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There is no mention of grammar here. I’m not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical

There is no mention of grammar here. I’m not sure how it is in the US, but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns. When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language. For example, my mother (native French-speaker) gives private French lessons. She finds that instead of saying “ok today we’re going to learn about the subjunctive mood, the root is the third person plural of the indicative mood of the verb with the following endings”, she spends most of her time having to explain what those terms mean. I realise that there may be other ways that are less formal to learn languages, but at the end of the day, grammars follow rules, and if you don’t even understand the rule book in your own language you’re already at a huge disadvantage in my opinion. All these online articles claiming “don’t worry about grammar, that will come later” are missing out on what I think is the most important tool in language learning.

diarmuidc 6y ago
Playing devils advocate, if you were able to learn your native language with out an understanding of the grammar, why can't you learn a foreign language?
- moooo99 6y ago
  I was forced to choose a third foreign language back in school. I ended up with Latin (bad idea btw, completely useless), so I had my usual German lessons (native language), English lessons (since 5th grade) and Latin (6th grade). When you constantly switch between those languages in terms of grammar, you realize how different those languages are. I didn't realize that in the beginning and I still have a habit of translating sayings from German into English that just don't make any actual sense. If you really want to learn a language, you need to learn the grammar, even if it isn't any fun.
  - sweetdreamerit 6y ago
    I'd love to learn Latin <3
- tkgally 6y ago
  The usual explanation is that younger people, especially small children, can pick up languages without explicit knowledge of the grammar better than older people can. There's some controversy about whether there is a narrow age range after which it becomes difficult or impossible to acquire native-level proficiency through immersion or whether the decline in that ability is gradual [0]. But there's a pretty strong consensus that there is a decline for almost everyone. While adults can learn second languages, very few can just pick up the grammar as they did with their native languages as children. For most adults, if we want to learn how to speak and write a second language with reasonable accuracy, we have to study the grammar explicitly. Practicing in immersive situations also helps a lot, of course. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis
- sjy 6y ago
  You can! But it’s not necessarily the most efficient way if you already have a native language to build on. It takes children years of full immersion to reach that point.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    > takes children years of full immersion Perhaps it depends on the language you start with and the one you learn but small children seem to pick things up very rapidly by immersion. It took each of my children roughly six months to learn Norwegian from the age of three when they went to kindergarten. We kept them at home until then to make sure that they would be fluent in English, then sent them to kindergarten where they learned Norwegian without any formal lessons at all, and within a year they were indistinguishable from the natives.
chki 6y ago
I would strongly disagree. My personal language learning experience so far has been immersion as the only way to go. Constantly hearing and reading a new language will teach you that language. Learning the grammar is basically useless because when talking or writing the end goal is not to think about it anyway. Maybe a bit of a controversial statement but I think learning grammar in a formal language learning setting is a relict of the past and mainly exists to assert the reasoning behind formal learning itself.
- mumblerino 6y ago
  I’m in the immersion camp, but give me a table of Spanish conjugations and it’s a million times better than having to figure it out one word at a time. Additionally, for really foreign languages (e.g. English vs Chinese) knowing in what order to place words and whether words are needed at all is of great help. Both parts are needed.
- diffeomorphism 6y ago
  I would strongly disagree with that. Your supposed dichotomy between immersion and grammar is just not the case. You both learn by immersion and also have a look at the grammar. Just hearing and reading will leave gaps in your understanding and have you build weird habits. You trying to paint it as an "either or" is a relic of the past.
  - AmericanChopper 6y ago
    But you almost certainly have gaps and misunderstandings in your native language too. I’ve learnt more than one language, almost entirely through immersion, and my grammar is pretty good. But I’d say if you want to do it well, you have to ask people questions. I was primarily talking to colleagues and friends while working overseas, and I’d say things wrong all the time, and get corrected, and ask questions constantly when I didn’t understand something. The real issue people have with immersion is that you have to be prepared to make a fool of yourself all day, every day, for quite a long time before you really start to get the hang of it. The really significant upside that I think people tend to gloss over is that my pronunciation is pretty much perfect, because I’d learn to say things by just repeating what I’d heard. On the phone people can’t tell I’m not a native speaker.
daggerdrone 6y ago
> but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English This is interesting because in India schools do teach grammar and grammatical terms. I thought they copied it from the UK school system. May be UK used to teach grammar before 1947 (when India got independence) and then they stopped teaching it.
- richrichardsson 6y ago
  The problem is it's a nonsense. We 100% do get taught grammatical terms in the UK, but GP has just forgotten them/wasn't paying attention in school.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago
