[fenomas]

Thanks for this explanation. I'd not heard of the debate before, but now that you describe it I find I've been a fan of input learning for a long time.

With that said I still find GP's complaint pretty weird, since TFA strikes me as being in the "beginning stuff that even advocates of input learning would teach out of a book" category.

I mean, if I was teaching somebody Japanese then I'd probably cover how particles work on the first day. Surely only a madman would expect someone to absorb that organically.

[visarga]

Particles are the hardest parts of the language, often untranslatable by themselves. I have a 100 page booklet about these words which are so few they can sit on one or two rows.

[nullsense]

Can confirm. I studied grammar through Anki deck of about 2000 sentences and a tonne of native content. It took my about a year to truly internalize に to the point it became second nature and I could understand it intuitively.

Passed JLPT1 after a couple of years, and had the time of my life learning Japanese. Particles are the glue that holds it all together but they are deceptively simple on the surface with an ocean of complexity lying underneath.