Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

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alaart
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby alaart » Tue Apr 27, 2021 9:18 pm

I hate studying grammar like nothing else, so I often avoid it. It is not 0% Grammar, but maybe less than 5% of my study time. I do this because I am often frustrated, I read a grammar chapter many times, then again, and practice the patterns, and still cannot use it correctly. I also forget it instantly if I stop practicing the pattern. Then I will say: "Ok, this doesn't work" and will revisit it waaay later, or maybe I won't.

So alternatively, I look up some stuff if I encounter it, and if I can't express or understand something I ask my language exchange partners to explain them in conversations. "How do you say this in Korean?" - Or I screenshot something I don't understand and log it, then if I encounter the same pattern again I screen it again and while I look through the screenshots a pattern recognition is forming. I also try to drill sample sentences of a pattern I recognized into Anki.

How successful is it?
I don't know. Some things work well, others take more time. Overall I am progressing really slow I feel, but I don't think this is necessarily because of the neglect of grammar. I think more grammar would be good for me, and I want to try to study more. But like a class-room experience is definitely too much grammar for my taste. I have taken quite some classes, and I also don't remember the grammar they taught me there very well :roll:
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby einzelne » Tue Apr 27, 2021 11:21 pm

I'm yet to find a person who likes to study grammar and do the drills. It really depends on your goals. You either get it quickly (but painfully), or you take it easy and slowly absorb the patterns.

But you're onto something. When I work on a particular grammar topic and don't usually do all grammar drills. I choose a dozen of sentences which are useful for me and drill them. Then I just read the books and fish out the useful sentences with the same grammar patterns. If you have a personalized list of such sentences, drilling the patterns becomes less painful.

Also, I find the common approach in textbooks to grammar exercises problematic. Instead of drilling, for instance, the present tense (like I go, you go, she goes etc) and then working on another tense (I went, you went, she went), I prefer drilling the patterns like: I go, I'm going, I went, I've gone, I would go etc. Or dialogue patterns like: I - You, I - He/She/They. Such patters are closer to real life interactions (like: Have you seen the movie? I haven't but Mike did it yesterday) and I find them way more efficient for developing fluency.
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby Ogrim » Wed Apr 28, 2021 9:20 am

Prepare for a little rant:

I absolutely hate it when YouTubers use the imperative in the title of their video. Who are they to tell me what to do or, more often, not do. I see it more and more and it annoys me a lot: "Don't buy this mobile phone, don't read this book, don't learn grammar, don't eat chocolate!" By all means, they are entitled to their opinions, but they should get off their high horse and accept that people have different preferences and taste, and that some people will enjoy something you don't, just like there is more than one way to learn a language.

I of course agree with rdearman that vocabulary is essential for communication. Grammar without vocabulary just becomes theoretical knowledge. I know linguists who can explain how the ergative functions in Basque, but they cannot have a simple conversation in the language, because they look at it from a purely academic standpoint. However, vocabulary without grammar means poor language and a high risk of misunderstanding. If you don't know how to conjugate verbs in Spanish, or you have no idea of the case system in Russian, I believe you will very soon get lost and you will certainly not be able to have meaningful conversations. Sure, if your goal is just to get by with basic tourist speak, then fine. If however you want to be able to engage with natives on a wide range of topics I think you need both grammar and vocabulary in equal measures.

I don't particularly enjoy doing grammar exercises, but I find them useful, and personally I need to know how a language functions grammatically in order to feel confident communicating with other speakers.
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby amarina » Wed Apr 28, 2021 11:47 am

rdearman wrote:
einzelne wrote:
I think that languages are for communication. If you are studying a language in order to complete the Cambridge English examinations then by all means study the grammar. If you are planning to live in Cambridge, ignore that and learn as much vocabulary as humanly possible, especially nouns.