    Or they are old enough to have had exactly the experience they describe. I am 64 and was never taught any formal grammar in primary school except in French lessons and then in Latin from 1st form to 4th form. We were taught English usage by example and expected to write essays in good English but we never analysed sentences to mark verbs and nouns, etc.
fiblye 6y ago
I'd be very surprised if some grammar wasn't taught at all. Formal writing in the UK would be in an absolute state of disarray if this were true. The US teaches most terms. It's pretty important to know what prepositions are, and how adjectives and adverbs differ. Lots of more complex topics do come up, but kids don't listen. It's not immediately applicable to their life so it goes in one ear and out the other. Plenty of people say also schools need to teach how to balance a checkbook and teach some basic finance. They do--but kids aren't paying attention, because no 5th grader should be out there balancing checkbooks for quite a few years, and no kid really cares what a "preposition" is either until they're learning another language or trying to improve their writing and suddenly need to dig back into those memory banks. But people who say to not study grammar usually don't make progress. What's worse is some people say "don't worry. Our language has no grammar." Every language has some basic rules to learn. The problem is some textbooks heavily front load some formal grammar because a lot of adult learning materials are focused on business usage, and they come with the implication that somehow a person is going to go from zero to handling diplomatic meetings in a month. Japanese textbooks are notoriously bad for emphasizing very formal speech (sometimes even excessively formal speech) before delving into more casual stuff that people will use 90% of the time. Then you meet a person and the grammar you've studied doesn't align with most of what's immediately practical, and it's easy to conclude it "doesn't matter".
- michaelt 6y ago
  > I'd be very surprised if some grammar wasn't taught at all. Formal writing in the UK would be in an absolute state of disarray if this were true. Oh, everyone in school will have been taught concepts like past tense and pluralisation. But often you can apply concepts just fine without having memorised the precise technical term for that concept. You can write just fine without understanding sentence diagrams, as surely as you can lift a box without understanding free body force diagrams.
vidarh 6y ago
I'm in the UK. My son is 11 and has definitively been taught grammatical terms. I know, because I've been forced to "relearn" to be able to help with homework. It may well differ between schools, though. Though having learned French from two very different teachers, I'll say I'm not at all convinced that focusing on the grammar is helpful until people have reached a relatively advanced level. My first teacher was very formal and went through the grammar in detail from the start. My second, in an intensive course at university, focused on immersion instead - she started speaking French to us almost exclusively from the very first lesson (which included people who had never had French before), and the focus was on speaking, with an insistence that everyone in class participated every lesson. The second course brought those who had never spoken French previously to a conversational level much faster.
- opsunit 6y ago
  I had both experiences and found neither valuable. I am in awe of anybody who can learn a foreign language full-stop. My French teacher fully explained the grammar most of which passed me by since, certainly in my case, one doesn't really rationalise their own language in terms of technicalities. My German teacher just pitched up on day one and spoke nothing but German. Two years later I was absolutely none the wiser. I could quite honestly have been listening to white noise. That anybody "picks up" a language is something I am amazed by.
  - vidarh 6y ago
    Immersion requires you to speak, not just listen, and that was key with my second French teacher. Everyone spoke words, and soon sentences in French from day one, even if at first it was badly broken and little more than parroting things back. She kept track - nobody got away without participating. Every lesson. Towards the end of a year of that we went to Paris for a week and spent 5-6 hours every day going out and stopping strangers to have conversations with them about various subjects. The structure meant both that we were forced to try and that the teacher knew at any point how we were doing.
    - kwhitefoot 6y ago
opsunit 6y ago
Same experience, same outcome. "They" attempted to teach me both French and German and in both cases I quite literally had no idea what was going on. A* pupil in English and English Literature. I am sure it is different today but certainly in the '80s and into the '90s you could arrive in senior school with perfect English and no idea why. The shocker for me was that I'd spent my whole short life up until that point just correctly intuiting all of the weird grammar modifications and then suddenly I couldn't. Any attempt to explain went right over my head as the framework to explain them was just missing.
fcatalan 6y ago
I strongly disagree. Grammar is a great tool for an instructor to organize their teaching, but a terrible way for students to think about language. Yeah, to read or speak you need to internalize those rules, but you don't really need to put a particular technical name on them, or think directly about them. I think the step from "slowly doing grammar while I try to understand" to "I'm so good at grammar that I just understand" doesn't work that way. I was taught English from 6 to 18 in a very traditional, strict, grammar-driven way and learned nothing. All spaniards go through the same type of lessons and very few can understand anything at all after years. At 18 I stopped any classes or studying but I got satellite TV, English computing magazines and shortly afterwards the Internet and then just learned all the English I needed to get by without much conscious effort. A few years ago I got interested in Danish and in about 4 months I could read regular novels at a decent pace just from Duolingo, newspapers and subtitled TV series. I probably could do the same with any language just with enough motivation.
roel_v 6y ago
