german2k01 wrote:...If a teacher is teaching grammar rules most of the time then throwing in exceptions of rules in between, ...
That's a general problem, and precisely therefore also one where you need to have the guts to cut through to the essentials - and maybe your grammar books don't favour that, and your teacher (if you have one) may feel that avoiding the difficult parts is cheating. But the simple fact is that there are some very common irregularities, and then there are some regularities, and the rest - i.e. the rare irregularities - are not really important before you have more or less mastered the two first caregories. Except of course if you find something arcane expression or construction immensely funny or interesting, but then it should also be easy to remember it. The important thing in the beginning is to build a skeleton to hang the rest of your learning on, and only very common or very regular things can be used as building materials there.
Unfortunately standard text books are not nearly repetitive and boring enough (!) - they try to vary your fare in order not to scare you away, but if you only see everything once you won't learn it. Repetition is necessary to remember trivial facts - only the shocking ones stick after one exposure. So repetitive exercises with minor alterations are boring, yes, but if you want to learn grammar through exercises that's the way to go, and there you are better of inventing your own minor changes than being forced to accepted those from a book or a teacher.
And does that contradict what I have stated earlier, namely that you shouldn't get your grammar presented dropwise as most text books do now? No, because there we are talking about showing a whole map instead of just what's around the next corner.No, because you are not supposed to learn the whole map by heart. But knowing the map will make it much easier to place all the subsequent observations correctly the first time. And then you will soon discover which roads are the busy ones.