Native students of which languages spent considerable time on studying their own language?

[ninuno]

i heard french german or russian speakers had to study their own grammar until ninth grade or so, whereas english speakers were basically exonerated from the conjugation of the subjunctives, the irregular noun plurals, or all the genitive plurals. it seems chinese, japanese and arabic are on the list too.

[Cavesa]

The Czech natives learn their own grammar too, the French seem to be no exception either. It makes sense and leads to better writing. The best writing people tend to be those who read a lot AND were able to also pay attention to the grammar teaching, even if they've forgotten the explicit rules since.

I think the English natives are the weird ones in this case, not vice versa

My personal pet peeve: the English natives writing grammEr. They clearly weren't taught much of it, otherwise they'd know the word

[DaveAgain]

I don't remember much explicit grammar instruction, but there used to be two compulsory English O levels: English language, and English literature. I assume the language exam would have covered correct grammar. (O levels are/were exams taken by 16 year olds in Britain.)

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I think you could argue that written french and spoken french are different languages, the verb conjugations in spoken french being simplified. French children then have to be taught differences between words that do not exist in the language they hear.

[Querneus]

ninuno, I'm surprised you mention Chinese speakers. In my experience, it is extremely rare to meet a Chinese speaker who knows anything about Mandarin grammar. Do you know what a 动宾合词 (動賓合詞, verb-object compound) is and how it affects the placement of 了, for example?

Regarding the question of the thread, most Spanish speakers are not taught much about grammar. I think it's common across countries to teach something about subjects and direct objects, what articles are, that verbs have forms that change with the subject (yo, tú, nosotros...), a few things like that. But unlike French and Arabic educated speakers, Spanish speakers can't generally spit out conjugation paradigms well, or tell you what pronoun case goes with which preposition (para mí, según yo, conmigo).

I think French, Czech and Arabic speakers have to be taught quite a lot of grammar as part of education because the three languages have fairly divergent or very divergent standard forms, in more formal and written contexts.

[kelvin921019]

With my recollection as a child and talking with my friends teaching Chinese at primary school, I'm pretty sure that only minimal amount of Chinese grammar were taught at the first few years of primary school (like punctuation, type of words (noun, adjective, adverb...), sentence patterns (more expression focus)) I guess something like word order or combination of words is something just natural to us. For example, I have never heard of 動賓合詞 for my whole life.

[eido]

I can remember going over various aspects of grammar in public school as an American student. When I went to a charter school for a couple years, we were encouraged to study grammar on our own, so I spent much of two years every morning sentence diagramming using symbols. This was in elementary.

When I got to high school, I took AP (Advanced Placement) English, and we didn’t so much study grammar as we did vocabulary. We learned about technical aspects of sentence structure in regard to literature, and the terms to go along with it. So words like “asyndeton” and “assonance” are among those in the list. I think we might’ve had a few discussions on the origins of grammar, but not too many. The general ed English probably studied it more than we did, or maybe not... I’m not sure. Doesn’t mean they were stupid.

That’s my experience.

[smallwhite]

With my recollection as a child and talking with my friends teaching Chinese at primary school, I'm pretty sure that only minimal amount of Chinese grammar were taught at the first few years of primary school (like punctuation, type of words (noun, adjective, adverb...), sentence patterns (more expression focus)) I guess something like word order or combination of words is something just natural to us. For example, I have never heard of 動賓合詞 for my whole life.

At my school, we were taught Chinese (and English) grammar without using grammar jargon and without calling it grammar. I remember we had to 作句 (create sentences) A LOT, eg.
"雖然 ____ 但是 ____" (Although ____ but ____)
"__ 適值 _____" (a verb that's tricky to use)
after being taught the structure.

But indeed no conjugation table type of learning.

Btw, I consider written Chinese a learnt 2nd language and only Cantonese my acquired native language. For the purposes of this forum, at least.

Cantonese was not taught at all. And we were not allowed to use it in any written material - homework or tests, noticeboards, sports day banners.

[Cavesa]

I think you could argue that written french and spoken french are different languages, the verb conjugations in spoken french being simplified. French children then have to be taught differences between words that do not exist in the language they hear.

It's so funny reading this written by an English native French is extremely regular. Once you learn the spelling, you are ok. It's the English natives, who even have spelling competitions

I think French, Czech and Arabic speakers have to be taught quite a lot of grammar as part of education because the three languages have fairly divergent or very divergent standard forms, in more formal and written contexts.

I can't speak much about Arabic (but as far as I know, the problem with it is not a different standard form, but rather a standard form that is a sort of a different language), but the issue is highly overestimated when it comes to Czech. What is wrongly being painted as hyperimportant diglossia or stupidly called "common Czech" is in reality a regional thing. (Even the Czech teachers teach this trash, but it is simply nonsense. There is no such a thing as one common Czech used in parallel to the formal Czech in the whole tiny country. This view of the situation is just pragocentrism) Half the country speaks mostly the "formal" way, and the various regions have their specifics (Prague is the most "informal"). But neither Czech nor French doesn't have much bigger spoken-written language difference than English.

I'd say it's more about the tradition and values than about some languages being that much harder for their natives. I'd be the first one to admit that some of the grammar stuff taught to the Czech natives is useless trash, but it is still being taught and even more now than before due to a few stupid political-education decisions. So, it is more about the tradition.

[Voytek]

In primary school I had one/two grammar lessons (45minutes each and a bit of the phonetics) per week for five years, it was around 200 hours in total. Welcome to Polish grammar and phonetics, gentlemen.

[Jaaguar]

i heard french german or russian speakers had to study their own grammar until ninth grade or so, whereas english speakers were basically exonerated from the conjugation of the subjunctives, the irregular noun plurals, or all the genitive plurals.

Wait, are you saying that native-English-speaking children don't study English grammar at school? Or did you just mean to say native-English-speaking children have it easier at school because English grammar is so much simpler than French, German or Russian?