget how to classify it as adults. I know I have.

I think any English speaker could tell you the difference between “the” and “a”. Even if it’s not in their immediate knowledge bank as a fact, they could think of a tiny set of examples and work it out immediately.

I've been teaching the vs. a vs. no particle at all (e.g. 'I go to church') and it's a lot more complicated than you think. There are many edge cases. Native speakers know exactly which one is correct, but cannot always explain why.

I think a really good example of this is adjective precedence. For example, any native speaker immediately knows "wooden nice green big house" is wrong, and they also immediately know that "nice big green wooden house" is the correct ordering. Good luck explaining why.

Here's my own theory on this. The English adjective order does have some logic to it.

   opinion, size, age, shape, color, origin, material, purpose

The adjective closer to noun tends to describe something more like an 'essence' of the noun. Changing the purpose adjective, eg 'savings account' to 'checking account', is more fundamental than changing other kinds of adjectives. The opinion adjectives are the most superficial and most fickle among them.

I haven't tested this extensively enough. Your thoughts and counterexamples welcomed!

Wow, that’s a really good one! I’ve never thought about that.

A Dutch friend of mine, who speaks great English, tried to impress me by mentioning her musician friend studied at "the conservatory."

She was baffled when I replied that I hadn't heard of The Conservatory before.

It took us minutes to understand she meant a conservatory: they studied at a music school. I agree that it's more complex than native speakers realize.

"The conservatory" is fine in English if the speaker has good reason to assume the listener would know which conservatory was being talked about, no different to any other educational institution. OTOH legal scholars only ever aspire to "the bar" (it's a metonym) and it's only ever "the school of hard knocks". Of course "school" on its own (or if only qualified by an adjective like "high" or "night" or "law") is unusual because it often sounds unnatural to use an article before it when describing your attendance there.

> if the speaker has good reason to assume the listener would know which conservatory was being talked about

Right - and as I didn’t, I assumed she was using a proper noun. It’s fine English either way! Language is fun.

Eh ... I don't see how that's an different from the common English idiom of saying you went to "the store", which actually always irks me too, since people say it even when it lacks context that would make it definite. If anything, the problem is that she's doing that same thing there.

It's because the alternative is "I went to a store" which only invites unnecessary questions and isn't relevant to the conversation or will become clear so the indicates that, much like ある人 in Japanese means "someone in particular but I'm not going to mention the name because it's pointless to what I'm telling you and it'll just bog us down if I bring it up but it was someone definite", much like the store.

So then what's the difference between that and saying "the conservatory", as in the original comment, for the same reason?

Because if I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work, no further introduction needed. It doesn't if we don't, it becomes special and therefore needs explanation to introduce to the conversation and take on "the".

> Because if I say "I went to the store" … it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing,

No, it isn’t. I frequently see native speakers refer to “the store” when that doesn’t hold — hence why it feels like a special case or break from the usual rules.

You know native speakers that don’t go shopping?

That’s not the standard your original comment was using (or you’re intentionally moving the goal posts here and abandoned good-faith). Again, to quote with more context:

> I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work,

Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean, or b) I go there myself or will in the future. ie, the standard you use for deciding whether “the” would work in the conservatory example.

Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.

Finally, in case it matters: yes, I have had native speakers (my parents) say “the store” even when I (also a native speaker) didn’t go shopping at all, being too young to do it. (This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)

> (or you’re intentionally moving the goal posts here and abandoned good-faith)

That's the end of our conversation, we're discussing grammar and its colloquial use, not anything that requires "good faith argumentation". Inane.

Every conversation requires good-faith, charitable interpretation of what others are saying. I don't know how to interpret your remark, in its original context, as good faith. I said nothing that could reasonably be interpreted as requiring that native speakers "not go shopping". If you were actually interested in a meaningful exchange of ideas, you would have given a more substantive reply than that one.

I agree that if you're not going to take the discussion seriously, you probably shouldn't join it -- it just makes HN worse. Strawman argumentation doesn't suddenly become okay just because "hey man, we were just discussing grammar and its colloquial use", as if it's somehow okay to deliberately misinterpret someone and waste their time in that case.

