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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 |  | |
| schoenewaelder Diglot Senior Member Germany Joined 5558 days ago 759 posts - 1197 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German, Spanish, Dutch | Message 33 of 59 06 September 2013 at 3:54pm | IP Logged | ||
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Have you tried the Lingq site? I don't know if the material there is really sufficient to
learn a language without specific grammar instruction, but they are all firm (practically militant) believers in the principle. Edited by schoenewaelder on 06 September 2013 at 3:55pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 5054 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 34 of 59 06 September 2013 at 5:51pm | IP Logged | ||
What is "proper Russian"? Of course Russians do not always follow grammar books, but that can be said about every language. 3 persons have 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 35 of 59 06 September 2013 at 6:22pm | IP Logged | ||
More than that, teaching grammars are simplified. They are designed to be used with a competent teacher and a lot of input, so complexities and different levels of speech are added gradually. You've probably made the experience yourself, when you try out newly learnt words or grammar points, and your teacher or native speaking friend has this certain slump in their shoulder and a gaze that doesn't focus on you for a moment, or similar body language, and you just know they are thinking "this is not how a native speaker would have said it, but it's technically not wrong, so I won't correct him/her this time" I assume authors of learning material often favour simplicity of grammar rules over idiomacity, assuming a student at a certain level won't be able to deal with both at once. 3 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| montmorency Diglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 4826 days ago 2371 posts - 3676 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Danish, Welsh | Message 36 of 59 06 September 2013 at 9:26pm | IP Logged | ||
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Leading on from s_allard's recent post, and from some of my own thoughts, is the
question: If you mainly learn by massive input and output and correction, and if (like me with Welsh at the moment) you are only learning the spoken form of the language, assuming you do get to a good level with the spoken language, will you then be easily able to go on to both be competent, and also enjoy dealing with the written language? Since I am only doing it for a hobby, I won't have lost anything really if I find I can't cope all that well with the written language, or enjoy dealing with it, but others who are learning for more serious reasons may have a lot to lose if they put a great deal of effort and much time to becoming totally fluent, but then find they can't read a textbook or a technical manual or similar (I'm sure they'd cope with a newspaper though). Welsh also happens to be fairly "phonetic", which should help (even if it looks a bit horrific initially to the English-speaker, with all those y's and w's in unexpected places). It could be more of an issue in other languages. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| cpnlsn88 Triglot Groupie United Kingdom Joined 5035 days ago 63 posts - 112 votes Speaks: English*, German, French Studies: Spanish, Esperanto, Latin | Message 37 of 59 06 September 2013 at 10:28pm | IP Logged | ||
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I would upend this way of looking at a distinction between grammar and language. I think grammar is always an inherent part of language. If one says one can learn a language without learning grammar and say, speak and write OK (or even well) one will then have effectively learnt the grammar component just by exposure. That is to say in a given language native speakers (or writers) obey a given rule where it's different to other languages.
Of course, if the grammatical rule is identical or very similar in one's native grammar one would only need exposure to learn the rule.If the languages are very similar exposure could go a long way towards learning the grammar. Then again, there's grammar and there's grammar. There's the dry and complicated grammar of old - the grammmar and translate method - clearly not for everyone (possibly not for anyone). Grammar can though still be taught through content - e.g. sentences put side by side in singular or plural, or present and past. So one can effetively learn quite a lot of grammar without thinking one is doing it. I guess that's the mark of a well designed course. Irrespective of how one does it, if one comes to replciate the rules used by native speakers then by some process or other one has learned grammar effectively (even if one never opened a traditional grammar book or knowingly learned a grammatical rule). My slight reservation is that there are some areas of grammar that benefit from some greater degree of grammatical explanation. My view is that this differs by language. I find I need more grammar with German than Romance languages. Still really learning the grammar requires seeing the rule used a lot. I still need to learn irregular verb forms, irregular plurals and ... gender in German. 2 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 38 of 59 07 September 2013 at 7:59am | IP Logged | ||
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My dilemma is that learning grammar dose not translate into correct speech. There is no language where I