I really really strongly disagree. I'll admit it's a personal thing - I know of some people who can only learn a language by memorizing all of its rules (typically people who have gone through their education based on rote memorisation as well), but I have yet to see a 5 year old who knows anything of the 'formal' rules of the grammar of their language, yet getting to the level of a 5 year old native is already a huge accomplishment for most people who only learn a second language when they are an adult. I think most people would be best served learning a language by not learning about any grammar 'rules' at all (maybe some simplified rules of thumb here and there for illustration and anchoring of skills - I'm not saying everyone should have to build their own grammar mental models from scratch through osmosis, but they should be introduced after a basic level of competence with the construct, not up front). As is remarked above - I'm sure this is a convenient way of teaching, because you can just tick off boxes of discrete 'components' ('does my student know the rules to conjugate in this and this past tense? check!), but there is a weak correlation to actually being able to use the language. I learned most of my language skills in both English and French by listening to rap music, transcribing it, translating into Dutch (my native language), repeating it and mimicking pronunciation etc. If anything, having to learn the grammar rules made the actual language acquisition harder. My best French teacher was one who, after asking in desperation 'how can I get you boys to be interested in learning French?' and me (mockingly) suggesting we analyse some MC Solaar CD's, then actually went out and got some of those, and contacted her Parisien neice to give us some of the backstory on the slang used in them, too. Then again, I'm bitter about many of the traditional teaching methods and I have no proof my anecdote scales to the general population, so my opinion is worth about as much as... well, something that's pretty worthless I guess...
russholmes 6y ago
Same here. I went to a fairly good state school and never received any English grammar but got some French grammar. The French language teaching was terrible - hours and hours of memorising irregular verbs. I passed all the exams but still can't speak the language. I have taught myself Swedish listening to Sveriges Radio, reading and translating news articles and following a series of short Swedish lessons on youtube. I pick up grammar as I go along rather than learn it formally. I don't use flash cards, duolingo or rote memorisation. The key thing is to read, write, listen and pronounce - form sentences and use the language rather than work on memorising vocabulary (that comes naturally).
- Symbiote 6y ago
  Swedish (+Danish, Norwegian) grammar is as close as it could be to English grammar. Many of the differences are because English changed -- order the words like Shakespeare and you are most of the way there. What works for Swedish might not work for many other languages.
OJFord 6y ago
> but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns. This just isn't true. It might have been true for you, but it isn't true 'in the UK', and most likely you've just forgotten because it wasn't and hasn't been important to you; it's on the national curriculum. > When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language. Absolutely agree with that, and it's worth learning more and revising what you were taught when at school in the UK if you choose to learn another language. It's also (one reason) why 'Latin is useless' is bollocks. Latin has a more 'complete' grammar than (modern) English, by which I mean that it has more cases, conjugations, etc. that are productive, and which take differing forms. It can be difficult to get your head around two different constructions in a language being learnt if both take the same form in English; they probably don't in Latin. I've never learnt Latin formally, but I've tried to pick a tiny bit up, and I tend to look to Latin grammar and resources rather than English in my pursuit of Hindi.
- mathieuh 6y ago
  OK I was being over-the-top with that part, yes, I remember being taught about verbs, adjectives, nouns and adverbs. But the rest? I don't remember them being taught them at all. I went to school in Northern Ireland starting in 1999, I thought the "national curriculum" covered all of the UK but it turns out NI has its own so that may have something to do with it. I'm an avid amateur linguist so perhaps I'm letting my own perceptions of what is important colour what I think should be important to other people.
Symbiote 6y ago
> No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns. In England, most of these basic concepts are introduced in primary school. These terms are introduced in Year 2 (age 6-7): noun, noun phrase, statement, question, exclamation, command, compound, suffix, adjective, adverb, verb, tense (past, present), apostrophe, comma[1, p66]. How much grammar is taught has changed -- it's more now than it was in the 1990s or 2000s -- but certainly "simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns" have always been taught. Children who paid no attention in English lessons should get a second opportunity to learn in modern language lessons (e.g. French). A Danish language school I attended filtered people into "professional" and "non-professional" groups. The "professional" group saved time by assuming students understood "the subjunctive mood…" etc. [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335186/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_English_220714.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...
pessimizer 6y ago
I have friends that make one or more grammatical mistakes in virtually every sentence they utter in English, and have very few problems expressing any thought in a way that is quickly understood (often at fairly high-level jobs.) Plenty of those people have English as their first language. As you've communicated, a major difference between native speakers and non-native speakers is that native speakers usually don't know or care about the grammar of the language they speak. They learn it through a series of dopamine hits they get from successfully understanding or being understood. If people who regularly and naturally use the subjunctive don't know the word "subjunctive" and can barely understand or repeat an explanation given of it, how important could it be to fluency?

