On doing the exercises

I'm up to Lesson 9 of Teach Yourself Japanese now, and have just started the exercises—15 Japanese-to-English translation sentences and then 15 English-to-Japanese.  I'm happier with the Japanese-to-English ones; when I make a mess of an English-to-Japanese translation I'm conscious that I might be reinforcing incorrect notions of Japanese syntax and grammar in my mind by writing duff sentences.  I'm definitely with those scholars of language learning who approve of a silent period at the start, where the learner watches and listens and reads rather than actually producing any of the foreign language.

Stuff is starting to come together, a bit.  When I look at romanized Japanese text I can now break a sentence down into rough consituent blocks: 'wa' marks the end of the topic, 'ga' the end of the subject (not the same thing!), 'o' the end of the direct object.  Verb always always always at the end, except that there might be an odd particle after it to finish off the sentence.  The verb at the end will probably be at a specific politeness level.  Watch out for the adjectives: they don't decline as nouns do in IE languages, they conjugate like verbs—arguably adjectives actually are verbs in Japanese, at least the i-adjectives as opposed to the na-adjectives.  So, I've got some notion of what Japanese grammar is like, though there's still some way to go yet.

How much longer with Teach Yourself Japanese?  I'm backtracking and revising assiduously, reading and re-reading the Japanese sentences from the exercises to try to drill those bits of the grammar that aren't sticking.  (The absence of a relative pronoun in particular keeps tripping me up).  At an average of one lesson per day I can finish it this month.  I'd like to finish faster as I'm hungry to try the Jorden and Chaplin Reading Japanese.  We shall see.