Barry Farber on learning grammar from the beginning

[USF_Fan]

I was skimming through a sample of Barry Farber's book "How to learn any language", and in his plan to learn a new language he recommends buying a condense and in depth book/textbook on the grammar right from the beginning. He recommends working through the first 5 chapters of the grammar, then working through a paragraph of a magazine, looking at a phrase book, and then doing Pimsleur or some other audio course. He recommends, actually, to start with only the grammar book first for the first 5 chapters, and then after that work through a few paragraphs of a newspaper, and then after some work with the newspaper take a look at the phrase book and audio course. I find his advice about studying the grammar puzzling, because from what I have read on this forum a lot of the very successful polyglots on here strongly recommend to not study the grammar in depth at the beginning stages. Rather, just have a very simple grammar book nearby as a reference every now and then while working on your main course or two.


For anyone who has read or is familiar with Barry Farber's recommendation on starting with studying the grammar, what do you think about his advice on studying the grammar right from the beginning? And what do you think about his approach to language learning in general?

[iguanamon]

Barry Farber, through his book "How To Learn Any Language", was an inspiration to me when I first embarked on my language-learning journey. I liked his multi-track approach and incorporated it, with some alteration, into my learning because it just made so much sense to me.

However, nobody, not Farber, not Lucca, not Professeor Arguelles, not Krashen, has (nor do I have) all the answers about the "right" way to do this- self-learning a second language. The hardest language a self-learner will ever have to learn is their first second language. There's a lot of mental resistance to learning a language to overcome.

Personally, I don't do five lessons of grammar first. I generally start with a course or two and at some point soon after, I have a go at parsing some short native text. If I've chosen a course well, it will contain sufficient grammar lessons within its lessons.

The main things, the most important aspects I believe, about learning a second language as an adult are being consistent with, and being persistent about, learning it. Even a bad course will teach a learner something. Quitting or being paralyzed by indecision over picking resources and establishing a routine usually leads to the learner not learning much at all.

Farber wrote his book pre-internet. FSI at that time was "Barrons" and it was not freely available. International phone calls where expensive, doing language exchanges (for people outside of major metropolitan areas) was practically impossible. Assimil was virtually unknown outside of France. Farber's flashcards were paper index cards and quite cumbersome to lug around and use. The Sony Walkman was an innovation at the time- probably five times as thick and heavy as a modern smart phone and much more awkward and clumsy to use as a language-learner. You could just about forget about watching an L2 series, ditto for listening to native audio (unless you had a shortwave radio), or doing a language exchange/hiring a private tutor.

In Farber's time, these assets weren't even imagined. So, he was fighting against the then conventional wisdom of foreign language education that existed at the time, which was classes, and formal dogmatic study. Native material required a lot of effort, money, travel, or access to a large library. This is what informed the book he wrote and what made it revolutionary. Farber took language-learning outside of the classroom, democratized it and showed his readers how they, too, could learn any language.

His introduction of native materials practically from the beginning was a radical departure from the CW at the time. His approach (with modifications), at least on this forum, has now almost become the mainstream. In fact, the pendulum seems to have swung the other way towards an imbalance of native materials outweighing formal study among some learners. I have watched this imbalance evolve over the last decade on the forum (old and new). It worries me when I see monolingual beginners who spend way more time watching Netflix (with English/L1 subs) and youtube videos than they do with getting down to the hard work of learning the language and assimilating grammar patterns.

I believe that if Farber were to write his book today, he would have incorporated the many modern tools that exist today. I wonder what he would have made of the free FSI/DLI/Cortina download courses; Duolinguo- which has become one of the default entries these days into self language-learning; Anki; subs2srs; parallel texts; LR; series; readlang; quizlet; twitter; facebook; youtube; kindle; podcasts; voip; this forum? My feeling is that he would have been able to distill the plethora of resources we have available today down to the essentials. He probably would have accepted "many paths" (as to resources) to learning a language as a beginner but my guess is that those paths would all have similar utility to a learner. In other words, I believe his multi-track approach would still be predominant but he would have made it much more efficient, and pleasurable, incorporating the best of what we have available today.

Farber's book, though very much outdated today, still holds relevance. He taught me how to use native materials in my learning. The book demystifies the often murky process of how to go about learning a language on one's own. In my opinion, his advice still lays a good foundation for learning a language. It's up to us what we plug into his formula to make it work,

[Cainntear]

I find his advice about studying the grammar puzzling, because from what I have read on this forum a lot of the very successful polyglots on here strongly recommend to not study the grammar in depth at the beginning stages.

And a lot of very successful polyglots here do recommend studying the grammar in-depth too. Curiously, one commercially successful polyglot who's name I don't care to mention doesn't recommend studying grammar in-depth... but studies the grammar of his chosen languages to great depth every time he starts a new language.

I'm in the grammar-early camp, and always have been. I've always felt that knowing what I'm looking for helps me see the patterns when I come across them in real use, and there's a school of thought in second language acquisition that goes by the name "the noticing hypothesis" that says you can't just absorb a new language unconsciously -- you have to pay specific attention to patterns to ever truly acquire them. Knowing grammar means I am more likely to recognise a pattern as something previously studied. I tried German with Duolingo without looking up the articles or the noun case endings first... it was hopeless. I started paying conscious attention to endings and gender and it got better... but it was still hit-and-miss. The rules I was trying to work out from examples were already written down by people who knew more about the language than me. Why should I reinvent the wheel?

[Iversen]

I find his advice about studying the grammar puzzling, because from what I have read on this forum a lot of the very successful polyglots on here strongly recommend to not study the grammar in depth at the beginning stages.