diarmuidc 6y ago

Playing devils advocate, if you were able to learn your native language with out an understanding of the grammar, why can't you learn a foreign language?

moooo99 6y ago
I was forced to choose a third foreign language back in school. I ended up with Latin (bad idea btw, completely useless), so I had my usual German lessons (native language), English lessons (since 5th grade) and Latin (6th grade). When you constantly switch between those languages in terms of grammar, you realize how different those languages are. I didn't realize that in the beginning and I still have a habit of translating sayings from German into English that just don't make any actual sense. If you really want to learn a language, you need to learn the grammar, even if it isn't any fun.
- sweetdreamerit 6y ago
  I'd love to learn Latin <3
tkgally 6y ago
The usual explanation is that younger people, especially small children, can pick up languages without explicit knowledge of the grammar better than older people can. There's some controversy about whether there is a narrow age range after which it becomes difficult or impossible to acquire native-level proficiency through immersion or whether the decline in that ability is gradual [0]. But there's a pretty strong consensus that there is a decline for almost everyone. While adults can learn second languages, very few can just pick up the grammar as they did with their native languages as children. For most adults, if we want to learn how to speak and write a second language with reasonable accuracy, we have to study the grammar explicitly. Practicing in immersive situations also helps a lot, of course. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_period_hypothesis
sjy 6y ago
You can! But it’s not necessarily the most efficient way if you already have a native language to build on. It takes children years of full immersion to reach that point.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  > takes children years of full immersion Perhaps it depends on the language you start with and the one you learn but small children seem to pick things up very rapidly by immersion. It took each of my children roughly six months to learn Norwegian from the age of three when they went to kindergarten. We kept them at home until then to make sure that they would be fluent in English, then sent them to kindergarten where they learned Norwegian without any formal lessons at all, and within a year they were indistinguishable from the natives.

