How much grammar do you need to study when you learn a language?
The precise answer, I suppose, is none — if you learned grammar for your native language at all, you almost certainly learned it after the fact (I barely touched the stuff until I was in 9th grade myself). You clearly can learn a language without explicitly studying grammar. So perhaps the better question is: how much grammar should you study when you learn a language.
A couple of folks whose opinions I respect say none at all, but I’m not so sure. The biggest argument for not learning grammar is, as I mentioned above, our own native language abilities, all of which were learned without any explicit grammar instruction. Why, though, do children learn purely through observation?
Because they have to. They don’t have the mental apparatuses to do anything else. Adults are different, though (and no, I’m not talking about the critical perdiod) — we’ve already gained (at great expense, I should add) the facilities to make sense of the world at a level far above that of a baby. Why do you want to throw all of that away and go back to your infant days?
The thing is, memorizing tables of declensions an conjugations clearly doesn’t work either. There is, however, a happy medium, I believe. In my studies, grammar serves two purpose:
- It clears up hard to understand sentences. I found, particularly early on, that there were sentences in which I understood every word and yet couldn’t make heads nor tails of the meaning. Generally the issue was not understanding the role that some of the words played in the sentence, and having a grammar book on hand made figuring it out a lot easier.
- It gives me things to look for. Just like when you learn a new word and suddenly begin seeing it everywhere, I find that when I learn a new construction it suddenly begins to jump out at me in things that I hear and read.
For me, grammar is just another piece of the puzzle. I don’t bother memorizing rules, but having read the rules helps to prime my brain for what I’m going to see, and that lets me use my hard won adult pattern recognition abilities to acquire things a bit faster than I did the first time, when I was still in diapers.
Related posts:
- You’re doing it wrong
- Thoughts on SRS content selection
- The messy in-between
- Maintaining one language while learning another
- Repetitio est mater studiorum
{ 12 comments… read them below or add one }
I’m glad to see that I’m not the only person out there who values grammar at some level. There is so much hate out there for grammar, but as an adult foreign language learner grammar has helped me so much. I don’t doubt that all of the computerized memorization techniques help, buy when trying to form my own utterances on the spot and under pressure (i.e. work), even having a basic grasp of grammar has helped me so much when I’ve been thrown into the fire.
I think the hate is mostly misplaced hate for the way that grammar is traditionally taught, which I agree is pretty crappy. The place for grammar, for me, is the difference between being told in a physics lecture how things work and doing an experiment on your own — the latter is a lot more fun and sticks better, but sometimes the former helps you know what to look for, making the latter more meaningful.
Thus far in my Chinese studies, I’ve taken a pretty lazy approach to grammar. I listen to or read the rule, maybe do a couple of exercises applying it, then move on to the next thing. I have placed more emphasis on acquiring words than on learning grammar. My attitude has been similar to the one you refer to above–that I never really studied English grammar, so I’ll just keep half-assing on Chinese grammar and hope that it sinks in. That seems to be happening to a degree–when I do homework/quizzes with grammar questions, I do pretty well, and usually just because “it sounds right,” not because I could explain the rule involved.
But yesterday I met a Chinese-Canadian woman who had a pretty good recommendation that I am trying to apply: Take a useful grammar construction, and make a few sentences with it. Carry those sentences around in your head with you, and drill them in by inserting new words wherever you can (swapping in a new subject/object, for example). It’s nothing that hasn’t been done before, but I think for my purposes could be quite useful. It gives me a place to plug in the new words that I learn (and, all too often, quickly forget) while also reinforcing the grammar rule or construction. I’m beginning to think that a little more attention to grammar could help me move everything else along much more quickly.
That’s an excellent idea. I wrote a bit about it — I call them “hangers” (i.e., things to hang new words and phrases on) — before and plan on writing again later, because doing that has helped and continues to help my Chinese and, now, Cantonese. I found it especially useful for making sense of all of those coordinating conjunctions.
Finally someone reasonable!
You´re absolutely right, I myself study grammar in a way similar to you. To aid comprehension. As a tool, not as an obstacle.
I’d say it is good to start out a language with a traditional course such as The Teach yourself Series, but to take it really fast, more like skimming it and I either skip the exercices or just go straight to the answers.
I usually spend only a few weeks on this and then go to the native content, if then you need some grammar you can use a reference grammar, no more methods.
I am a big fan of your blog and your approach. You are talking about Chinese, however, when you write: “memorizing tables of declensions an conjugations clearly doesn’t work . . . .” I am learning French, and with due respect, the notion of an adult’s mastering the French verbs, and especially the subjunctive, without memorizing tables of conjugations, lists of principal parts, and so on, strikes me as absurd.
