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Guide to Learning Languages, part 3 | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies | ( Topic Closed) |  |
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 9 of 11 06 March 2012 at 1:02pm | IP Logged |
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How to learn use a grammar book
Quote from Krashen and beginners, 23 February 2011 When we speak about grammar we tend to think about morphology, and if we ever continue to thinking about syntax it will be in terms of messy hierarchies of obscure rules - and everything has Latin names. Learning grammar then will be learning complete tables or rules that resemble juridical texts. I can understand if this seems less attraktive, but it doesn't have to be like that. My personal preference is to run quickly through the grammar of a language at an early stage "to see what is there". However after that stage I mainly take two approaches: studying isolated examples through concrete examples and making my own summaries, which in the case of morphology results in "green sheets" which I use for reference. If you for instance want to study the use of ablative on Latin then check the possible endings and then go through a page or two of Latin text (preferably something fairly simple). Note down all passages where there seems to be a possible ablative and in if in doubt check with your grammar whether it should be an ablative and not for instance a dative, which often has the same form. Ask yourself whether you understand why there is an ablative in each and every case, using your grammar as a reference book rather as something to be learnt by heart. There are of course constructions in your grammar which aren't represented in any given text, but it is valuable to get a feel for which things are common and which are rare - and just looking things up to solve concrete problem cases will make it much easier to remember the different possibilities you have to choose from. It should also be clear why reading through your grammars before venturing into the 'real' world is a good idea: it makes it much easier to find things later when you look up a concrete construction or form. Morphology can often be analyzed in structural terms, maybe even as combinatorical games or geometry. The things Cainntear mentioned [in the original thread] for Scottish Gaelic are also valid in Irish, and there I have noticed that the distribution of certain changes of initial consonants (lenition) is complementary between masculine and feminine words. Seeing such a pattern is part of understanding what is actually going on beneath the surface. And memorizing a simple geometric pattern instead of a lot of forms may be easier for some learners. The big problem is in my view all the things that have to memorized word for word, not those that have some kind of regularity. The morphology of a language is more or less those things that are regular enough to be put into tables - actually you should be happy that some things are that regular and start worrying about the things that are too confused for that treatment. Speaking like Tarzan is easy in a morphology-low language, but only because you don't notice all your blunders. Which brings me back to the Krashen problem. I wonder what kind in general of grammar study he and his followers actually are thinking about when they are so much against grammar. If it's all rote learning for them then their attitude may be understandable, but even then it would be more constructive to find ways to work with the regularities in our languages than just giving up and let people find their own way through the fog. Edited by Iversen on 06 March 2012 at 1:59pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 10 of 11 06 March 2012 at 1:07pm | IP Logged |
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How to learn grammar, step by step
From 'Iversen', 08 March 2009 I am going to write about learning grammar. I may be repeating myself, and I have to warn you: some people can't get my methods to work for them. No problem, provided that that you have an alternative. First, if you want to learn grammar you have to be able to make at least a rough analysis of a sentence in its main parts (subject, direct and indirect object, verb, etc) and you have to know what nouns (substantives), finite and infinite verbal forms, cases and such things are. If you already know one foreign language then you have probably learnt the correct terms and analysis techniques there, otherwise you you have to learn these things from scratch with your own language as an example. But you HAVE to know at least the basic grammatical wordstock before you set out to learn a new language with the help of grammars, otherwise it will be a complete waste of your time. When you open the grammars for your new language then be prepared to add some terms and even revise your conceptions about other terms to suit the new language, but you have to start somewhere. Next: try to get more than one grammar. If you can't get more than one full size grammar then even the short sketchy grammatical sections of travellers' language guides will be better than nothing. Your first task will be to look through the morphological sections and compare them. Do they agree on the terminology? The order of cases? The number of declensions? Do the divide the verbs into corresponding groups, and do they list the same verbal forms? Probably not, which may come as a nasty surprise to many learners. Now look at the adjectives and the substantives. Do their endings in the different cases - if there are cases at all - look almost similar or not? Are there articles? Look at the verbs in the same way, - try to get a comprehensive view of the whole morphology in this way. Then leave the morphology aside and read the syntactical sections with the same critical attitude. Which kinds of subordinate sentences are there, and which constructions