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A Vocabulary/Grammar Balance | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| maydayayday Pentaglot Senior Member United Kingdom Joined 5224 days ago 564 posts - 839 votes  Speaks: English*, German, Italian, SpanishB2, FrenchB2 Studies: Arabic (Egyptian), Russian, Swedish, Turkish, Polish, Persian, Vietnamese Studies: Urdu | Message 9 of 14 23 August 2010 at 3:58pm | IP Logged | ||
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The problem for me was I felt that I needed/wanted to be able to communicate immediately. (I had absolutely no German at that point as I had sadly dodged the subject at school.) By knowing some 500 phrases and perhaps another 500 vocabulary items I had a reasonable toolkit to start with and more importantly could communicate. This is very much akin to the strategy the Irish polyglot uses. I had plenty of time to learn better grammar.
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| Arekkusu Hexaglot Senior Member Canada bit.ly/qc_10_lec Joined 5386 days ago 3971 posts - 7747 votes Speaks: English, French*, GermanC1, Spanish, Japanese, Esperanto Studies: Italian, Norwegian, Mandarin, Romanian, Estonian | Message 10 of 14 23 August 2010 at 5:02pm | IP Logged | ||
I second that. While the various verb forms certainly constitute an obstacle, the advantage is that switching to a different tense or different person requires very little adaptation. In other words, you can take a sentence and change the subject or the tense with virtually no need to change anything else. You can learn almost all verbs forms despite having little vocabulary. Here is an exercice you can easily do in the bus, or even when driving or walking: take a few structures or sentences you know to be correct and practice changing tense and person orally, while you visualize the event, keeping a conjugation table close by to check. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| galindo Bilingual Triglot Senior Member United States Joined 5212 days ago 142 posts - 248 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish*, Japanese Studies: Korean, Portuguese | Message 11 of 14 23 August 2010 at 7:47pm | IP Logged | ||
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I agree with those who said that they focus on the vocabulary after learning some basic grammar. Once you know more vocabulary, it's easy to listen to and read lots of material and pick up the grammar structures from that. You can't do that with a very limited vocabulary.
I really don't think you can learn advanced grammar or have a deep understanding of grammar rules UNLESS you've already learned enough vocabulary to be able to expose yourself to lots of different material and internalize the patterns and structures. Even if you memorize an entire grammar book, it won't help unless you've seen those things "in the wild" before. There are some people who try to learn grammar purely through immersion/input, but I think it's good to use a grammar book at the beginning, and to look up things you're confused about. It really will just make a lot more sense once you've seen it used hundreds of times; the grammar book can give examples, but they won't be meaningful unless it's something you're already familiar with. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Cainntear Pentaglot Senior Member Scotland linguafrankly.blogsp Joined 6016 days ago 4399 posts - 7687 votes Speaks: Lowland Scots, English*, French, Spanish, Scottish Gaelic Studies: Catalan, Italian, German, Irish, Welsh | Message 12 of 14 23 August 2010 at 9:19pm | IP Logged | ||
Where does grammar end and vocabulary begin? There's a bit of a fuzzy grey area called "phraseology". At what level is a phrase a multiple word vocabulary item and at what level is it a "rule"? It's not always clear cut. I would definitely say that there's a clear rule in "If I was you, I would do something", and "whatever you do, don't tell her!" follows a pattern too, but that pattern is a sum of smaller rules. I would certainly aim to have all the elementary rules as early as possible, but I'm not sure where I stand on these compound rules. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Legend Newbie Australia Joined 5534 days ago 38 posts - 41 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Italian | Message 13 of 14 24 August 2010 at 7:49am | IP Logged | ||
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I am so glad I started this discussion.
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| josiah Newbie United States Joined 5994 days ago 12 posts - 12 votes Speaks: English* Studies: Arabic (Egyptian) Studies: Spanish | Message 14 of 14 27 August 2010 at 4:12am | IP Logged | ||
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What books would you recommend for learning basic grammar?
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