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Why grammar does not help ( some of us) | ||
Tags: Language Teaching | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| nicozerpa Triglot Senior Member Argentina Joined 4324 days ago 182 posts - 315 votes  Speaks: Spanish*, Portuguese, English Studies: Italian, German | Message 9 of 59 02 September 2013 at 1:39am | IP Logged | |||||
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Same as Fuenf_Katzen, I do need to consciously learn the grammar rules because it's hard for me to guess it. However, the main focus is to get exposure to the language. I learn grammar as a crutch to help me when I read, listen, write or when I'm taking my first steps in speaking.
I'm not a grammar hater (in fact, I find it interesting), but I think that it definitely doesn't play a key role. There are plenty of more important things to pay attention if you want to learn a language successfully. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Cavesa Triglot Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 5007 days ago 3277 posts - 6779 votes Speaks: Czech*, FrenchC2, EnglishC1 Studies: Spanish, German, Italian | Message 10 of 59 02 September 2013 at 1:44am | IP Logged | |||||
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That's the spirit, Cristina! I wish you a lot of success with the change and I'm sure your personal army of Russian tutors will soon find out how right you are about your choices.
Well, prz, I think the real trouble is not whether you prefer either books or people or any combination. The point is that some teachers try hard to do the job of the books at the expense of their job as people. We had such charts in textbooks as well, 1e4e6! Most of my classmates and I actually found some of the proper Czech declinations and conjugations funny back then. By the way, I know a guy who learnt to play several instruments by ear. He is really good. But then I know a lot of people who learnt just one or two instruments the traditional way and even more who failed at whichever way and chose another hobby instead. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Bao Diglot Senior Member Germany tinyurl.com/pe4kqe5 Joined 5764 days ago 2256 posts - 4046 votes Speaks: German*, English Studies: French, Spanish, Japanese, Mandarin | Message 11 of 59 02 September 2013 at 1:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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Grammar has to grow in my mind. The image that comes to mind is one of artificial pearls. It's possible to incubate pearl oysters with beads of different sizes and have the oyster only put a few layers on top of the bead to get an artificial pearl. That would be learning grammar by using rules. You get perfectly pretty pearls but without the arduous task of putting layer on layer of examples. But my mind rejects those beads, it can only build on smaller fragments of the language, and prefers to layer them to a bigger size all by itself, only to check and use the rules as a cross-reference when it is pretty sure it got the right idea already and will be able to put the thing to use soon. It is snobbish like that.
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| beano Diglot Senior Member United KingdomRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4620 days ago 1049 posts - 2152 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Russian, Serbian, Hungarian | Message 12 of 59 02 September 2013 at 1:50am | IP Logged | |||||
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I learned a lot of German by listening attentively when the language was being spoken around me and joining
in with conversations, gradually working my way from a "stimmt" up to expressing complete ideas of my own. I did some study from the grammar book, but perhaps not as much as I should have. Some surprisingly simple concepts eluded me for quite some time before I had an "ahhhh" moment, when exposure brought me to a point I could have reached earlier if only I'd gleaned the correct information from the textbook. I think a range of approaches works best: listening, speaking, grammar study, independent reading and whatever else happens to be available. 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Stelle Bilingual Triglot Senior Member Canada tobefluent.com Joined 4142 days ago 949 posts - 1686 votes Speaks: French*, English*, Spanish Studies: Tagalog | Message 13 of 59 02 September 2013 at 1:56am | IP Logged | |||||
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I think that grammar is important. But - for me - grammar could never be the cornerstone of language study.
Communication has to drive the need for grammar. I don't learn a verb tense for its own sake - I learn it because I get frustrated with my inability to communicate without it. As I improve and progress, I need different grammar rules. So when I first started, I was quite happy to babble away in broken Spanish in the present tense. Then I wanted to talk about more complex things, and couldn't. That frustration led me to study the past tenses. Now that I'm more comfortable with past tense, I find myself needing conditional and subjunctive. While I'm still happily babbling away for now, I'll soon hit that threshold where I'll know that it's time to start studying those new tenses. That said, I've never studied a language with a radically different structure. I'm already fluent in French and English, and Spanish isn't such a huge jump from there. I don't know if I'd need more grammar from the beginning to understand how to put sentences together in a language with very different roots. I do think that a grammar lesson is a terrible waste of a teacher. I can study grammar on my own, and then turn to tutors for clarification. If you have a stubborn, inflexible tutor, then it's time to find a new tutor. 2 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 14 of 59 02 September 2013 at 2:09am | IP Logged | |||||
On one hand, I learn to speak by speaking and/or imitating. On the other hand, I like to know just enough grammar before I start expressing myself in a foreign language so that I can take the abstract knowledge and its example sentences and apply them with different words. Whether I get to the desired level of understanding the relevant sections in grammar by drilling, reading a description of the feature, passive exposure or a combination of the preceding doesn't matter. I'm not an archetypical perfectionist but I'm generally very exacting and value getting as many details as possible right on the first try after having done preparatory work. I definitely suffer poorly those who openly make a point of scoffing at those who value understanding the grammar when learning languages. It sounds gimmicky to me to try to present language learning in the simplest possible way since language is a complex phenomenon. May I add that it wouldn't hurt people to be a little more informed about and able to explain developments and characteristics of at least their native language instead of automatically deriding unfamiliar usage as "sloppiness", "laziness" or similarly subjective judgements on the part of the people doing such things. 3 persons have voted this message useful | ||||||
| Solfrid Cristin Heptaglot Winner TAC 2011 & 2012 Senior Member Norway Joined 5332 days ago 4143 posts - 8864 votes Speaks: Norwegian*, Spanish, Swedish, French, English, German, Italian Studies: Russian | Message 15 of 59 02 September 2013 at 6:56am | IP Logged | |||||
I do hope you do not think I am scoffing at people with another learning style, I preach tolerance for all styles, including my own. .. We all learn differently. One of my friends is a grammar buff, he reads grammars in bed, even for languages he does not speak. We tried to take a German class together once, which did not go too well in spite of us being roughly at the same level. He wanted to do mainly grammar (which drove me up the wall) and I tried to get us to speak as much as possible (which drove him up the wall). We are both language nerds, but in different ways. As for "unfamiliar usage" in my native language, I admit to being less forgiving of those. We have lots of dialects, and therefore accept a wide range of different usage, but even in Norwegian there are some things that are down right wrong. When my daughter tells me that she finds it difficult to learn from her Norwegian teacher because she automatically filters out all the teacher's grammar mistakes, making it difficult to focus on the content, then we have gone too far in tolerance. I bet you would not be too happy with an English teacher who said "Them have not done it yet" or ""That book is themses" either. I hear that usage occasionally, but I get depressed when I hear it from a Norwegian teacher. Edited by Solfrid Cristin on 02 September 2013 at 6:56am 1 person has voted this message useful | ||||||
| Chung Diglot Senior Member Joined 7154 days ago 4228 posts - 8259 votes 20 sounds Speaks: English*, French Studies: Polish, Slovak, Uzbek, Turkish, Korean, Finnish | Message 16 of 59 02 September 2013 at 7:10am | IP Logged | |||||
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You? C'mon. You acknowledge the role that studying grammar has when learning a language (comprehension). It's people who deride the study of grammar in isolation thinking of it as effectively a net drain from oh-so-precious exposure.
Everything has its place. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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