have learned so many grammar rules as in German. Germans laugh at me when I recite the prepositions that govern accusative or dative. If I am given a written test, I will answer all the questions correctly. When I turn around and speak I will however make many mistakes. In Spanish, where I learned no grammar until after being fluent already, I am complimented for my good grammar. I do not in any way deny that grammar is an important part of a language, I simply note that for me studying it does not help me. It helps me in learning grammar, but it does not help me in speaking correctly. I would really wish that it would. It seems so easy: You learn the rule, do a few exercises and " voila", you can say it correctly. But I can't. If I did not know that I am pretty good at learning languages in other ways, I would have had to assume that I am down right stupid. Or perhaps I am down right stupid, but with a knack for learning like a child. Perhaps I just now discovered a whole new diagnosis: the Cristina syndrome, for people who have a deficiency in their brain, so that they cannot learn languages from grammar. :-) My heart goes out to people who are wired like me, and who go through school believing that they are rubbish at languages, just because the grammar focus does nothing for them. If put in an immersion situation, they might do incredibly well. I think my mantra will for ever be just this: We all learn in different ways. And we need to find our own right way. I shake my head in disbelief at people who have been in an immersion situation for 5-10-15 years, and still speak their TL really badly, with horrible grammar and worse pronunciation. I try not to think "How stupid can they be"? But for them, some structured grammar studying and pronunciation exercises might be the right thing. We all learn in different ways. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4705 days ago 5310 posts - 9399 votes Speaks: Dutch*, English, Swedish, French, Russian, German, Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Afrikaans Studies: Greek, Modern Hebrew, Spanish, Portuguese, Czech, Korean, Esperanto, Finnish | Message 39 of 59 07 September 2013 at 8:42am | IP Logged | ||
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I don't think you are the only one.
1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| Via Diva Diglot Senior Member Russian Federation last.fm/user/viadivaRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4232 days ago 1109 posts - 1427 votes Speaks: Russian*, English Studies: German, Italian, French, Swedish, Esperanto, Czech, Greek | Message 40 of 59 07 September 2013 at 9:10am | IP Logged | ||
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I should've write here before...
Grammar was never one of my strongest skill. It started in school, at 7th-8th grade when I noticed that it's quite hard for me to work with sentences. We still had dictations as a main form of control work: first part was the dictation itself and then teacher picked some sentences for us to work with. I always got confused when determine the role of the word in sentence. It's easy to find subject and predicative, but even in this cause could be problems. We had to memorize lots of incomplete sentences, lots of different complex part of sentences, etc. All of this is important when you're dealing with syntax, which never was easy in Russian. We got a vicious circle - overwhelming with hard constructions and unsureness with easy and plain ones. This unsureness is still here and I really do not know what to do but to avoid unknown/forgotten constructions. When such thing happens in relatively free language like Russian, with no strict word order, it's not that bad. Somehow I manage to write in blogs in Russian and I do not get much of complaints about mistakes. My style is quite hard to read, but it's grammatically correct anyway, some even like that :) And in English situation only gets worse. First of all, English grammar is usually explained to us applying the rules of Russian grammar. For example, Complex Object in English is somewhat like Russian subordinate clause with question "как?", therefore it should be translated that way only. And I'm tending to play with structure in some cases, which leads me to bad marks. Plus, all of this is under control and if I fail something I have to work it out and improve my grammar. Otherwise... well, I never was eager to know what would happen otherwise, so I really tried to work theme out to pass tests and other works without problems. For a month or so we had different teacher in university, she sometimes demanded to tell her the exact grammar rule. Many unprepared students just failed and they had to deal with bad mark with the teacher personally. I forgot the details as a some kind of nightmare (забыла, как страшный сон :) ), but I'm sure that I had some problems in that time too. Yesterday at our university English lesson we started last grammar topic (we were told that it's last topic and there would be only some details afterwards), called Verb Infinitive (hehe). Nothing worth attention except that our teacher tried to make parallels with Participle and Gerund. That was the first lesson after summer break. I'm not sure that everybody actually did realize what Gerund is! I only remembered that Gerund can be translated into Russian as a noun or verb, but I didn't remember any of roles which Gerund can take in sentence. But this was the subject of all grammar talks. Now I had to review all these topics to get ready to some grammar test. It'll not come very soon, but it seems that I can't deal with Verb Infinitive without clear knowledge about the rest. And this is what I really hate in official language study. I nearly hate grammar when I'm required to know that. Right now I'm interested in German grammar, it's really reminds me of a constructor (as it said in one of the methods), but once I had to pass German exam I would've hate grammar. P.S. I'm going to post it lang-8, it would've been funny to find out amount of grammar mistakes that I've made here :) 2 persons have voted this message useful |
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