chki 6y ago

I would strongly disagree. My personal language learning experience so far has been immersion as the only way to go. Constantly hearing and reading a new language will teach you that language. Learning the grammar is basically useless because when talking or writing the end goal is not to think about it anyway. Maybe a bit of a controversial statement but I think learning grammar in a formal language learning setting is a relict of the past and mainly exists to assert the reasoning behind formal learning itself.

mumblerino 6y ago
I’m in the immersion camp, but give me a table of Spanish conjugations and it’s a million times better than having to figure it out one word at a time. Additionally, for really foreign languages (e.g. English vs Chinese) knowing in what order to place words and whether words are needed at all is of great help. Both parts are needed.
diffeomorphism 6y ago
I would strongly disagree with that. Your supposed dichotomy between immersion and grammar is just not the case. You both learn by immersion and also have a look at the grammar. Just hearing and reading will leave gaps in your understanding and have you build weird habits. You trying to paint it as an "either or" is a relic of the past.
- AmericanChopper 6y ago
  But you almost certainly have gaps and misunderstandings in your native language too. I’ve learnt more than one language, almost entirely through immersion, and my grammar is pretty good. But I’d say if you want to do it well, you have to ask people questions. I was primarily talking to colleagues and friends while working overseas, and I’d say things wrong all the time, and get corrected, and ask questions constantly when I didn’t understand something. The real issue people have with immersion is that you have to be prepared to make a fool of yourself all day, every day, for quite a long time before you really start to get the hang of it. The really significant upside that I think people tend to gloss over is that my pronunciation is pretty much perfect, because I’d learn to say things by just repeating what I’d heard. On the phone people can’t tell I’m not a native speaker.

daggerdrone 6y ago

> but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English This is interesting because in India schools do teach grammar and grammatical terms. I thought they copied it from the UK school system. May be UK used to teach grammar before 1947 (when India got independence) and then they stopped teaching it.

richrichardsson 6y ago
The problem is it's a nonsense. We 100% do get taught grammatical terms in the UK, but GP has just forgotten them/wasn't paying attention in school.
- kwhitefoot 6y ago
  Or they are old enough to have had exactly the experience they describe. I am 64 and was never taught any formal grammar in primary school except in French lessons and then in Latin from 1st form to 4th form. We were taught English usage by example and expected to write essays in good English but we never analysed sentences to mark verbs and nouns, etc.

fiblye 6y ago

I'd be very surprised if some grammar wasn't taught at all. Formal writing in the UK would be in an absolute state of disarray if this were true. The US teaches most terms. It's pretty important to know what prepositions are, and how adjectives and adverbs differ. Lots of more complex topics do come up, but kids don't listen. It's not immediately applicable to their life so it goes in one ear and out the other. Plenty of people say also schools need to teach how to balance a checkbook and teach some basic finance. They do--but kids aren't paying attention, because no 5th grader should be out there balancing checkbooks for quite a few years, and no kid really cares what a "preposition" is either until they're learning another language or trying to improve their writing and suddenly need to dig back into those memory banks. But people who say to not study grammar usually don't make progress. What's worse is some people say "don't worry. Our language has no grammar." Every language has some basic rules to learn. The problem is some textbooks heavily front load some formal grammar because a lot of adult learning materials are focused on business usage, and they come with the implication that somehow a person is going to go from zero to handling diplomatic meetings in a month. Japanese textbooks are notoriously bad for emphasizing very formal speech (sometimes even excessively formal speech) before delving into more casual stuff that people will use 90% of the time. Then you meet a person and the grammar you've studied doesn't align with most of what's immediately practical, and it's easy to conclude it "doesn't matter".

michaelt 6y ago
> I'd be very surprised if some grammar wasn't taught at all. Formal writing in the UK would be in an absolute state of disarray if this were true. Oh, everyone in school will have been taught concepts like past tense and pluralisation. But often you can apply concepts just fine without having memorised the precise technical term for that concept. You can write just fine without understanding sentence diagrams, as surely as you can lift a box without understanding free body force diagrams.

