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Not Studying Grammar | ||
Tags: Natural method | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4372 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes  Studies: German | Message 9 of 89 11 August 2013 at 11:49am | IP Logged | |||||
I would be careful not to conflate "learning like a child" with "not learning any explicit grammar rules". It's hard to reproduce the learning conditions of a child: very patient adults who will patiently listen to your every output like you are a genius and tell you again and again when you make mistakes; a desire to repeatedly read the same (boring) book again and again etc. Moreover, we are more focused than children - try getting a 3 year old to use Anki for instance. I am sure you can get to a reasonable level in German without concentrating on explicit grammar rules. I am now after a year at B2 level (reading/listening) and B1 for (speaking/writing). I have essentially not worried about speaking/writing over the last year, and first just watched lots of shows (I've done about +300 hours now) and reading (5500 pages). I personally didn't want to go the pure route of starting with simple children's books and instead used Anki to build up a bit of vocabulary as well as get exposure to sentences before starting to read real books. At the end of last year I was doing about 200 pages a month, reading intensively, looking up words on the Kindle, but at this point I read quite easily about 2000 pages per month without a dictionary (and without having to think consciously about cases/genders etc). I would also say that's useful to have some grammar, but just enough to read. Basically you need to recognize nouns, verbs, adjectives, tenses, definite/indefinite articles, cases, etc look like, but you don't need to be able to explicitly reproduce them. I guess if you read lots of children's books you could pick this up from context, but I didn't want to start that "low", and aimed to start reading at the Harry Potter level. So I read a simple grammar book over a month to get an overview of the grammar, and then kept reading sentences in Anki to reinforce my understanding of the structure of the language, until I was ready to start reading real books. If I were to do this again I would start reading earlier, and not try to learn as much vocabulary from Anki to start with, and trust my reading to teach me the vocabulary as I went. My aim is to keep reading, reading, reading, with about an 1-2 hours a day of TV/movies, and see where I am at the New Year. At that point I may try to do more work on the output side of things, but for now I am learning so much just from input it may not be such a bit deal. I'll have to wait and see. Edited by patrickwilken on 11 August 2013 at 12:01pm 10 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 3983 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 10 of 89 11 August 2013 at 2:59pm | IP Logged | |||||
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I think that it's important to make a distinction between "grammar as a goal" and
"grammar as a tool". As a goal, I'll agree with you - working step-by-step through a grammar workbook as your main form of language learning doesn't make much sense to me. But that doesn't mean that grammar has no place in learning a foreign language. Grammar is a tool. For instance, I get frustrated during my Skype conversations because I can't talk about stuff that happened last week. So I take some time to learn and practice past preterite. The goal is communication; one of the many tool is grammar. We're not children, so we can't expect to learn exactly like them. Even the fact that we already have language makes us radically different from children. We already think and reason in words, so it makes sense that we would need to understand what words mean when learning a new language. We already think abstractly, so it makes sense that we would want to be able to communicate those abstract thoughts. Besides, children have over a year of pure input before they begin to speak in words. I don't have that much patience! Edited by Stelle on 11 August 2013 at 3:01pm 8 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
 emk Diglot Moderator United States Joined 5371 days ago 2615 posts - 8806 votes Speaks: English*, FrenchB2 Studies: Spanish, Ancient Egyptian Personal Language Map | Message 11 of 89 11 August 2013 at 9:41pm | IP Logged | |||||
I agree with patrickwilken: Most people vastly underestimate what's involved in "learning like a child." According to various studies: 1) Children hear between 3 million and 13 million words per year from birth until the start of school. The kids who hear closer to 13 million tend to do noticeably better in school. To put it perspective, the Super Challenge involves between 1 and 2 million words of listening, so figure several Super Challenges per year. 2) The typical native 4-year-old produces reasonably grammatical sentences a lot of the time, but their speech is not very idiomatic by adult standards, and they spend a lot of time producing "word salad" when they try to communicate complicated ideas. 3) French children don't fully internalize the gender system until 5 or 6 years old. 4) Successful students typically read at least a million words a year (about half a Super Challenge) every year from age 10 through the end of school. 5) Kids who move to a new country and start going to school in the local language can socialize pretty well within 6 to 12 months, but it typically takes them 3 to 7 years of school to catch up with their native classmates. 6) Kids have enormous incentives to speak their language well. And indeed, if you put adults in similar circumstances, they do quite well. Given 3 to 5 years of full-time immersion and no choice, some adults can reach near-native levels without ever cracking a grammar book. (Their writing will lag behind unless they read voraciously in their new language.) But personally, I find it helpful to combine lots of input with modest amounts of grammar study and feedback from native speakers. If I stick to just input, I can overlook simple stuff for a long time. If I just try to study grammar without input, I can take years of classes without getting near A2. So my strategy is (a) get lots of input, (b) try to notice a few interesting bits of grammar or vocabulary on each page when reading, and (c) occasionally look weird stuff up online or flip through a grammar book. 14 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5399 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 12 of 89 11 August 2013 at 10:20pm | IP Logged | |||||
I used to have to change schools every 3 to 5 years as a child. Despite them being always English, it would take me about 3 years to get back to my previous relative level. Kids moving to a foreign country are not just having to learn a new language, but a whole new syllabus, new school system, new way of life. I'm not surprised it takes a while for them to catch up. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Enki Tetraglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5672 days ago 54 posts - 133 votes Speaks: Arabic (Written), English*, French, Korean Studies: Japanese | Message 13 of 89 12 August 2013 at 7:52am | IP Logged | |||||
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It sounds like the people knew the grammar rules and patterns, they just didn't know the terminology. I can know that certain sounds make a good ending to a song without knowing the word "cadence".
