Most of the posts I see on HN mostly revolve around learning languages. In my opinion that's only part of the problem. It's more difficult to get the structure of sentences and tenses correct. I personally know words in 2 - 3 languages which share a root with my mother tongue, but it doesn't mean that I can speak those languages because I often don't get the way a single word transforms based on the tense, part of speech etc. For eg. merely knowing the word "smile" would only take you so far. Knowing the difference between "He is smiling", "He smiles", "He keeps smiling at me" is the tricky part.
Perhaps we are obsessed with learning words because it's the easier problem to solve. Learning sentence structure and grammar takes time and effort.
Perhaps we are obsessed with learning words because it's the easier problem to solve.
I think that depends on the person and/or language.
My Polish grammar knowledge is now pretty impressive, but I'm having a terrible time trying to remember words, so spend the majority of my time attempting to force memorisation with flash cards.
In a way it's kinda fun - I can go through pages of grammar exercises, conjugating and declining correctly, but with no idea of what Marta did in the past with 101 of somebody's somethings.
I'm delving into learning Polish myself but have been taking mostly a whole language, immersion approach. For example, when I was in Krakow I bought myself a book on CD and the book itself, so I can 'read' along as I listen. I use translation tools to put selected passages into English. I also spend time listening to Polish radio. I know at some point I will have to develop some discipline about tackling grammar in a systematic fashion the way you are doing, but for the moment I guess I'm content to as much as possible to get a feel for the language. Japanese is my second language and its challenges are almost completely different... anyway, good luck!
Quite often you can figure out the essence of the sentences even if you don't know all the words. Of course, you do need to have a basic vocabulary. While speaking/writing it is possible for you to convey what you want to without using complicated words. If you can simplify your thought and strip out all that's non-essential, you will be able to convey the essence of your thought.
However, if you don't have a grasp of the basic grammar you're prone to confuse the person you're talking to. If you're reading, then you lose the context.
Exceptions abound, but I have found this to be true quite often while studying French.
This is true, but learning vocabulary is a long, hard slog that you have to get through to get anywhere with learning most of the other skills. It's something of a choke point in language acquisition, and your knowledge of vocabulary from related language is going to let you down again and again because you don't grasp all the senses of words you think you know or are fooled by false friends.
That said, phonology is neglected. Poor pronunciation makes verbal communication more error prone, something you don't need as a beginner, and if you rely entirely on body language for catching such non-lexical content as emphasis and modality, you will suffer when you talk on the phone. A bit of extra work here when you start learning a language will pay off.
In my experience, that's not the case. In the case of English, the main difficulty was (is) learning the pronunciation of every word, because the English spelling system isn't very helpful (to put it kindly). As you advance, the problem is then to get a good grasp on usage/pragmatics; that is, there are tons of syntactically correct ways of saying the same thing, but only a few of them sound "natural". Grammar was never a big problem for me.
In the case of Japanese too, the problem is not the grammar. Japanese morphology is simple (e.g. nouns are the same in singular and plural, verb conjugation doesn't vary with person) and very regular. The big problems are 1) acquiring the vocabulary in the first place, which is hard because the writing system is even less helpful than English's 2) and remembering all those words, which is hard because for the most part they don't resemble either my native language or English.
Oh yes, English is terrible at denoting the pronunciation with its script. Not so for French (or from what I hear, German). Most of the time you are able to predict the pronunciation based on a set of characters. Words in Indian languages which use the Devanagari script (or scripts derived from it) can be directly mapped to their pronunciations. There are no exceptions.
Grammar learning and engagement might just be the holy grail of learning a language. I haven't come up with a good way of "hacking" grammar. So far it has just been a brute force study of grammar in front of a desk with a lamp.
Most of the posts I see on HN mostly revolve around learning languages. In my opinion that's only part of the problem. It's more difficult to get the structure of sentences and tenses correct. I personally know words in 2 - 3 languages which share a root with my mother tongue, but it doesn't mean that I can speak those languages because I often don't get the way a single word transforms based on the tense, part of speech etc. For eg. merely knowing the word "smile" would only take you so far. Knowing the difference between "He is smiling", "He smiles", "He keeps smiling at me" is the tricky part.
Perhaps we are obsessed with learning words because it's the easier problem to solve. Learning sentence structure and grammar takes time and effort.