Yes, you can learn grammar effectively without relying on flashcards and tables. Use your pattern recognition strength and love for novelty to absorb grammar through context, then reinforce with targeted, short bursts of active practice.
Your approach of translating video games and songs is already powerful for building vocabulary and intuition. The fear of gaps, especially with irregular verbs, is valid but can be addressed without forcing yourself through boring tables. The key is to make grammar discovery as engaging as the content you already enjoy.
First, leverage your pattern recognition. When you encounter a verb in a game or song, note its form and try to guess the rule. For example, if you see "he runs" and later "he ran," you can infer the irregular past. Keep a small, running list of these observations in a notebook or app. This turns grammar into a puzzle, not a chore.
Second, use spaced repetition systems (SRS) like Anki, but with a twist. Instead of pre-made decks of conjugation tables, create your own cards from the sentences you encounter. For each irregular verb, make a card with the full sentence on the front (e.g., "Yesterday, he _____ to school" with the blank) and the correct form on the back. This ties the grammar to a meaningful context, which your brain will remember better. Limit sessions to 5-10 minutes to match your attention span.
Third, gamify the process. Set a timer for 5 minutes and challenge yourself to find all irregular verbs in a song lyric or a short paragraph from a game. Reward yourself with more gameplay or listening after each session. Apps like Clozemaster or LingQ let you learn grammar through sentences in context, which may feel more like a game than a textbook.
Tradeoffs: This method takes longer to build explicit grammar knowledge than drilling tables, but it builds deeper, more intuitive understanding. You may still need occasional reference to a grammar guide to confirm rules, but you can treat that as a quick lookup rather than a study session. For high-frequency irregular verbs, this approach works very well because you encounter them often. For very rare ones, you might need to look them up when they appear.
Next steps: Pick one game or song you love. For the next week, focus on noticing verb endings. Write down 3-5 new verb forms each day. After a week, review your list and group them by pattern (e.g., common irregular past tense changes). This builds your own grammar system based on your interests.