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Can you master grammar by reading a LOT? | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Advice Center |  | |
| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5745 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes  Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 1 of 14 22 September 2009 at 9:02am | IP Logged |
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*mar :)
Hello Generally speaking, if one knows "basic fluency" grammar in a given language, does reading a lot everyday makes him get the grip of the more difficult variations in a language with a fair rigidity in grammar, French for instence? Merci a lot 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Thaorius Diglot Groupie ArgentinaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 5544 days ago 40 posts - 58 votes Speaks: Spanish*, EnglishB2 | Message 2 of 14 22 September 2009 at 9:08am | IP Logged |
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In theory, yes. That's how I learned most of my English.
Do note, however, that you will have to make an effort to identify the constructs you do not understand/recognize, and try to remember them. And even if you don't learn much grammar, your vocabulary should increase by a few orders of magnitude. PD: Depending on how basic your current understanding of the language is, you might want to find simplistic reading material; maybe something for kids. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5745 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 3 of 14 22 September 2009 at 9:24am | IP Logged |
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Thanx for your reply man.
I speak French at basic fluency, I can read an average novel in difficulty and understand about 90%, so vocabulary is not a problem,at least for now.. Quote : you will have to make an effort to identify the constructs you do not understand/recognize, and try to remember them That's exactely what I want t do, but I don't know how! I didn't learn French by my self. I have a lot of grammar books for French, should I search the bizzar structures and practice or what? Thank you 1 person has voted this message useful | |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6704 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 4 of 14 22 September 2009 at 9:26am | IP Logged |
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The question is what you understand by "basic fluency" grammar. If that more or less is the whole morphological system plus the use of conjunctions, infinite verbal forms, the cases that goes with specific prepositions and things like that, then the learning the rest of the syntax will be fairly close to learning the idiomatics of your target language.
And that can be done through reading, provided that you stay alert to these things and don't focus entirely on the meaning. One trick to do this is to choose a certain grammatical phenomen and then keep that on your mind while reading or listening. It really doesn't matter which phenomenon you choose (it could for instance be prepositions after verbs in English), because being alert to one phenomenon will also make you notice other things in the form of the message. The imporant thing is to avoid being focused entirely on the meaning. But those things in grammar that can be formalized and put into a system will be more efficiently learned if you do consult a grammar when you are intrigued by something. And you can only consult a grammar efficiently if you know where to find what in that book. EDIT: not impeccable enough, though - I have had to correct two typos Edited by Iversen on 23 September 2009 at 1:08am 9 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Toufik18 Bilingual Tetraglot Senior Member Algeria Joined 5745 days ago 188 posts - 202 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written)*, Arabic (classical)*, French, English | Message 5 of 14 22 September 2009 at 9:43am | IP Logged |
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Impeccable as always :)
Thank you so much Iverson. By "basic fluency" grammar I mean that I can recognize most of the writing "styles" in a given text (an intermediate one), so the basic structure of the language is not the tpic here, but how can I expand my grammatical variations when writing or speaking, and making accurate distinguishes between the small nuences of a bizzar grammatical phenomenon (to me, of course) . Edited by Toufik18 on 22 September 2009 at 9:50am 1 person has voted this message useful | |
| Luís_RJ Diglot Newbie Brazil Joined 5564 days ago 12 posts - 16 votes Speaks: Portuguese*, English | Message 6 of 14 22 September 2009 at 6:41pm | IP Logged |
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Reading what ? it also depends on what you're reading. Even journalists make mistakes. But I think that reading itself is not enough to improve grammar rules, because there will be subtle differences that only a foreign student bothers about and a native speaker may not take into account.
For instance, some months ago I came across the conjunction "as" instead of "when", which made me confused. I could suppose the meaning by the context, and yet, the next time I came across this situation I would have already mastered this idea, but I couldn't assume that I would be able to write precisely. However, the problem gets worse when someone explains to you that a certain "rule" or verb sounds weird in the spoken language and it's only used in written documents. Yeah, you should have a grammar book, not only to know what you should write, but how and when. The grammar exceptions and stylistics are tough, much more than the rules. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |
| lancemanion Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5573 days ago 150 posts - 166 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish, Thai Studies: French, Mandarin, Japanese | Message 7 of 14 23 September 2009 at 1:15am | IP Logged |
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If you do nothing but read, and have no other exposure to a language, probably not.
2 persons have voted this message useful |
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