Why especially nouns? I find verbs to be a lot more powerful and always lacking huh

rdearman wrote:
einzelne wrote:So, vocabulary and pronunciation both trump grammar I say. :D ;)

Big yes, grammar gets picked up very quickly after sufficient exposure, while vocabulary and pronunciation absolutely need to be drilled in
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby Sonjaconjota » Wed Apr 28, 2021 12:58 pm

Personally I enjoy studying grammar up to a certain point. I've started to see the whole grammar thing as a circular process.
First I get introduced to a certain grammar concept through a grammar book or course. I take notes, do the exercises, try to internalize the concept.
Then I go on using the language, and I will quickly come across the concept through reading, listening and speaking (I don't do a lot of writing practice). On the one hand, sometimes content will help me to reinforce concepts, as has happened with certain verb forms coming up in the lyrics of Turkish songs. On the other hand, sometimes using the language will make it very clear to me that a certain concept is still shaky, and then I can go back and look it up again. Rinse and repeat.
Of course you can also start at the opposite side of the circle and only ever look up things if you have come across them enough times to know that they are going to be relevant for you. But personally, I think it is more difficult. I mean, if you are studying Turkish (like I do) and nobody has ever explained to you that vowel harmony and the locative exist and are important concepts of the Turkish grammar, it will be more complicated to look them up.
Personally I find it absurd to ignore grammar completely. Some people seem to think of it as an instrument of torture, but it is a tool to help you!
An example: I was using Pimsleur as an additional resource for Turkish, and they were teaching things like "New York'tan" = "from New York" and "İzmir'den" = "from Izmir" without any grammar explanations. If you know about vowel harmony and about how endings change between d and t according to the previous consonant, it is very obvious why one example uses "tan" and the other "den". But if you would choose to ignore those rules (like Pimsleur suggests), you would have to learn the correct ending for every single name of place you'll ever come across. Or trust in developing, over time, an intuition telling you which would be the correct of the four possible endings. But why, if you could look up and learn the rules in about ten minutes?
Last edited by Sonjaconjota on Thu Apr 29, 2021 8:04 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby rdearman » Wed Apr 28, 2021 1:16 pm

amarina wrote:
rdearman wrote:
einzelne wrote:
I think that languages are for communication. If you are studying a language in order to complete the Cambridge English examinations then by all means study the grammar. If you are planning to live in Cambridge, ignore that and learn as much vocabulary as humanly possible, especially nouns.


Why especially nouns? I find verbs to be a lot more powerful and always lacking huh

rdearman wrote:
einzelne wrote:So, vocabulary and pronunciation both trump grammar I say. :D ;)

Big yes, grammar gets picked up very quickly after sufficient exposure, while vocabulary and pronunciation absolutely need to be drilled in


I can't figure out who you're quoting, but it looks like this might be a question for me?
Why especially nouns? I find verbs to be a lot more powerful and always lacking huh


I believe that you will typically need nouns more than verbs. In most languages there are more nouns than verbs. Here is a sample analysis of a small English dictionary.

Code: Select all

66235 noun
21316 adjective
9525 verb
6137 adverb
1101 plural noun


You can see that nouns far out weight verbs. Verbs and Adverbs are only 15,662, which is only %23.64 of the number of nouns. So when speaking you can say:

I have a ... (bed, knife, car, house, bill, invoice, keyboard, mouse, cat, chain, candle)

There would be fewer verbs to learn, and if you know most of the basic ones then you should be able to muddle through, but if you don't know enough nouns you're going to get stuck very quickly. Also, you can replace some verbs for basic ones, use walk not stroll, tour, meander, march, hike, etc. but a dog is normally a dog, and you can't really replace it with candle or cat or bucket.

To be fair the largest number of word types in the sample above are adjectives, but knowing the most common ones like big, little, tall, short, etc would be most useful. You're probably not going to need adjectives like: iridescent, elephantine, or inductile.

Anyway, that is my theory, your mileage may vary.
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby Querneus » Thu Apr 29, 2021 4:47 am

rdearman wrote:
einzelne wrote:It's 2021 and we're still discussing the "don't study grammar" nonsense?...

Why is it nonsense?

Personally I have always felt that vocabulary trumps grammar every time. Let me give an example of two non-English speakers who approach me with the same question.

Another tertium non datur opinion: I'm personally a fan of saying that maybe 85+% of language learning is just learning vocabulary, and yet I value grammar. To me it's not a source of pain, but a useful shortcut tool.

