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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 |  | |
| KimG Diglot Groupie Norway Joined 4979 days ago 88 posts - 104 votes  Speaks: Norwegian*, English Studies: Portuguese, Swahili | Message 25 of 59 03 September 2013 at 2:20pm | IP Logged | ||
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Solfrid, Your feeling about Russian seem to remind me of my experience trying to learn Portuguese as self study, I strugled immensely until I got how different the written and formal Language differed in Brazil. And I felt, as an Scandinavian, I tried to learn to read/write in one Language, and speak another closely resembling.
In the end, I think I need to do a bit of both: do formal grammatical study of the colloquial Language, including tracking down ordinary books written exacly how people talk, and, a bit easier, learn the spoken colloquial and perhaps some "formal" Language too. Unfortunately, don't think its about my learning style, just an immense gap in grammar between formal and informal language.I fixed my English from quite broken after School, to workable level by using it, speaking to people, reading books, etc. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Medulin Tetraglot Senior Member Croatia Joined 4670 days ago 1199 posts - 2192 votes Speaks: Croatian*, English, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Norwegian, Hindi, Nepali | Message 26 of 59 03 September 2013 at 3:30pm | IP Logged | ||
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In Norwegian (outside Oslo), there is also a big difference between the written form (be it Bokmaal or Nynorsk) and the actual spoken form (the local dialect). And it's not only pronunciation and morphology which is different, sometimes syntax is different too (for example in Trondheim and in Northern Norway, they don't use inversion in questions).
Every variant (spoken variety, local dialect) has its own grammar, but this grammar may be different from the formal written grammar. Some languages (English, Argentine Spanish) are more tolerant when it comes to incorporating newer/colloquial forms (you can write It's me; Who did you see in English; and Te amo a vos in Argentine Spanish). Other languages (like French, Finnish, Brazilian Portuguese, Swiss German, Czech) are almost diglossic: they want to keep a sharp divide between the actual spoken language and the written form. (And then we have pure diglossic languages like Arabic or Tamil...written Tamil and spoken Tamil are just like Latin and Italian). My father told me when he learned English (55 years ago), they had to memorize 10 rules when to use SHALL and not WILL and vice versa :) English is one of those languages in which the formal written grammar and the colloquial grammar have come extremely close, you can use neutral register which can work great in both a soap opera and a school essay. This is almost impossible in French or Brazilian Portuguese (languages which are becoming diglossic because the formal written grammar is stuck at the end of the 19th century). Edited by Medulin on 03 September 2013 at 3:48pm 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| sanmusa Newbie United States Joined 4103 days ago 2 posts - 4 votes Speaks: EnglishA1 | Message 27 of 59 03 September 2013 at 4:05pm | IP Logged | ||
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Russian to me seems to be the wrong kind of language to study by grammar as generally there are more exceptions than rules. A good Russian Ukrainian friend of mine told me that most Russian people can't speak proper Russian anyway. With Russian you need to listen, listen, listen, and speak, speak, speak, that's how you learn it.