Edited by Enki on 12 August 2013 at 7:53am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4073 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 14 of 89 12 August 2013 at 8:46am | IP Logged | |||||
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I used to deny grammar rules from school. I have had problems even in Russian somerimes because I wasn't paying enough attention to what I write or say. It became even more horrible in English: my teachers perfectly knew that I had no problems with translation to Russian and that was the thing that allowed me to get good marks. In the final grade, howewer, I had to show something more due to teacher's demandings and all my tries to fix that were leading to total fail.
I still can't remember how exactly I managed to finish school with highest possible mark on English (maybe that was because teacher knew that I'm not stupid or whatever), but that grammar problem haunts me everyday. All tests leading to the fact that I know English in intermediate/ upper-intermediate level, but I know that my gtammar is disaster. When we're studying "new" grammar topics at university, our teacher compares Englis grammar rules with Russian and that method only multiplies my sufferings. Somehow I managed to become one of the best in my group but I think that this "success" is quite meaningless. Now I'm triyng to learn German. I can't follow boring textbooks (not enough motivation, I suppose), but all that stuff "learn like child" and whatever seems useless without grammar. "Beginner German" on memrise.com has only provided me wiith some words and basic constructions, Duolingo course became too difficult for me because of absense of grammar rules and their explanation. I'm studying English for more than 10 years but I have understood the difference of look/looks or care/cares (third-person singular simple present, eh?) only about a year ago. Imagine how many mistakes about that have I done before! To sum it up: grammar is important. P.S. How much grammar mistakes is here? :) Edited by Via Diva on 12 August 2013 at 8:47am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4372 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 15 of 89 12 August 2013 at 9:20am | IP Logged | |||||
I don't think anyone is denying the importance of grammar. The question is how effectively you can internalize grammar from reading/listening. I agree with EMK that people underestimate how much input you need to do this. Last week, I realized that I knew the rule distinguishing proven/proved when I was correcting someone's English text. That's not a rule I ever learnt explicitly - in fact I had to look up the rule online to work out why "proved" not "proven" sounded better in the sentence in order to better explain it to the person. So this would be an example of a relatively subtle grammar rule I picked up by reading. Out of curiosity, can you estimate how many pages of English books you've read? I saw somewhere that the number of English books that students with 10 years of English school study entering university in Norway/Finland (?) is remarkably low (approx. 15 ?). I used to think that 10000 pages for the Super Challenge over 20 months was insanely high; now I think I should be trying to read 25000 pages per year, in order to get to any sort of reasonable level of German in the next few years. 25000 pages/year sounds like a lot, but at my current speed of about 25 pages per hour (<1 page/2 mins) that's only about 2.5 hours reading per day. Given I read an hour at night before I sleep, I only have to find another 1.5 hours during the day to read. I fully expect my reading speed to pick-up significantly in the next six months to perhaps 1 page/min - at which point it would seem reasonable to aim for 50k pages per year (12.5 million words/year). Of course, the better my German gets the easier it is to watch movies/shows, and to talk, which of course feedbacks into my reading comprehension. Edited by patrickwilken on 12 August 2013 at 9:45am 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4073 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 16 of 89 12 August 2013 at 9:37am | IP Logged | |||||
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patrickwilken, I understand that I should catch up grammar rules in Duolingo and Rosetta Stone by myself, but I failed to get required level in both courses. Considering that courses has been designed for average people, I'm probably lower than average in that point. Which begs the question... :)
I don't think that I read much English in school/ university, but I've made somewhat English environment for me such as movies and series with English subtitles, English ebooks on my phone, English forums and social networks eventually. I can even think in English and I actually do it very, very oftenly, but there is no teacher or corrector in my head... 1 person has voted this message useful |
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