Thanks for your comment, MCG, and your kind words!
I’ll admit I’ve never given French a shot. I found with German and Spanish, to the extent that I learned them, I certainly looked at the verb ending tables, and took note when I made a mistake, but I never memorized them in the sense of “column 3, row 2 ==.” Maybe that’s defining memorization too narrowly, though.
I suppose what I’m suggesting is something of a middle way — giving grammar its due, but at the same time not focusing on it and studying grammar for grammar’s sake.
Thank you for your kind message, John. It depends on what you mean by memorization, I suppose, and it also depends on how good at the language you expect to be. You seem to be setting your goals high.
Just a quick comment (I didn’t want to comment but can’t control myself
); I’m not saying you should ignore grammar entirely (heck, I’m using the grammar section of the Gente textbooks to get my grammar explanations from for Spanish), only in the beginning.
And learning verb tables for Spanish (or French, Italians, Portuguese, etc.) is bollocks. I don’t know a single person that actively studies verb tables for Spanish and is fluent. All I’ve seen is ‘lenguaje roto’; messed up language.
In the contemporary Spanish classroom in the US, grammar isn’t really taught until 3rd year of high school/2nd year university. Grammatical *functions* are practiced in the first year (how to talk about daily routines, how to talk about what you did last weekend, etc) which will demand certain tenses, but grammar study for the sake of grammatical knowledge doesn’t come along until later.
Now I was the third year Spanish teacher, teaching grammar, and I think I was good at it. At that point in student’s Spanish learning, once they had been exposed to a lot of concepts in Spanish, the grammar review course told them how to organize their knowledge of the language. I would always get students saying, “omg, why didn’t they teach us this from the beginning.” The answer is, because that way sucks.
Descriptive grammars are a fine way to reference and mentally organize a language once you already know it, but they are a terrible teaching tool. Grammar to me never made sense until I already knew the material. Grammar, in other words, should be a review–but not an intro. At least in Spanish.
Bravo! That’s exactly what I’m telling my classmates and teachers, but all say I’m a weird kid
. Krashen talks about this grammar first-approach. As soon as you study grammar before knowing the language it doesn’t make sense and you’ll make some kind of monitor for yourself. Everything you hear or want to say goes through that monitor. The effect? Slow and often messed up output. This while people that first learn how to speak naturally often do way better and are also better with grammar (my Spanish is practically error free and fluent, and I can still explain grammar because I started studying it after I became fluent, thus fixing small errors and learning how to say really complex things)
It seems to me that the key lines of division within grammar instruction (meaning syntax, word choice, usage, punctuation, and even spelling—a catch-all term that most English language-arts teachers use to describe the “stuff” that we “have to , but don’t want to” teach) have been drawn between those who favor part to whole and whole to part instruction. As a brief aside… isn’t this much akin to the graphophonic (phonics-based) and whole language reading debate? Anyway, here is my take on the assumptions of both positions:
Advocates of part to whole instruction believe that front-loading instruction in the discrete parts of language will best enable students to apply these parts to the whole process of writing. Following are the key components of this inductive approach.
1. Memorization of the key terminology and definitions of grammar to provide a common language of instruction.
2. Identification of grammatical constructions leads to application.
3. Familiarity with the rules of grammar leads to correct application.
4. Teaching the components of sentence construction leads to application.
5. Distrust of one’s own oral language as a grammatical filter .
Advocates of whole to part instruction believe that back-loading instruction in the discrete parts of language, as is determined by needs of the writing task, will best enable students to write fluently and meaningfully. Following are the key components of this deductive approach.
1. Minimal memorization of the key terminology and definitions of grammar and minimal practice in identification of grammatical constructions.
2. Connection to one’s oral language is essential to inform fluent and effective writing.
3. Reading and listening to exemplary literature and poetry provides the models that students need to mimic and revise as they develop their own writing style.
4. Minimal error analysis.
5. Teaching writing as a process with a focus on coherence will best enable students to apply the discreet parts such as subjects, predicates, parts of speech, phrases, clauses, sentences, and transitions to say something meaningful.
Of course, how teachers align themselves within the Great Grammar Debate (See http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/grammar_mechanics/the-great-grammar-debate/) is not necessarily an “either-or” decision. Most teachers apply bits and pieces of each approach to teaching grammar. I take a stab on how to integrate the inductive and deductive approaches in How to Integrate Grammar and Writing Instruction (See http://penningtonpublishing.com/blog/grammar_mechanics/how-to-integrate-grammar-and-writing-instruction/).