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| Deji Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 5442 days ago 116 posts - 182 votes Speaks: English*, French Studies: Hindi, Bengali | Message 28 of 59 03 September 2013 at 7:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I have been working on Bengali for FOUR years reading books in a private class. I have a list of 12,000 words, half
with sentences. My grammar is lousy! Back to the drawing board! 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| patrickwilken Senior Member Germany radiant-flux.net Joined 4535 days ago 1546 posts - 3200 votes Studies: German | Message 29 of 59 03 September 2013 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||
That interesting. Can you estimate how many books you've read? How many pages/words? Are these "adult" books, graded readers, children's books? Do you supplement your reading, with films and tv? Do you do a lot of speaking with natives? 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| darkwhispersdal Senior Member Wales Joined 6042 days ago 294 posts - 363 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Ancient Greek, French, Italian, Spanish, Russian, Mandarin, Japanese, Latin | Message 30 of 59 03 September 2013 at 9:05pm | IP Logged | ||
What books do you use? and how useful has your Hindi study been while you have studied Bengali? 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4830 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 31 of 59 04 September 2013 at 12:51am | IP Logged | ||
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@Cristina,
My thinking on this has changed radically since I started learning Welsh with SSiW Log This is a totally audio based course, with no reading, writing, revision, homework, or formal grammar whatsoever. It is also aimed four-square at everyday colloquial language. There are 3 courses each containing (I think) about 36 lessons of about 30 minutes each, plus optional daily listening and speaking practices of 5 minutes each. I believe that if a student goes through all 3 courses fairly diligently (and after getting a goodway through course 1, speaking it as much as possible, and listening to Welsh language radio is also strongly encouraged), they are usually reckoned to be airly fluent in the spoken language. They may still lbig gaps in their vocabulary, but they should be thoroughly competent in the structures of the language, i.e. they will end up knowing the grammar, even if they don't know that they know it. It's a bit like the "we is" vs "we are" argument. We English 1st-language speakers probably learn the correct form before we go to school, but our parents never ever talked about the rules. We just learned that by example and repetition. I used to be a grammar bug, especially in German. I used to go to bed with the thick "Hammer Grammer", and still enjoy reading it (either for interest, or if I'm writing something formally). But on the whole, I don't think studying grammar has made be a better speaker of German. I would probably be a much better speaker if I'd just gone out and spoken more, made loads of mistakes, and had them corrected by natives, and spent less stime studying grammar. I suspect that in due course, I will start buying Welsh grammar books as well....the grammar bug is hard to kill completely, but for the moment, I am almost completely "ignoring" it. I don't mean I'm deliberately breaking the rules ... I know for example that certain words mutate or soften after "i", and I try to get those right (according to what I've heard, not according to some table), but I know I'll probably get them wrong quite a lot. And although they haven't gone on about it, I know there are masculine and feminine nouns, not that we learn them as such, but in time, I know that certain constructions will change according to gender. Would it help to learn the gender with the noun? Well, why bother? Why not just learn which construction form goes with which noun. At some point I'll realise "ah yes, "cath", that's feminine, that's why it's like that". But it doesn't really matter: I just have to remember to soften the "c" when used with the definite article (I think...). @Medulin: From what I have been told, I think Welsh is one of those language where the written form has deviated from the spoken form quite a bit. This is probably a reflection of it almost having died out, and then it having been vigorously revived in the post-war years. 6 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| s_allard Triglot Senior Member Canada Joined 5432 days ago 2704 posts - 5425 votes Speaks: French*, English, Spanish Studies: Polish | Message 32 of 59 06 September 2013 at 3:08pm | IP Logged | ||
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Although we've had this discussion before, the subject is very important to all of us here at HTLAL. Most of us
would agree that learning a language implies acquiring a grammar or the grammar of the language. This is basically a set of rules that tell us how to put the components of the language in the correct order. Keep in mind that "correct order" can be a dialectal variety and can differ considerably between spoken and written varieties. The real question is how to acquire grammar. Formal study or by an informal, intuitive or natural process through sheer exposure. One reason for studying grammar formally is that it should speed up the acquisition process by providing an analytical view of the language. So, for example a conjugation table gives you a big picture of how a verb work. This may be more efficient than trying to reconstruct intuitively the same verb system just by speaking and being corrected. For me grammar books are like dictionaries. Rather than trying to reconstruct the meaning of a word from context, I can just look it up and get the meaning right away. A good grammar book, in my mind, can really make learning faster because it explains how the language works. But I'm also a fan of learning by massive output and correction. just like Solfrid. It's just that for me a quick detour through a grammar lesson can provide insiight into the the workings of the language. The real problem is that most grammar books are terrible. First of all, there is the terminology that one must learn. I sometimes find that more challenging than understanding the language rules themselves. The other problem is that the vast majority of grammars are prescriptive and biased towards the written and standard language. We have few teaching grammars of the spoken language. So, most grammars don't teach what people really say but what the authors think people should say. Teachers understandably want to teach "proper" grammar and gravitate towards literary sources. These teachers are loathe to teach the grammar of the spoken language because working with transcriptions of real conversations is very difficult. In the end I think some sort of compromise is necessary. Some of us may like more formal grammar and some more learning by just doing. But the what counts is the end results Edited by s_allard on 06 September 2013 at 5:35pm 4 persons have voted this message useful |
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