with infinite verbal forms do you find, which may or may not correspond to subordinate constructions and vice versa in the languages you already know. Remember, you are not supposed to learn any of these things by heart yet, just find out what there is to learn later. Next step, - you have to learn something by heart, sorry. But don't do it without also having some texts to use at the same time. I say texts because I find it easier to read than to understand spoken words in the beginning, - if you have a teacher then by all means listen to him/her, but find some things to read also, - preferably bilingual texts. The internet may be a good source for parallel texts, or you can get some from text books or touristical guidebooks, but DO try to use bilingual texts in the beginning, it will spare you a lot of misunderstandings and a lot of half-understood constructions along the way. And most translations aren't so precise that they will do all the work for you - you will still have to look things up. If you can find hyperliteral translations then just be happy, but they are rare. Among the first things to learn by heart would be the main forms of the most common verbs til 'to be' and 'to have', the personal pronouns and things like that. You will have to learn them by heart eventually so you can just as well start now. Do what most people do: read them aloud many times, write them, find them in your texts and identify the forms, make associations (if you can) and so forth. Do the same kind of forced slave labour with some of the forms of articles and substantives (you don't have to learn everything by heart now, but you should be aware of which forms you have left for later - unlike the way most text books work!). But do one thing more: get some coloured paper and write all the main forms down on such paper for reference. You are now entering the next phase. As you probably have noted your grammars aren't in total agreement. Maybe you can even spot some inconsistencies. Now think hard about a way to organize the forms of articles and adjectives and nouns on one sheet (maybe two), and all the verbal forms on another - and do it in a logical fashion. For instance all Germanic languages have strong and weak verbs (the first group basically change the verb through the tenses), so your tables should show that in some way - use colors or special signs or different kinds of dividing lines for such things. Don't put irregular forms into your tables for the regular forms, - if a set of endings is used only by two or three verbs then leave them for a list over irregular nouns or verbs or whatever - these tables aren't meant to contain everything, but only the basic things which you must learn soon. The idea is that you keep these colored sheets whithin in sight whenever you work with the language - personally I use a note stand. If you see a form that bothers you (or you need it while writing) then look at your collection of coloured sheets. Making these sheets yourself makes you think about each single form, and looking at them daily for maybe a month will make them into something like an extension of your brain. Therefore it is also extremely important that you settle for a specific way of presenting the facts, because you then have the added possibility of remembering for instance a certain verbal form as a specific spot on a specific sheet (but only until you can remember the form without help, of course). When I first wrote about my 'green sheets' almost everybody criticised that I only wrote the endings. But this criticism was misguided: by using whole example words you tie the tables to some irrelevant example words. However in practice you will almost always have a specific word in mind when you use these tables, so it doesn't matter that they only contain the endings. And with only the endings you can make the tables much more compact so that you ideally can fit the whole regular part of the morphology of any (friendly) language into maybe 4 or 5 sheets. Plus a number of sheets for pronouns and other more or less irregular adjectives, nouns and verbs. To learn syntax you can to some degree make 'green sheets', for instance for the verbal forms used in different kinds of subordinates. But most of the syntax has to be learnt using other methods. One of these is to first compare a few descriptions of some problem to find out what the main issues are, and then make your own collection of examples, using some from your grammars, some from your own texts - though you probably won't be able to illustrate everything without perusing hundreds of pages - don't spend your time on that, but just go through for instance ten pages. If the thing you are looking for is common then it is there, and otherwise it isn't common and then it is less important to know about it (!) But even looking for something without finding it will help you to remember what it should look like. One little, but important warning: don't waste time on writing down the examples in their full length, but cut them down to the important part - and don't try to remember them as as full sentences, but cut them down to short mnemonic formulas such as "to do something to somebody" (with suitable dummy words). Later on you should keep a notebook for funny syntactical items, not least those that you have been looking in vain for. This will keep you alert, and being alert is one of the most efficient things when it comes to learning languages. This also applies to idiomatic expressions, which is in a sense the continuation of syntax when it has become too individualized to put into a fixed structure. Edited by Iversen on 01 May 2013 at 1:13pm 5 persons have voted this message useful | |
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6703 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 11 of 11 01 May 2013 at 1:31pm | IP Logged |
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Grammar is a giant built on sand..
