Let's say that your goal is to learn every grammatical construction needed to pass JLPT N5.

Here’s a list to stress you out:

Don’t hate me. Hate the list!

Japanese schools and books let lists like these throw their syllabi into disarray. They force overly complicated grammar constructions onto low level students before they’re ready. They completely ignore simpler, more useful grammar constructions, because they don’t show up in standardized tests… or in their competitor’s textbooks. It’s madness! And as a result, Japanese grammar lessons become a marathon of memorization.

I’d like to take a different approach in this text, though. In this guide, we’ll be building grammar constructions on top of one another.

For example, let's say we're studying conjugations for Japanese verbs. We learn that the te-form of the verb 飲む (のむ), "to drink," is 飲んで (のんで).

Old school learning materials will probably teach you the following construction when looking at te-form: ～てください.

ください basically means "please." Attach it to 飲んで (のんで) and we get:

飲んでください。
のんで　ください。
Please drink (it).

The hard part of this is learning that verbs that end in む (mu) change to んで (nde) in the te-form. So the un-conjugated verb 飲む (のむ [nomu] // to drink) becomes 飲んで (のんで [nonde]).

Most textbooks will do a pretty good job of teaching this, I think. The problem is that they don't teach you the potential for building on this conjugation.

With this specific example, by adding a few simple syllables to the end of our te-form verb, we can say ALL KINDS of things:

Most Japanese courses will take years to slowly drip-feed you all of those sentences and meanings. That seems crazy to me, because most students pick up the foundation to form and use all of those sentences within only a couple of months of studying.

My goal in this guide, then, is to teach whatever is easiest to learn based on our current knowledge/foundation of Japanese grammar at a given time.

It’s kind of like we’re building a Mind Map of Japanese Grammar. Instead of learning long lists of grammatical formations, we’ll build on simple grammatical formations until we have one coherent, interconnected web of sentence formations. Something like this:

OK. Maybe that mind map image and all of these lists are extremely intimidating. But this grammar is not too intimidating when you take this stuff one step at a time. We're easing into the pool. Not diving into it.

If none of that makes sense, just try reading on, and you should start to understand what I mean.