I'll finish up on the objections here as I don't wish to continue the conversation they come from but do wish to clear them up.

> Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean,

The other person doesn't need to know, it's acting like a specific place has been introduced without it being introduced because to specifically introduce it is wasteful.

> or b) I go there myself or will in the future. ie, the standard you use for deciding whether “the” would work in the conservatory example.

Everyone except the terminal and imminent misfortune will go shopping to the kind of shop "the" will be put in front of. If you were a musician and said "when I went to the conservatory" I wouldn't blink either.

> Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.

It may well be, and it still fits with what I described, and expected shared experience that is assumed to need no further introduction for the rest of what is about to be told.

> Finally, in case it matters: yes, I have had native speakers (my parents) say “the store” even when I (also a native speaker) didn’t go shopping at all, being too young to do it.

You have been or will go shopping in your life, and you know or will come to know what they are referring to. Older people will often use language to youngsters that youngsters do not fully understand yet. It helps the youngsters come to understand it.

> (This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)

Because they point out the stupidity of a response and may invite further stupidity in response? Yes, that is a downside.

>>Native speakers say “the store” even when there’s no expectation that a) I know which store they mean,

>The other person doesn't need to know, it's acting like a specific place has been introduced without it being introduced because to specifically introduce it is wasteful.

That was in response to the reply where you said:

>I say "I went to the store" or "I went to the pub" it's somewhere we both go or experience or have an expectation of going or experiencing, no further introduction needed. If we both go to the same conservatory then "the conservatory" would work,

In other words, I only brought that up, because you were saying it falls under a case where both people know which one it refers to. If you weren't using that defense, you shouldn't have replied here.

>>Even under your new standard, you should say that “the conservatory” is fine as long as the listener “goes/has gone to conservatories”.

>It may well be, and it still fits with what I described, and expected shared experience that is assumed to need no further introduction for the rest of what is about to be told.

Great, but there you're definitely diverging from native speaker usage (as illustrated from the original comment [1]) -- native speakers do not otherwise use "the" for such cases, and would agree you shouldn't say "the conservatory" in that case just because the listener has also gone to a conservatory.

>You have been or will go shopping in your life, and you know or will come to know what they are referring to. Older people will often use language to youngsters that youngsters do not fully understand yet. It helps the youngsters come to understand it.

True, but irrelevant to the issue at at hand. Here you were claiming that it's fine because it's expected that the listener has already shopped at that store. If you want to switch to "well, they're going to model how other people would treat the store's definiteness" that is a different reason for making the noun definite here, which would still make this case different and break the usual pattern of when a noun is made definite.

>>(This is why oh-so-clever rhetorical questions should be used with caution.)

>Because they point out the stupidity of a response and may invite further stupidity in response? Yes, that is a downside.

Any stupidity it pointed out was on your own side -- you were absolutely incredulous at the idea that there might be a native speaker that never goes shopping. Haha! Point for you! What a dumb argument! Now everyone will see the light because you have pointed out a clear absurdity in the other person's position!

Except ... such people (non-shoppers) do exist. Which means, not only did you make a demonstrably false assumption, you were calling the other person stupid despite being correct, and adding one more layer of correction that has to be resolved before the discussion can continue.

Yeah -- that counts as a reason to be cautious of that technique.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=32619524

I feel like this has something to do with whether the identity of the thing is central to the story or incidental.

"On my last vacation I went to the beach to work on my tan." vs "on my last vacation I went to a beach to work on my tan". "The beach" feels like I went to a specific beach on purpose (or that there was only one), while "a beach" feels like I just picked one at random.

"On my way here I stopped at the store to get an apple" vs "On my way here I stopped at a store to get an apple". Similarly, "the store" implies intentionality/singularity, while "a store" implies I happened upon it.

Wow, that's interesting. In Dutch you would definitely use an article in that sentence:

ze heeft op/aan het conservatorium gestudeerd - she studied at (the) conservatory

hij heeft op/aan het hbo/de universiteit gestudeerd - he studied at (the) college/university

I’ll send this to her! Would love to know how her mental translation arrived there.

