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Not Studying Grammar | ||
Tags: Natural method | Grammar | ||
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 Language Learning Forum : General discussion |  | |
| Qaanaaq Newbie United States Joined 3935 days ago 14 posts - 25 votes Speaks: English* | Message 1 of 89 11 August 2013 at 2:20am | IP Logged | ||
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I love languages and studying them, but I've had a few interesting experiences lately.
-------- - I took a Hebrew class in college, and a few months ago met a native Hebrew speaker. I was talking to him about binyanim (verb conjugation system), and he laughed me off, saying he didn't know any of the rules, and "just used them without thinking". - I was talking to my mother about Yiddish grammar (she's a native speaker). Yiddish has three genders, and she confessed to me that she didn't know what a grammatical gender was. I've seen her speaking fluent Yiddish rapid-fire to Hasidim, and yet she was completely unaware of the actual differences between der/di/dos. - I took an intensive Spanish course in Guatemala. I found that studying the grammar drills was somewhat beneficial, but actually speaking the language with natives gave me far more insight. ...Of all the languages I've studied, I've spent the least amount of time with grammar on Spanish, yet I speak Spanish the best. -------- The basic moral of the story is that native speakers never study grammar- they just learn the language. I never once thought about deemphasizing grammar when studying a foreign language. I've broken my head trying to cram in German grammar, and still to this day can barely read a newspaper auf Deutsch. So my question is this: if I try and learn like a child, will this yield better results? Just have fun with it, never (or rarely) study "rules", never look at charts. I realize my brain is adult now (23), so I would NOT make the same neural connections a child would, but it'd be interesting to try this. I'd really like to get German down pat, since it was the first foreign language I properly studied (I've later learned others to much higher fluency). So I got a children's German picture book from the library, with 1000+ words and very little grammar (explained extremely simply when it does appear). It comes with audio too. My plan is to get through this book, then read some German comic books, then children's books with plots I know well. I'd eventually watch movies/shows with which I'm familiar, dubbed, and without subtitles. Has anyone learned a language to fluency or near-fluency without getting into the technicalities? Just watching movies, reading children's literature, advancing to higher literature, etc? Would this work for a language with extremely complicated grammar and few English cognates, e.g. Hungarian? Edited by Qaanaaq on 11 August 2013 at 2:22am 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Darklight1216 Diglot Senior Member United StatesRegistered users can see my Skype Name Joined 4911 days ago 411 posts - 639 votes  Speaks: English*, French Studies: German | Message 2 of 89 11 August 2013 at 3:28am | IP Logged | ||
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I disagree with the moral of your story. I studied English grammar for many years.
Personally, I'm not a fan of limiting myself in my language studies. If I have access to movies, I watch them, if I know speakers I speak to them, if my library has grammar books I check them out. So my biased advice would be to spend at least little time studying grammar. If you find it to be helpful, continue; if it's just painful, stop (at least for now). I have never learned a foreign language to the point that it meets my definition of fluent, but you might want to take a moment to consider what you want to get out of your language studies. If you want to sound very educated as you speak German, then I would imagine you might need to study grammar (as I assume most educated Germans do), but if that's not particularly important then you might not need to stress it. You may end up saying the German equivalent of "I dranked the juice and then I runnded down the street" for a little while if you only take the childlike approach, but that wouldn't be the end of the world. Edited by Darklight1216 on 11 August 2013 at 3:34am 8 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Fuenf_Katzen Diglot Senior Member United States notjustajd.wordpress Joined 4180 days ago 337 posts - 476 votes Speaks: English*, German Studies: Polish, Ukrainian, Afrikaans | Message 3 of 89 11 August 2013 at 3:29am | IP Logged | ||
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My extremely personal opinion is that this probably depends, to a certain extent, on the language in question and how much exposure you have to it generally. I don't think language learning needs to be (or even should be) strongly divided between grammar study/communicating with native speakers/using native materials. I know some people have learned grammar-heavy languages with very little overt grammar study, but for me, I can't see how I would learn to speak Polish well if I didn't study grammar. I imagine I would become very frustrated and think I could have had a much better understanding much sooner had I just taken the time to learn at least part of it. That said, I also haven't been surrounded by Polish and hearing and seeing Polish for most of my life like I have with, say, Spanish (which, even though I don't speak, I have a surprisingly decent passive knowledge just from years of being exposed to it). That probably makes a greater difference than we might even realize.
