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How to learn grammar without translations | ||
Tags: Translation | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : Learning Techniques, Methods & Strategies |  | |
| gwyner Pentaglot Newbie United States Joined 5762 days ago 23 posts - 75 votes  Speaks: English*, FrenchC1, GermanC1, ItalianB1, Russian Studies: Hungarian | Message 1 of 27 09 March 2013 at 4:24pm | IP Logged | ||
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I've recently written about a method for learning grammar with Anki. It gets you a *lot* of mileage out of every
example sentence you break down, and in practice, it's a lot of fun. Enjoy! Link 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6409 days ago 9753 posts - 15779 votes 4 sounds Speaks: Russian*, English, FinnishC1, Latin, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese Studies: Danish, Romanian, Polish, Belarusian, Ukrainian, Croatian, Slovenian, Catalan, Czech, Galician, Dutch, Swedish | Message 2 of 27 09 March 2013 at 5:44pm | IP Logged | ||
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Hm. I'd say there's a difference between the act of translation, the usage of translations and the usage of dictionaries. They all have their own dangers, but especially the last two get some unnecessary criticism. Translating something on your own is an exercise and an easy way for the teacher to control your understanding... the rest are basically aids and should not be stolen!
The main problem is of course that nothing will stop you from thinking in your native language as you look at a picture. And that looking for pics will take time. But of course SRS and specifically cloze deletion is a good method for learning the grammar. And your method is better than Rosetta Stone. In general it's far more important how much L2 you hear/read OUTSIDE your "sessions" than during them. 100% L2 for two hours a week is useless if the rest of your week is 100% L1. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
 Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6515 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 3 of 27 10 March 2013 at 10:58am | IP Logged | ||
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Grammars in another language than the one which is the object discussed are often better than those written in the same language because they mostly are written for learners - those in the same language often are aimed at native speakers, who have quite different priorities and problems.
So the question of translations is mainly something that concerns the examples. And here I would definitely say that translations should follow the sentence structure of the original example as closely as possible - the aim is clearly not to provide information about some non-linguistic topic, but to illustrate a mechanism in the target language. Some language guides like the German Kauderwelsch series give two translations: a word-for-word translation and a freer one. The first one tells you how the original text is constructed, and the second one suggests what you might have said in a similar situation. And those two things are very different. I have written much more about hyperliteral translations in my Guide to Language Learning part II, which lies buried somewhere in the misty cellars of this mighty forum. Edited by Iversen on 20 March 2013 at 12:34pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4519 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 4 of 27 20 March 2013 at 11:48am | IP Logged | ||
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The thing with grammar is is that you need to develop some personal understanding of how grammarese works and how you apply this to every language. Iversen has written at length about this and I agree with pretty much everything he has said, although I don't necessarily completely adapt to his terminology; I use what works for me and that's more important.
What grammar is, is simply a way to systematically describe the setup of a language - it's a sentence construction manual. Most people don't want to read the goddamn manual when they're setting up an appliance (in this case the appliance is your brain spitting out a foreign language, let's say Hungarian). I don't like doing grammar with Anki because what Anki does is in fact a more effective way of brute force memorization (which is useful for vocabulary which, let's face it, requires memorization) but that is not how you should approach grammar unless you are aiming to simply chunk and get a base in the language (I would recommend laying off grammar in the beginning unless you're like me and you have the grammars of seven languages behind you and you can tell direct objects from indirect ones etc, and even *I* ignore most grammar - I use grammar as a tool to explain why I should phrase a sentence in one way and not another. And there are still many details of grammar in certain languages that I cannot always reproduce properly, Russian aspect is a good example). Grammar is the mathematics of a language and you should approach it as if you were doing mathematics and not as if you were studying vocabulary. Mathematics is not a set of formulae for you to memorise (although you'll need to use some to memorise a few conjugation patterns, for sure) but you can engineer sentence construction to a very large degree. Here are things I look for in the grammar of a new language when I'm studying: - what groups of words are important? Verbs, nouns, adjectives, prepositions, articles (if you have them!) etc Note that these demarcations DO NOT HAVE TO CORRESPOND WITH English/YOUR NATIVE LANGUAGE. Make sure to realise that every language in this is an entity unto its own, and each of them prefers a different setup! For example, Romanian may be a romance language but it uses a lot of subjunctive constructions where other Romance languages use an infinitive, and you need to know that this is a Romanian construction expressing the same idea as a French infinitive: (vreau sa prind, je veux prendre; but lit. je veux que je prenne, but this construction cannot exist as such in French!))). - in what order do you put words? Verb first or