vidarh 6y ago

I'm in the UK. My son is 11 and has definitively been taught grammatical terms. I know, because I've been forced to "relearn" to be able to help with homework. It may well differ between schools, though. Though having learned French from two very different teachers, I'll say I'm not at all convinced that focusing on the grammar is helpful until people have reached a relatively advanced level. My first teacher was very formal and went through the grammar in detail from the start. My second, in an intensive course at university, focused on immersion instead - she started speaking French to us almost exclusively from the very first lesson (which included people who had never had French before), and the focus was on speaking, with an insistence that everyone in class participated every lesson. The second course brought those who had never spoken French previously to a conversational level much faster.

opsunit 6y ago
I had both experiences and found neither valuable. I am in awe of anybody who can learn a foreign language full-stop. My French teacher fully explained the grammar most of which passed me by since, certainly in my case, one doesn't really rationalise their own language in terms of technicalities. My German teacher just pitched up on day one and spoke nothing but German. Two years later I was absolutely none the wiser. I could quite honestly have been listening to white noise. That anybody "picks up" a language is something I am amazed by.
- vidarh 6y ago
  Immersion requires you to speak, not just listen, and that was key with my second French teacher. Everyone spoke words, and soon sentences in French from day one, even if at first it was badly broken and little more than parroting things back. She kept track - nobody got away without participating. Every lesson. Towards the end of a year of that we went to Paris for a week and spent 5-6 hours every day going out and stopping strangers to have conversations with them about various subjects. The structure meant both that we were forced to try and that the teacher knew at any point how we were doing.
  - kwhitefoot 6y ago

opsunit 6y ago

Same experience, same outcome. "They" attempted to teach me both French and German and in both cases I quite literally had no idea what was going on. A* pupil in English and English Literature. I am sure it is different today but certainly in the '80s and into the '90s you could arrive in senior school with perfect English and no idea why. The shocker for me was that I'd spent my whole short life up until that point just correctly intuiting all of the weird grammar modifications and then suddenly I couldn't. Any attempt to explain went right over my head as the framework to explain them was just missing.

fcatalan 6y ago

I strongly disagree. Grammar is a great tool for an instructor to organize their teaching, but a terrible way for students to think about language. Yeah, to read or speak you need to internalize those rules, but you don't really need to put a particular technical name on them, or think directly about them. I think the step from "slowly doing grammar while I try to understand" to "I'm so good at grammar that I just understand" doesn't work that way. I was taught English from 6 to 18 in a very traditional, strict, grammar-driven way and learned nothing. All spaniards go through the same type of lessons and very few can understand anything at all after years. At 18 I stopped any classes or studying but I got satellite TV, English computing magazines and shortly afterwards the Internet and then just learned all the English I needed to get by without much conscious effort. A few years ago I got interested in Danish and in about 4 months I could read regular novels at a decent pace just from Duolingo, newspapers and subtitled TV series. I probably could do the same with any language just with enough motivation.

roel_v 6y ago

I really really strongly disagree. I'll admit it's a personal thing - I know of some people who can only learn a language by memorizing all of its rules (typically people who have gone through their education based on rote memorisation as well), but I have yet to see a 5 year old who knows anything of the 'formal' rules of the grammar of their language, yet getting to the level of a 5 year old native is already a huge accomplishment for most people who only learn a second language when they are an adult. I think most people would be best served learning a language by not learning about any grammar 'rules' at all (maybe some simplified rules of thumb here and there for illustration and anchoring of skills - I'm not saying everyone should have to build their own grammar mental models from scratch through osmosis, but they should be introduced after a basic level of competence with the construct, not up front). As is remarked above - I'm sure this is a convenient way of teaching, because you can just tick off boxes of discrete 'components' ('does my student know the rules to conjugate in this and this past tense? check!), but there is a weak correlation to actually being able to use the language. I learned most of my language skills in both English and French by listening to rap music, transcribing it, translating into Dutch (my native language), repeating it and mimicking pronunciation etc. If anything, having to learn the grammar rules made the actual language acquisition harder. My best French teacher was one who, after asking in desperation 'how can I get you boys to be interested in learning French?' and me (mockingly) suggesting we analyse some MC Solaar CD's, then actually went out and got some of those, and contacted her Parisien neice to give us some of the backstory on the slang used in them, too. Then again, I'm bitter about many of the traditional teaching methods and I have no proof my anecdote scales to the general population, so my opinion is worth about as much as... well, something that's pretty worthless I guess...