I'm not puzzled at all because that's exactly what some us us have warned against (like Cainntear above and my humble self). I'm as impressed as Iguanamon above of what Farber did in the old days before the internet and modern electronics (where I actually learned my first foreign languages) My only addition to Farber's recommendations would be first to run through a simple grammar like the grammar section of a standard language guide or an Wikipedia article about the grammar of your target language This will give you an overview which can help you to navigate through a real grammar book, but it definitely can't replace the use of such a grammar.

Learning grammar from a textbook is like drinking tea from a heap of shards on the floor rather than a cup - and the newer the textbook the more shards will be missing. But as Barry Farber also stresses you shouldn't try to learn the grammar book by heart: it should be used together with sources where you can see in practice how the abstract rules function in the real world.

[jeff_lindqvist]

I found Barry Farber's book shortly after finding HTLAL around Christmas time in 2005 (a long time ago...). That book plus Steve Kaufmann's "The Linguist - A Personal Guide to Language Learning" inspired me a lot.

Regarding Farber's grammar approach, I think it's similar to how we use a printed map. We know it's not the real thing, but it still gives a decent bird's-eye view (and it's very helpful if we ever get lost).

Personally, I don't think I've ever used a grammar book as my first source, but whenever there was an upcoming Spanish test in high-school, I went through all the grammar the night before. It took an hour at most, a couple of times per semester.

[sirgregory]

I found Farber's position on grammar to be very sensible and moderate. Farber himself is no grammar fanatic, having had a traumatic experience with Latin in school. But he sees it as something that you ought to do, like eating vegetables or doing your chores. He says: "Grammar comes first. Build a little character by slogging through five chapters of it." Then dive into the phrase book, the newspaper, the audio program and "these will be your reward after you make an honest beginning in the grammar." His advice to start with only the text/grammar book I think is more psychological than anything. The idea seems to be that you have to have your vegetables before you have dessert because you aren't as likely to eat them afterwards. It also impresses upon you at the start that there is hard work involved, that you can't just learn a few phrases and listen to some tapes. At the same time, he says not to let the grammar derail you. If you don't get something, he says to write down the point of confusion and keep moving.

Overall, I think Farber's approach is solid and practical. It actually sounds like real, experience-tested advice (i.e., methods he himself actually used), not just a sales pitch for his own product line. Recently I started German and I introduced native reading material right from the start as he recommends and I've found it to be beneficial (to the extent I can judge this). What I like about it is that you will notice lots of things in the text. The verb inflections, the articles, the infinitive often moving to the end of the sentence, verb prefixes, contracted prepositions, whatever. These will be unexplained curiosities initially, but later on when you come upon an explanation of the principle in a coursebook, you will encounter it excitedly and have a sense of having finally solved a great mystery. You don't get this same effect working a coursebook straight though. Plus it keeps your eye on the goal, which is to eventually understand authentic native speech and text, not just prepared materials that "condescend" to your modest level. That all said, I also found early intensive reading to be an enormous time sink. You can easily spend hours slogging through a text, and you pretty quickly run into diminishing marginal returns. I was overdoing it at first and decided to limit it no more than a hour or two on the weekend when I have a bit of extra time. If you only have so much time budgeted per week to studying, it's most efficient to spend the bulk of it on a course that will give you a core vocabulary quickly without fumbling around in the dictionary.

[Serpent]

Then dive into the phrase book

Thanks for reminding. I also read the book some time after finding HTLAL, so I forgot this part.
I think the key point here is that you shouldn't begin with a phrasebook, really. You shouldn't learn entire sentences that don't make sense to you. (And I think he didn't mean a grammar drills book but a regular coursebook) After five lessons you'll have a better idea of how things work, at least in a Romance or Germanic language. Eventually you'll have more questions and you'll be more motivated to progress through the textbook or at least look up the grammar items you come across.

On the other hand, if you have a background in linguistics there's less of a need to do those five first lessons before using native materials (or phrasebooks). Also, don't forget that with paper dictionaries, you need to know what to look up. Nowadays you don't have to figure out the infinitive/the nominative/etc on your own.

[El Forastero]

Grammar relevance always depends on what your goal is. When you need only the basics or very specific contextual language, you can get it thruogh repetition with no idea of grammar, even with no knowledge of the writing system (Like doing Pimsleur for chinese or arabic). But if you want to get at least the intermediate level, at some point you need grammar, and then you realize you could have started the grammar study earlier.

I just started Russian with some of Barry Farber's multi approach recommendations. When starting, I realize I need grammar to understood what i'm repeating. I already read about cases and aspects, russian phonology wikipedia article like Iversen has said. Perhaps I've not fully understood the whole thing, but I have an idea about what is that about and I feel more confortable facing a new unit of my course because I already have the notion. I don't know, but thanks to grammar I'm aware of what I don't know.

[Cainntear]

When you need only […] very specific contextual language, you can get it thruogh repetition with no idea of grammar, even with no knowledge of the writing system (Like doing Pimsleur for chinese or arabic).

But when does that ever happen? How does anyone know what specific language they're going to need? Crucially, do the people you're going to meet know the script you're following and the answers you're expecting?

[El Forastero]

Perhaps when people only need the basics to get along as a tourist for a couple of weeks, with no further intentions to keep learning. Or when you want to sign in another language without knowing the complexity ans subtlety of the lyrics.

Or as a sport player. If you play, let's say, table tennis, you can play with a rival ignoring his language (And he ignoring yours), but you need basic vocabulary to understand the play.