Now, I will say, I've changed my opinion somewhat as my German has progressed. I no longer think you "need" to study things such as prepositions as much. Things like that eventually become natural by hearing or seeing it enough. Cases I think still need to be studied on their own, and they take some time to get used to, but they don't have to be insurmountable. Sometimes maybe the reason we have trouble with a grammar concept is that we haven't seen examples of it in context. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| casamata Senior Member Joined 4073 days ago 237 posts - 377 votes Studies: Portuguese | Message 4 of 89 11 August 2013 at 3:35am | IP Logged | ||
When you say that you speak Spanish the best, do you mean that you speak it the most grammatically correct? Or do you mean that you speak it the most fluidly or with the richest vocabulary and idioms? Personally, I think you have to be able to teach the language at a high level to really understand and *know* the language. Being able to explain concepts and teach them well is a higher level of knowledge than just speaking correctly most of the time, in my opinion. I always respond to the question whether grammar is important that a mix of informal practice and concentrated grammar is the best. You can speak very fluidly and make yourself understood but speak incorrectly. Just look at the millions of immigrants in the US that learned English as adults and never took classes. A lot of them never learned how to speak correctly due to lack of classes and, even more importantly, little grammar study. I guess that some people can notice all the grammatical rules without studying them, but to me it is the same. In Spanish, for example, you can commit to memory a very limited (like 15 endings) amount of rules for gender or can just try to remember the gender of every word. (thousands and thousands of words) Of course, most people will notice that words that end in "ma, pa, or ta" are masculine but not always! But I have met Americans in Spain that understand everything and speak very fluently due to many years living abroad but commit the same basic grammatical mistakes because they never studied the grammar. 1 person has voted this message useful | |||
| berabero89 Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 4453 days ago 101 posts - 137 votes Speaks: English, Amharic* Studies: Spanish, Japanese, French | Message 5 of 89 11 August 2013 at 3:57am | IP Logged | ||
I agree that explicitly studying too much grammar is bad, but overall, there are many grammar rules better learned through explicit instruction than context. Grammar is essential to the understanding of a language, and I don't think that you can get away without studying it forever. Maybe if you were completely immersed in the language for years without any use of other languages (the way you learned your first language), you could manage it, but other than that, I think it would really take a genius to learn languages without grammar study. You said that your mother didn't know Yiddish cases, yet used them all properly. This is common among native speakers of a language, but who don't learn grammar rules explicitly, yet I am quite sure that your mother could correct a learner of Yiddish who used feminine instead of neuter. To get to the same level, a foreign learner of Yiddish would probably have to learn the differences between these genders, but after a certain point, the gender of words could be figured out by context. I really think that that is the point of grammar study--to get up to a level where you have a firm grounding in the language and let context take care of the rest. 4 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| Serpent Octoglot Senior Member Russian Federation serpent-849.livejour Joined 6408 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 6 of 89 11 August 2013 at 4:48am | IP Logged | ||
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Well, there's AJATT and antimoon and the creators of the sites, as well as people passionate about their ideas. But if you are capable of understanding grammar (some people just don't get it no matter what), there's no need to exclude it entirely.
I don't like explicit grammar study either nowadays. Finnish has spoiled me, it has an amazing grammar :) But for me the biggest issue is how the textbook author is "holding my hand", explaining things that are already obvious to me as a linguist and aspiring polyglot. Nowadays I look up the grammar when I don't understand something specific, or when I'm trying to produce a sentence and no matter how much I simplify it I can't make it grammatically correct. Sometimes it's just much easier to get an explanation than to compare ten sentences and still be unable to figure out the difference. And yeah, I agree with others that your conclusion is wrong. Of course it was beneficial to speak with the natives, that's one activity that you could do much easier in Guatemala than at home. But would you be able to talk to them if you didn't already know at least some grammar, whether through drills or exposure? If you haven't yet, check out Assimil. It's all about absorbing a language rather than learning actively. Assimil definitely has tons of success stories. @Fünf Katzen: it depends on your native language too :) I've not studied almost any Polish grammar :-))) 5 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| luke Diglot Senior Member United States Joined 7016 days ago 3133 posts - 4351 votes Speaks: English*, Spanish Studies: Esperanto, French | Message 7 of 89 11 August 2013 at 10:04am | IP Logged | ||
For learning irregularities in a language, such as the fact that words of Greek origin often are masculine although they end in "ma" was helpful for me, even though I hadn't studied Greek. Just knowing that there was a class of words that had an exceptional gender and the nature of it has kept me on my toes con tal problemas. So, although I am sympathetic to and use a grammar light approach, I try to study more grammar than I like. I also recognize that I could speak my native language extremely well without ever studying grammar. I didn't really learn much of my native grammar until I started studying Spanish. I too, feel the pull with foreign languages that comes from the draw of using native materials rather than slogging through more grammar and lessons. 2 persons have voted this message useful | |||
| LifeLanguage Newbie United Kingdom lifelanguage.org/ Joined 3935 days ago 2 posts - 8 votes | Message 8 of 89 11 August 2013 at 11:47am | IP Logged | ||
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Grammar is essential. Edited by LifeLanguage on 11 August 2013 at 11:48am 7 persons have voted this message useful |
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