I agree it's pretty complicated. Although the general principle of 'definiteness' covers many/most cases, it is far from complete.

I found this page by the British Council to be quite comprehensive, but may still miss something (eg. 'go to school' vs 'go to the school')

https://learnenglish.britishcouncil.org/grammar/english-gram...

Do you know of some other resources that explain many grammatical points well?

Really? "The" is used when the listener knows which one you're talking about, or if there's only one. "A" is used when it's not known or not important which specific one you're referring to. What's an example that deviates from that framework?

[edit] "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians). Properly they mean "I go to [the/a] church", and the reason they leave out the particle is that they mean "THE CHURCH" but they want to sound humble, so they can't say that; but they also can't say "I go to a church," because that would be denying that the church they go to is the One True Church. That's why they don't use a particle in that particular phrase. The proper particle is "a", and "church" shouldn't be capitalized.

[edit2] this is not an attempt to start a religious flame war. I'm just commenting on the grammar.

[edit3] Just to demonstrate the proper noun thing I'm referring to, Jews "go to Temple" (capitalized, proper noun), or go to a temple, but they don't "go to temple".

It isn't that simple, unfortunately for learners of English. One example would be "Shall we go to the pub?" (British usage at least): No specific pub is intended, so a learner would expect 'a pub'. The only sure-fire way to grasp the subtleties of articles (or lack thereof in phrases like "go to school") in English is via immersion, as any rule system is going to fall foul of idiomatic exceptions. To bring this back to Japanese, I feel the same about 'wa' vs 'ga', it's best just to develop a feel for the distiction.

“I went to THE post office”, “I went to THE train station”. These are typically used without context, and are exceptions that confuse learners, particularly those who are learning about articles for the first time.

Regarding “I go to Church”, the verb to go here doesn’t actually mean movement, it’s a euphemism for “I worship”. Same with “temple”. If you say “I go to a/the church” you are actually stating movement towards a definite or indefinite place.

Again, these are challenging subtleties for language speakers where all nouns are conceptual. And most native speakers can’t explain these exceptions spontaneously

> “I went to THE post office”, “I went to THE train station”.

In my hometown: There's only 1 of each and wouldn't be confusing.

Where I live now: Which one?

These don't refute GP's definition, your examples are just missing the shared context that determines whether it's correct or not.

I think definiteness doesn't need to be a shared context.

"I went to the the train station to pick up a map on my way here". "Great, thanks!"

It was a specific train station that I chose intentionally or visit regularly, but it's not relevant to the conversation which one.

If I were to use "a train station" then it implies I didn't care which train station it was.

I go to school.

I think school is in the same class as “work.”

> "I go to Church" works because Church is a proper noun when used in that sentence (and it's only used as a proper noun by devout Christians).

You're definitely wrong here, because "I go to school" and "I go to work" are equally grammatical statements, and there is no way to construe those as involving proper nouns. You can also see this construction with words like bed or the various mealtimes.

The commonality I can derive from these various examples is something along the lines of "state of being," although I find that a poor descriptor. This kind of formation is limited to relatively few locations (you can't say "I go to mall" for example), but for everything I can think up, you can also use the word sans determiner in other circumstances ("College has gotten expensive as of late," for example).

If you try to translate from one language with a definite/indefinite article distinction to another (say English to German or Spanish), you'll notice that in many edge cases, one language uses a different article than the other (or one of them uses no article, while the other does).

The "I go to Church" example, is a case in point. In both German and Spanish, a definite article is required.

That shows that, while there is a systematic difference between "a" and "the", it breaks down in many edge cases.

As a native speaker of English, I didn't know about mass nouns until I was an adult and I was trying to explain to a non-native speaker that they were using "the" too much.

Then you have “I go home”, which drops not only “the” but “to”. Religious in nature? No.

This was some truly bizarre reasoning based off one example and it has zero actual foundation in language. One of the strangest comments I’ve ever seen on HN.

I wonder if “hospital” behaves the same way in some countries due to religious roots

In American English, people are in the hospital, but in UK English people are in hospital. So it only behaves that way in some Englishes.