russholmes 6y ago

Same here. I went to a fairly good state school and never received any English grammar but got some French grammar. The French language teaching was terrible - hours and hours of memorising irregular verbs. I passed all the exams but still can't speak the language. I have taught myself Swedish listening to Sveriges Radio, reading and translating news articles and following a series of short Swedish lessons on youtube. I pick up grammar as I go along rather than learn it formally. I don't use flash cards, duolingo or rote memorisation. The key thing is to read, write, listen and pronounce - form sentences and use the language rather than work on memorising vocabulary (that comes naturally).

Symbiote 6y ago
Swedish (+Danish, Norwegian) grammar is as close as it could be to English grammar. Many of the differences are because English changed -- order the words like Shakespeare and you are most of the way there. What works for Swedish might not work for many other languages.

OJFord 6y ago

> but in the UK we don’t even get taught the grammar of English. No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns. This just isn't true. It might have been true for you, but it isn't true 'in the UK', and most likely you've just forgotten because it wasn't and hasn't been important to you; it's on the national curriculum. > When you don’t even know formally how your own language is structured, it is very difficult to learn another language. Absolutely agree with that, and it's worth learning more and revising what you were taught when at school in the UK if you choose to learn another language. It's also (one reason) why 'Latin is useless' is bollocks. Latin has a more 'complete' grammar than (modern) English, by which I mean that it has more cases, conjugations, etc. that are productive, and which take differing forms. It can be difficult to get your head around two different constructions in a language being learnt if both take the same form in English; they probably don't in Latin. I've never learnt Latin formally, but I've tried to pick a tiny bit up, and I tend to look to Latin grammar and resources rather than English in my pursuit of Hindi.

mathieuh 6y ago
OK I was being over-the-top with that part, yes, I remember being taught about verbs, adjectives, nouns and adverbs. But the rest? I don't remember them being taught them at all. I went to school in Northern Ireland starting in 1999, I thought the "national curriculum" covered all of the UK but it turns out NI has its own so that may have something to do with it. I'm an avid amateur linguist so perhaps I'm letting my own perceptions of what is important colour what I think should be important to other people.

Symbiote 6y ago

> No one knows grammatical terms, like preposition, person, the name of tenses, the subjunctive, or even simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns. In England, most of these basic concepts are introduced in primary school. These terms are introduced in Year 2 (age 6-7): noun, noun phrase, statement, question, exclamation, command, compound, suffix, adjective, adverb, verb, tense (past, present), apostrophe, comma[1, p66]. How much grammar is taught has changed -- it's more now than it was in the 1990s or 2000s -- but certainly "simple ones like verbs, adjective, adverbs and nouns" have always been taught. Children who paid no attention in English lessons should get a second opportunity to learn in modern language lessons (e.g. French). A Danish language school I attended filtered people into "professional" and "non-professional" groups. The "professional" group saved time by assuming students understood "the subjunctive mood…" etc. [1] https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/335186/PRIMARY_national_curriculum_-_English_220714.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/...

pessimizer 6y ago

I have friends that make one or more grammatical mistakes in virtually every sentence they utter in English, and have very few problems expressing any thought in a way that is quickly understood (often at fairly high-level jobs.) Plenty of those people have English as their first language. As you've communicated, a major difference between native speakers and non-native speakers is that native speakers usually don't know or care about the grammar of the language they speak. They learn it through a series of dopamine hits they get from successfully understanding or being understood. If people who regularly and naturally use the subjunctive don't know the word "subjunctive" and can barely understand or repeat an explanation given of it, how important could it be to fluency?