I don't know that those things are taught, at least not in classrooms. The manual in your citation doesn't teach them. > the real rules of grammar don't have t

I don't know that those things are taught, at least not in classrooms. The manual in your citation doesn't teach them. > the real rules of grammar don't have to be taught to native speakers: if it's a rule, they pick it up naturally. If it has to be taught to native speakers, it's artificial, even if it were once part of the language. I understand your point now! See how tricky communication is? :) I don't believe the argument that we can't be taught to improve what we learn naturally, if that's what you mean. In fact, I think it's very common. We learn to run naturally, but if you want to do it well (e.g., to run track or for other sports, or to protect your back/knees/shins if you're a jogger), you study technique. The same goes for writing, reading, programming, ... even basic functions like learning, sleeping, eating (I eat too much, naturally!), etc. The same goes for grammar and language, IMHO. EDIT: Relevant, and copied from another post: From David Adger, professor of linguistics, Queen Mary University of London: "People have a notion of grammar as being a set of rules that someone tells you to do. ... I want to say, 'No, look at the amazing complexity of languages around the world, and look at how unified it all is.'" "There's an unlimited number of even numbers but obviously they’re limited, right? Because 3s and 7s aren't in there. Language is like that. There's an unlimited number of possible things we can say, of sentence structures, but not anything can be a sentence structure. ... Language is unlimited, but it’s unlimited in a limited way." http://nautil.us/issue/76/language/-talking-is-throwing-fictional-worlds-at-one-another http://nautil.us/issue/76/language/-talking-is-throwing-fict...