True. Currently I'm in the stage of writing my thesis. Grammar is hard. I know and learnt about the vs a vs no particle but I'm still struggling when to use any of them.

(And then there's US Eng vs UK Eng...)

I dunno - there after plenty of cases we use "the" despite it not referring to a known single instance of something. "The thing is..." or "what's the matter" or even "I've got the flu". Good luck trying to explain to Japanese speakers especially why "a dinner" or "go to a hospital" don't sound natural but "I'll have a beer" or "a few friends" are fine. And why is it "once upon a time" but "most of the time"...

English speakers across dialects can't even agree on how to use "the", "a" and no particle.

I went to hospital.

I went to the hospital.

>I went to hospital

Where would that be standard?

England.

Similar to "I went to university" and so on.

This is really not true of many ESL speakers whose first language does not have articles.

The evidence points to the contrary, you acquire a language as an adult faster than a child can. This is because you have more complex mental faculties available, and can have complex topics explained as analogies to a language you know.

As others have pointed out, ESL learners ask questions about English articles all the time, and it helps them understand how the language works faster than if they had to brute-force the patterns.

There is no "natural" way to learn, there's just ways that work and ways that don't. The fastest way to learn a language is by having comprehensible input, and more input becomes comprehensible with directed, structured study.

You may ramp up adult-level conversational ability faster, but it takes much longer to reach any state of native-like fluency.

For example, I lived and studied in Japan, and while I probably jumped from zero to ~middle-school in terms of basic communication ability in about a year with daily classwork and total immersion, I was nowhere near the average toddler in terms of basic fluency after that time. Even now, I can make myself understood in most adult-level contexts where a toddler would be helpless, but nobody would ever confuse me for a native toddler.

It's not just accent, either -- little kids still routinely teach me vocabulary and grammar.

If you had three years of paid vacation where you had to use the language exclusively for everything, your skills would probably improve to toddler-level or beyond. Though admittedly you already know many things that they have to learn at the same time.

Having to communicate with your family (and probably close friends/significant other/etc.) exclusively in the language probably makes a big difference as well.

I think a lot of fluency is having someone carry you around 24/7 and talk to you like a baby for a few years. Much of the rest is just having patient people around you for another 3-4 years who will listen to you babble like an idiot and correct you when you're wrong.

I agree that if I could do nothing but spend 3 years in total immersion, I'd probably accumulate an adult-level vocabulary (again, the ramp-up is steep), but I still wouldn't sound like a native at that point, whereas a toddler would sound like a native...but have a toddler vocabulary.

Hmmm I think if you observe children my personal conclusion is that in practice (over theory) thought and language are intractable and as we mature, expression becomes more acute and so language acquisition is faster because we no longer need to learn how to think.

A 6 year old needs to learn $LANGUAGE and science simultaneously

Indeed, that's why adults are still favored in language learning, with the exception of phonology (which does make sense, retraining all those fine movements truly is harder than starting with the right movements to begin with) - https://sites.psu.edu/bilingualismmatters/children-vs-adults...

Adults win in acquisition speed because we already have a template for learning a language.

> but I managed to get to a point where I could use the right one far more often than not based on what just felt right

It is the same for kanji for me. I usually don't actively know something by seeing it and reaching for it, I just see it enough times that one day I "feel" the answer first. I never go "Oh yes, that's the kanji for cat, this is definitely correct". My brain goes "CAT!", and then I just have to assume this is the kanji for cat. Almost like there's a disconnect between active recall and knowledge stored from repetition.

I’m going to challenge you buy saying this. I’ve progressed much much quicker by studying the differences between. は and が, because I learn it and I forget it. I don’t think about it when using it anymore, however it’s in there somewhere when I get lost.

Same for English. I did learn it, I also forgot it. It’s not in there but it is. Same for being able to explain verb conjugations.

I agree though on some points for sure. Especially how well my German fiends (for example) understand the theory of English compared to me.

I distinctly remember learning about articles in fourth grade English in my US public school, and distinctly remember most of my class having a lot of trouble with them.

To your point though, I taught myself to read at age three and was reading adult fiction by fourth grade, I've always been told I have a large vocabulary, and still had a lot of trouble in that class around parts of speech and grammar, because I apparently skipped out on essential English language skills by teaching myself to read and not learning by immersion.

