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This is fascinating to me, because I am adamant that learning grammar (and especially verb conjugation) is completely counter productive when starting to learn

by nchmy 14d ago

This is fascinating to me, because I am adamant that learning grammar (and especially verb conjugation) is completely counter productive when starting to learn a language. Especially with Spanish, where every tense and person has different terminations. I literally just ignored conjugation and spoke in infinitive for a while. Yo comer pan. Tu comer pan. Ayer/mañana el comer pan. Etc... Likewise not worrying about gender, articles etc. If you use the wrong el/la/lo/les/whatever, it almost never matters, whatsoever. Likewise if you put words in the wrong order. Everyone understands it all. So, just focus on building vocab, fluidity and confidence. The tenses come in time. I do agree, though, that etymology - or at least noticing similarities between languages - can be very useful. Spanish and English speakers already know thousands of words in each language just with some basic rules. -al is the same (metal). -tion becomes -cion (conversation, conversación). Etc... I suspect that your struggles was that you were being evaluated on the wrong things... I'd be curious to hear your experience and what you think of what I've said.

MrDrMcCoy 13d ago
I think you're probably right where most people are concerned, but none of that held for me in my various attempts. I think I should amend a couple of the points I raised, though: I wrote etymology when I meant morphology. Etymology is certainly useful to me and helps vocabulary stick, but I find morphology to be a useful building block that I need on the front-end of learning vocabulary. No curriculum I've found includes it. Phonetic collisions were particularly difficult for me, as my early education intrinsically bound phonetics to the English alphabet in my mind, which made it very difficult for my memory to latch onto new associations that share Latin script. I think phonics are crucial, but I wish there was a good way to better steer the sound associations to morphemes instead of individual characters, so as to better make room for more than the one language you're trying to learn. New point: I had already done some programming by the time I tried learning another language. My thought processes had already reshaped into a sort of compiler for all my language processing. The necessary precision of code extended into how I wrote, and that overinflated the importance of grammar into something I just couldn't see past before getting to the words themselves. I wanted the words that were useful to sentence structure ahead of all others so I could do something useful with the rest. I expect this would all be pretty incomprehensible to most people.

by nchmy 14d ago

MrDrMcCoy 13d ago

I think you're probably right where most people are concerned, but none of that held for me in my various attempts. I think I should amend a couple of the points I raised, though: I wrote etymology when I meant morphology. Etymology is certainly useful to me and helps vocabulary stick, but I find morphology to be a useful building block that I need on the front-end of learning vocabulary. No curriculum I've found includes it. Phonetic collisions were particularly difficult for me, as my early education intrinsically bound phonetics to the English alphabet in my mind, which made it very difficult for my memory to latch onto new associations that share Latin script. I think phonics are crucial, but I wish there was a good way to better steer the sound associations to morphemes instead of individual characters, so as to better make room for more than the one language you're trying to learn. New point: I had already done some programming by the time I tried learning another language. My thought processes had already reshaped into a sort of compiler for all my language processing. The necessary precision of code extended into how I wrote, and that overinflated the importance of grammar into something I just couldn't see past before getting to the words themselves. I wanted the words that were useful to sentence structure ahead of all others so I could do something useful with the rest. I expect this would all be pretty incomprehensible to most people.