last? Prepositions or postpositions? Articles before or after? - Do words change form? If so, what does a form change mean and when should I use it? What is the semantic implication of morphology. Reciting a table by heart is great, and it's good to memorize the forms, but you should know how to USE these forms and that requires understanding the semantic implication of, for example. a genitive (which implies a sort of possession of an object or some other relationship). -What semantic MOODS can verbs take? Indicative? Imperative? Subjunctive? Gossip tense? From this you build your machinery to speak Dutch, English, French, whatever. This machinery will be buggy at first and you'll have to realise that you need to debug this system frequently. Only regular debugging gets you a functioning program. And yes, you'll get frequent error messages but you can still get decent output at the beginning if you know how to build. It is important to understand what these terms mean and HOW YOU USE THEM IN A PRACTICAL CONTEXT. Memorizing the fact that verb x is perfective in Russian is not enough if you do not know that using a present-tense conjugation for this verb implies a future semantic meaning. It also does not help if you don't know that this precludes using actual future conjugations with perfective verbs in Russian! Where translations come in here is that they provide a point of comparison with what you are doing in a new language, and that can be quite useful if it's similar in the base language and in the target language. For example if I compare Dutch and German syntax structure, it's very easy to compare them because they're basically two different operative versions of one similar base build. It's just two versions of Apple OS with some differing functionalities according to that language's preference. Then it's a huge help to know one because you can basically fix the details to get to the other. I don't need to be explained a strong verb in Swedish - Dutch has strong verbs so I use a one-to-one correspondence on the topic and then I memorise the vowel changes that are different or illogical. But sometimes it doesn't correspond. Hebrew conjugates prepositions - there's no point explaining that in English because English doesn't know what that is. You can indicate it by using a dash: of-me, to imply that "of me" is written as one word in Hebrew with the pronoun conjugated using a personal suffix (shel becoming shli), and then you use a bit of deductive logic to work out what Hebrew does (or if you, like me, happened to know that Breton uses that methodology as well then you use THAT as your analogy). Now, you can do without all this, but it takes much more trial and error and if you can efficiently shortcut with some logic after you've bought yourself a whole set of useful lego bricks (get the lego bricks first! First learn a good decent set of vocab before you start playing and toying, or you will not have ANY context to work with and grammar basically DEMANDS you have context). Edited by tarvos on 20 March 2013 at 11:55am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| LaughingChimp Senior Member Czech Republic Joined 4511 days ago 346 posts - 594 votes Speaks: Czech* | Message 5 of 27 20 March 2013 at 7:06pm | IP Logged | ||
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tarvos: I think you're overcomplicating it. Grammar is nothing more than a set of patterns that you have to memorize. Languages are not mathematics and treating them as mathematics is not useful.
2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Iversen Super Polyglot Moderator Denmark berejst.dk Joined 6515 days ago 9078 posts - 16473 votes Speaks: Danish*, French, English, German, Italian, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, Swedish, Esperanto, Romanian, Catalan Studies: Afrikaans, Greek, Norwegian, Russian, Serbian, Icelandic, Latin, Irish, Lowland Scots, Indonesian, Polish, Croatian Personal Language Map | Message 6 of 27 20 March 2013 at 7:56pm | IP Logged | ||
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LaughingChimp: I think you are undercomplicating the idea of learning grammar as a set of patterns. If you do that the set will be of astronomical size.
The idea behind morphology is to put everything that can be expressed as tables in table form, and it's feasible (though foolish) to learn that by heart purely by rote memorizing. Morphology is the simple part of grammar. But already at the syntactical level we are in territory where you sometimes can make tables and lists, but mostly it is more reasonable to express things as more or less comprehensive rules, which you of course can internalize without learning the nomenclature if you get enough input ... which means extracting the mechanisms from tons of unorganized input. But in reality you don't just learn patterns, you learn methods to construct those patterns, which is why learning grammar is so smart. And then there are of course cases which you have to learn case by case, and the sum of those cases we call idiomatics. And to avoid one common objection: No, you can't speak a language just because you have learnt a lot of grammar and words. It is a good basis, but to activate your knowledge you have to use it actively. Edited by Iversen on 21 March 2013 at 1:13pm 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| tarvos Super Polyglot Winner TAC 2012 Senior Member China likeapolyglot.wordpr Joined 4519 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 7 of 27 20 March 2013 at 8:11pm | IP Logged | ||
Yes. A set of patterns that is quite astronomical to do all at once, which is why you simplify it using rules. And yes, grammar is almost pure logic. My engineering constructions seem to work very well for me. I like being able to derive and guess solutions instead of having to memorise them :) Edited by tarvos on 20 March 2013 at 8:14pm 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Марк Senior Member Russian Federation Joined 4868 days ago 2096 posts - 2972 votes Speaks: Russian* | Message 8 of 27 21 March 2013 at 7:34am | IP Logged | ||
Unfortunately not. 1 person has voted this message useful |
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