My theory of language was fundamentally different and I had to relearn English from the bottom up. This also caused me to perform terribly in foreign language classes as I was learning concepts I should have already learned about English... I wasn't just learning a foreign language, I was learning my own language at the same time.

Grammar used to be a core part of grammar school. It was for me, along with penmanship. I'm not (that) old, my school was weird, but one is expected to graduate high school knowing what indefinite and definite articles are, which is which in English, and the distinction they represent.

Explicitly rather than implicitly, I mean. I believe this is still expected of high school graduates in America, yes? So the use of the negative particle in the first sentence isn't indicated.

> just keep practicing

I'm taking a course from my university and am active on Duolingo. How do you suggest I practice? How did you?

Duolingo is bad. You should have a mix of resources that fit you best: Wanikani (absolutely essential), Bunpo, LingoDeer, Bunpro, and audio drills lessons, like Pimsleur.

Add a occasional speaking lesson with a teacher on iTalki.

I checked out Wanikani's free blog posts to learn kana, but they seemed pretty useless as an L2 English speaker. They might be useful for L1 English speakers, though.

The interesting thing about it is learning the kanji, which is essential for reading. It might be an extra step to learn a few new words in English, but it is not a complex task.

It is not complex per se, but it is unnecessarily confusing.

For instance, Japanese い (i) is similar in pronunciation to the letter 'i' in various Germanic languages (e.g. Dutch, German, Swedish). The romaji reflects this similarity.

Enter Wanikani's (Tofugu's) explanation:

> い is pronounced like the ee in "eel." To remember this kana, just think of a couple of eels hanging out.

Like I mentioned, this is probably useful for L1 English speakers, but it is not worth having to go from Dutch 'i' to English 'eel' in order to finally go to Japanese い (i).

When you use the app, not the blog, there are audios with the pronunciation, instead of these approximations. Wanikani is the app I refer to as useful, not Tofugu’s blog.

OK, I'll check out the app once I get to studying kanji (still working on kana at the moment). Thanks!

Talk with natives. I used HelloTalk back in the day and it was pretty good for Japanese.

If you can afford the cost and time investment, I greatly recommend studying at a Japanese language school in Japan. The experience is invaluable. I was able to get a one-year student visa, later extended for another year, as well as an amendment (there's a proper word for this but I can't recall) to the visa which allowed me to work part-time (above-the-table, that is) to help cover the costs. What's available to you will vary based on your citizenship (I'm American) but if you really want to learn this stuff seriously and have the opportunity available to you, I'd definitely recommend it.

Currently, though, I use DuoLinguo (yeah, not very comprehensive, but the gamificaiton works to induce me to use it every day, and a little study every day is better than none) and occasionally write up "Moments" (blog posts) on HelloTalk. As there's no IRL language schools that teach Japanese in the area I live currently, I hope to do online lessons some day, but those can be spendy and I'm not currently at a point in life with much disposable income.

I'm just starting out with Japanese, but a weird thing I have found is that private lessons with professional teachers (with 5-star reviews) on Italki seem to be about as expensive on an hourly basis as group-based lessons (at least in my country).

I was going to sign up for a class, but noticing this has made me reconsider, and now I am planning to just take private lessons for the same amount of money (or cheaper, as a class needs to move at the pace of its slowest student).

But if you want to be thrifty, I have heard of people who mostly self-study, and only consult with a private teacher to practice their speaking. I don't think Duolingo is a truly effective way to learn, but the last time I tried it was a decade ago.

The community on /r/LearnJapanese is massive and contains a lot of information.

Read and listen to a lot of native language. You will absorb the patterns and eventually produce them automatically. Much much easier than memorising lots of grammar.

You could say this about many aspects of many foreign languages. So what?

Reading explanations helps. Immersion helps too. They are both useful tools, and for many people, immersion or "the natural way" are not available unless they move to a different country, so reading explanations is a perfectly reasonable approach.

I would like a Japanese primary school teacher to confirm that this isn't actually taught in schools there.