For example, there are parts of Mandarin grammar that I imagine would've taken me an eternity to figure out on my own, because it's so different from European languages sometimes. I see Yip and Rimmington's Mandarin comprehensive grammar as a god-given gift in 550-page form. Similarly, for some reason I never got to understand how relative clauses with stranded prepositions work in English on my own ("the guy who you listened to", "the cousin you arrived with", "the sister that you're faster than"), until at one point I got tired of never getting them right after seven years of English, and so just looked up grammar explanations of them (Spanish is not like this at all).
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby Saim » Thu Apr 29, 2021 6:57 am

I believe that morphology in the Slavic languages is a fairly important part of comprehension. You can get away with not mastering it because natives will generally be able to decode what you mean, but you will hit a wall at a certain point if your goal is to have natural, comfortable conversations with natives; with Russian-speakers this may not be as much of an issue due to low average English competence, but if you're living somewhere like Warsaw or Prague and you want natives to take you seriously you're probably going to have to work on your grammar. I think you'll also learn to understand the language faster if you at least consult a sort of grammar overview at times, or at least that's been my experience with languages like Basque, Urdu and Hungarian.

I do find the Bald and Bankrupt interview quite interesting. There are of course case issues, which is to be expected from an English speaker, but he also doesn't seem to have acquired gender agreement either, which I didn't expect (although it makes sense, I guess). I don't believe I've ever met an English speaker who has that much trouble with gender agreement in Slavic languages, but I guess most of them were philology students or heritage speakers.

EDIT: I'll add that as a heritage speaker of Serbian, I only started to figure out the case system, clitic placement and other more complex aspects of grammar once I was taught it explicitly in a classroom setting. I did have OK intuition in the sense that most of the time when I was taught something new I would think "oh, of course, that is how people talk!", but I still needed some kind of conscious framework as scaffolding for all the input before I was able to produce anything approximating correct language.
Last edited by Saim on Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:11 am, edited 2 times in total.
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby Henkkles » Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:09 am

einzelne wrote:I'm yet to find a person who likes to study grammar and do the drills. It really depends on your goals. You either get it quickly (but painfully), or you take it easy and slowly absorb the patterns.

But you're onto something. When I work on a particular grammar topic and don't usually do all grammar drills. I choose a dozen of sentences which are useful for me and drill them. Then I just read the books and fish out the useful sentences with the same grammar patterns. If you have a personalized list of such sentences, drilling the patterns becomes less painful.

Also, I find the common approach in textbooks to grammar exercises problematic. Instead of drilling, for instance, the present tense (like I go, you go, she goes etc) and then working on another tense (I went, you went, she went), I prefer drilling the patterns like: I go, I'm going, I went, I've gone, I would go etc. Or dialogue patterns like: I - You, I - He/She/They. Such patters are closer to real life interactions (like: Have you seen the movie? I haven't but Mike did it yesterday) and I find them way more efficient for developing fluency.

As someone who has learned, say, 90% of Russian morphology I found it really enjoyable to unravel the patterns and to install them in my brain. I often listen to music while declining and conjugating words, and I can reach a zen-like state doing that. I think that Russian word-bending is relatively tame, six case forms with mostly really clear patterns, with some irregular old locatives here and there like лесу. Also, you only have to learn the declension and conjugation of one (conservative, looking at you Bulgarian and Macedonian (and south Serbian)) Slavic language, and the rest will just be variations of the same theme, so you get a lot of mileage out of practicing the patterns.
Last edited by Henkkles on Thu Apr 29, 2021 4:51 pm, edited 1 time in total.
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Re: Do not learn Russian Grammar (Opinions?)

Postby Querneus » Thu Apr 29, 2021 7:39 am

Henkkles wrote:As someone who has learned, say, 90% of Russian morphology I found it really enjoyable to unravel the patterns and to install them in my brain. I often listen to music while declining and conjugating words, and I can reach a zen-like state doing that.

And here I like to say that if you're reading a Latin grammar and you aren't listening to American or Japanese rock in the background, of the heavier more recent kind, you aren't reading it correctly.

I say this as less of a joke than you might think. :lol:

Music really helps setting the mood for anything.
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