But it is necessary to try to build it. And we should be happy that someone did spend time doing it, but we should also be aware that grammatical descriptions are written by humans who had specific ideas, termperaments and theoretical background. from Are you a rebellious grammar student?, 24 March 2013 I have in my log written about my qualms about the distinction between infinitivo pessoal and the futuro do subjuntivo in Portuguese, which to me seems almost to have joined into a new symbiotic partnership which covers territory taken from both the finite verbal forms and from the standard (infinite) infinitive. And thereby it puts a question mark at not only between a too strict separation between infinite and finite verbal forms, but also for instance between prepositions and conjunctions. I have earlier refused to accept the traditional claim that imperfective verbs in Russian don't have a synthetic future and perfectives don't have a present. The situation is actually that the synthetic futures and the present have exactly the same endings -it's a purely semantic consideration that has led the grammarians to give them distinct names and identities. And I remember a thread where I with no aberdabei proved that the rules given in my grammars concerning the possessive 'a-' particle in Romanian were wrong - modern Romanian simply doesn't function as I was told it did. I even remember that I drew a question about adverbials at my final exam in French at the university in Århus in 1981, and I proceeded to declare the whole category meaningless because its supposed members belonged into different structural groups. Luckily my teacher and my censor could see that I had a point.. And then I came to wonder why people here seem to be content with their grammars (except that it is hard work to refute them). Am I the only one who can't see a grammar without thinking about better ways to structure the data - even before I really master the language in question? There must be members here who have questioned the sacrosanct principles and claims in their grammars. But maybe this irreverent attitude is more common among parttime linguists than it is among people who consider themselves just to be practical learners. Maybe the rebellious learners don't use grammars much, or they reserve their grammatical treatises to scholarly magazines or other homepages. Ah dunno.. German accusative?, 01 May 2013 (slightly modified) Actually the rules and paradigms in grammar are the result not only of observations of hard facts like case endings, but also of 'softer' semantical observations .. like: what happens if we change the word order. The effect is so to say measured on a semantic scale. But even the presumed hard facts are anything but hard. They are based on genuine examples found for instance in literature OR constructed for the purpose by a native speaker - and in both cases it is only the gut feelings of the author that guarantees that a certain formulation is grammatically correct. Let's take a look at the constructions built upon a copula verb. Actually English is lucky just to have one ("to be") - Irish has got two, one for claiming a quality of something, the other to point out which one it is. It is commonly accepted that the copula has a subject, although in many languages this is can be implicit: "[io] sono Danese" ("I'm Danish" in Italian). The subject can also be a mere place holder with a reference to something which follows later or is known already: "it is obvious that this is a sentence" ---> "[that this is a sentence] is obvious". Languagesponge writes that "In English we say "that is her" - "her" is a direct object in English.". Actually you could claim that, but only because you don't have 'true' direct objects with copula verbs - and of course because the only accusatives in English are those of the personal pronouns, where "it's me" is far more common than "it is I". But almost all grammars for other languages (even those written in English) would state that the 'number two thing' attached to a copula verb is a subject predicative (except those influenced by Chomsky, because in his school the subject is a NP and the rest is a VP - verbal predicate - which includes the verb itself). In most languages with cases the subject predicative is in the nominative case like the subject - although often with the accusative if it's a personal pronoun. However there are exceptions. For instance in Russian, where there is an ongoing fight between the nominative and the instrumentative case. So even though you don't have to differentiate between subject predicatives with "to be" and direct objects with other verbs in English you do have to make the distinction in other languages - and inevitably that spills over into English, where you actually could defend that there is a direct object with the copula verb, as done by Languagesponge. The argument against doing this is that this function in the sentence just as well could be filled out by an adjective, and that's rare with other kinds of verbs than copula verbs - the exceptions are contrived things like "he likes to play hard to get", which do have a copula-like ring to them without having a true copula verb. So for this reason I stick with the distinction between direct objects and predicatives. Something similar can be said about certain constructions with a direct object and one more element, which could be called an 'object predicative': "I call him a fool". Here "him" is the direct object, and the person referred to is "a fool" (compare "he is a fool"). This is a different situation from the one with an indirect object: "I gave the pope a lollipop". The item given is not the same thing as the man or a characteristic property of the man. So what is the direct object here? One test is to put the sentence in the passive because direct objects then supposedly become subjects (at least in English). The trouble is that also indirect objects can become subjects through such a transformation: "a lollipop is given to the pope" or "the pope is given a lollipop". So in the absence of case markers you have to resort to your semantically based gut feeling (or the sneaky little "to", which shows that we don't want an obvious misunderstanding to occur). In this case the thing which is given is a sweet, and the receiver is a living person - not the inverse. So the lollipop must be the direct object of the original phrase, and the pope is the indirect object. So verbs may have a direct object and sometimes an indirect object, or they a combined with preposition clauses wich can be more or less standardized. Or they can stand alone. For the grammarian the general rule would be be to call the thing attached to the verb a direct object if it is a substantive with some attachments or a personal pronoun, and if there are two then the second one could be called an indirect object. This neat system is upheld by languages like Latin, where direct objects are in the accusative and indirect ones are in the dative case. But in most languages with cases there are verbs which 'take' other cases - like the German "freut euch des Lebens" (enjoy youplural the's life's), where "des Lebens" is in the genitive. And in Russian you can have verbs that commonly take complements in just about any case. But outside the simple direct objects you find the murky waters of adverb(ial)s. Actually the are specific word or word forms which always act as adverbials (NB: 'adverbial' is a role, and 'adverb' is a specific word which takes on that role). But in some cases there is a gray zone, as for instance with expressions of measure and time and price or manner. What is "a ton" in "The car weighs a ton"? Well, you could say "the car weighs a lot" or "the car weighs too much", and the general consensus is to regard the final element in such expressions as adverbials. But in "The man weighs the car" the car is without a doubt the direct object so fundamentally the problem is that the verb "to weigh" can behave in two very different ways: it can function as an intransitive verb with an adverbial or as a transitive verb with a direct object. You need extra arguments to claim that one is an adverbial and the other is a direct object. And where do you find those arguments? Either in the use of different cases OR in semantic considerations. Besides you need to be able to distinguish a subordinate phrase inside a main phrase. Basically phrases are organized as boxes: you can have a box inside another box, which can be inside a third and much larger box. In those cases where the innermost box has a verbal of its own it will be the verb at this level that decides the roles of the elements that are attached to it, not the verb which is functioning as the verbal of the outer box. But sometimes the innermost box hasn't got a finite verb, but for instance a participle or an infinitive. And even infinite verbal forms can have other elements attached to them. For instance "to buy a house is very expensive". The outermost verb is "is" (a copula verb), and "very expensive" is the subject predicative (cr. the discussion above). The subject is "to buy a house", which has an inner structure where "a house" is the direct object of "to buy". When you build a grammatical description of a language you try to find recurring patterns, and you are most at ease if there is some clear indicator which divides all your examples into two or more nice heaps in such a way that members of one heap also in other respects clearly are different from all the members in other heaps. Unfortunately reality isn't always like that. Languages are basically chaotic phenomena where some kind of order imposes itself, but leaves areas where you have to draw arbitrary division lines or face descriptions which are too complicated to be useful. OK ... maybe this also became a wee bit complicated. And then I didn't even consider dialectial or other variations or the need to simplify things for the beginners or those who just don't care about the details. This is the end of Guide no. 3. part 1 (about learning languages in general) part 2 (about translations) part 4 (about wordlists and vocabulary) part 5 (about understanding speech and strange languages) ==================================== ====== ================== ========= Edited by Iversen on 01 May 2013 at 1:38pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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