Grammatical accuracy in a second language

[smallwhite]

What are your thoughts on grammatical accuracy in a second language?

How important is it to you?
How accurate do you aim to be?
Are you happy with Tarzanese?
Do you prefer Tarzanese or a never-ending silent period?
Do you think mistakes are unavoidable?
The more mistakes the merrier?
What do you think about other people's grammatical mistakes?
How do learner mistakes in your L1 sound to you?
What do you think about them?
etc etc

What are your thoughts on grammatical accuracy in a second language?

[rdearman]

Even as a native speaker I put commas in the wrong place, or forget to put "an" before a word beginning with a vowel instead of "a" and it didn't really impede me. I think broad rules about grammar need to be known in order to get sentence structure correct, but I'm perfectly happy to brutalise someone else's language. I've never been bothered by grammatical errors by non-natives. I do get annoyed with poor grammar from people who should know better. For example here in the UK where I live people under the age of 30 appear to believe that prepositions are surplus to requirements. I often hear things like:
I'm going town.

arrgggghhhhhh Feck! Are you going TO town, AROUND the town, THROUGH the town, INTO town, FROM the town.

[Speakeasy]

Although I live in the real world where inaccuracy abounds, the correct use of grammar is important to me. I make serious, but failing, attempts at expressing myself as clearly and correctly as I possibly can. My primary concern is one of being understood and I expect that from others. Regrettably, this leads me to speak and write in a fashion that even I find unnatural and stilted!

I accept that mistakes are unavoidable. I would go further by admitting that some mistakes become so prevalent as to establish the new grammatical norm. Nevertheless, I am often irked by the negligence and just plain old sloppiness by people who should know better. Mistakes committed by children or by non-native speakers should be accepted as part of the learning process. While authors and composers enjoy greater latitude, populist politicians abuse the privilege.

I assume by “Tarzanese” smallwhite means simple, direct, communicative speech by native speakers which is grammatically flawed, but fairly understandable. On a purely practical level, if I can understand my interlocutor, I have no problem with Tarzanese. However, it’s use is often perceived as a social marker. Having just typed that, I will now retire to the deep shelter station that my father prepared during the 1960’s in the anticipation of a nuclear conflagration.

EDITED:
Misplaced modifier.
Typos.

[trui]

Learning the grammar is important to me and it's one of the first things I focused on when learning Dutch. I also learned some essential vocabularly alongside this process.

I didn't really have a silent period though, at least not with writing/chatting online, because not only was learning the grammar important to me, but saying things like a native speaker would was also important to me. So what I'd do is write something using the grammar I knew and if I was unsure of it I'd ask the person I was chatting with if it was correct and natural. I wasn't interested in only being technically correct. I've found Dutch people online (including my boyfriend of course) very helpful and their willingness to help helped me a lot.

Nowadays I don't explicitly study grammar anymore. I just look up stuff I'm confused about when it comes up and also occassionally look at conversations to find certain ways of phrasing things that I can use myself. My grammar certainly isn't perfect nor are my sentences always natural but I can improve on those things in time. For me, my grammar is now good enough to focus more on vocabulary, something I'm very much lacking in.

As for other people's mistakes, I don't mind them, as long as they're understandable. Some people decide to focus more heavily on vocabulary at the beginning, and that's okay too, though for people focusing on vocabulary, I'd also recommend against a silent period unless you have a teacher or tutor that you're showing your attempts to. It's good to ask people if using a certain word in a certain way is common if you want to sound natural. Even if you have a tutor, unless you can afford to chat with them a few hours a day, then it's good to try out new vocabulary with native speakers online (and offline if possible) if said native speakers are available and willing to help.

[MarkLondon]

I think that one’s attitude towards these things is in some part dictated by where you live. If you are in a very large cosmopolitan city you are likely to be constantly exposed to people speaking the primary language as a second language, and I think that necessitates a tolerance. It also can drive home how correctness in grammar doesn’t necessarily have a huge correlation with ability to be understood. Couple that with even a passing understanding of how language constantly evolves and grammar is not, and cannot be, static, and I think you get to a point where accuracy in others doesn’t bother you that much. Of course, you might still strive for it in your L2s and L3s, as I imagine most of the people here do.

There are also going to be personal linguistic bêtes noirs we are going to carry around. I hate, for example, how pretty much everyone misuses “begs the question” — no, it doesn’t mean “raises the question”. But the reality is so, so, many people use it that way now it basically DOES mean that for all realistic purposes and you have to be a particularly annoying pendant to constantly point out the error (although I can be on occasion).

[Henkkles]

To me grammatical inaccuracy is a failure in acquiring the correct patterns for expressing ideas, so it's really a non-issue for me. If you find yourself making mistakes, you can isolate the sentence pattern, elicit correct patterns from people or corpora and then try to update your internal representation of it.

[Jar-Ptitsa]

What are your thoughts on grammatical accuracy in a second language?

How important is it to you?
How accurate do you aim to be?
Are you happy with Tarzanese?
Do you prefer Tarzanese or a never-ending silent period?
Do you think mistakes are unavoidable?
The more mistakes the merrier?
What do you think about other people's grammatical mistakes?
How do learner mistakes in your L1 sound to you?
What do you think about them?
etc etc

What are your thoughts on grammatical accuracy?

I will answer each question in the same order:

It's important for me, I used to be a perfectionnist and this is still part of me despite my decision to try to be happy with less, in general in life I mean, not only grammar or langauges.

I aim to be accurate, completely accurate, but I accept less. Now, I am happy to accept that I will never reach C2 Dutch, but feel fine with C1 / C1.5, the same with my German C1 which feels like B2. My English is improving I think (and hope!!) and I think that I will be satisifed with it soon. My Spanish is total rubbish, so I am not happy with my accuracy in this language.

I'm happy with Tarzanese when i am a beginner, but not after this. I have onyl learned related langauges, which are much easier to learn, but if I learned for example, Korean, then I would be very happy to speak Tarzanese Korean!!

It depends who I am speaking to or writing, if I would use my tarzanese in the foreign language, or ask if they can speak a language that I know better. If you are tarzan level then you can't understand or say much, so if the conversation were important, we would have to change languages.

generally, some mistakes are unavoidable for me, yes. But I don't say that nobody can speak a foriegn langauge without grammatical mistakes, for sure some people can do this, but I am not capable of that.

The more mistakes the merrier, no I don't agree.

Other people's mistakes it depends of the person and the mistake and the situation. If the person is nasty then I don't like their mistakes, but if the person is nice then their mistakes are no problem at all. If their mistake make it difficult to udnerstand then it's maybe stressful, but some mistakes when the foreigners speak French sound funny or cute, so it depends.

Learners' mistakes in my L1 sound different it depends. If they are flemish the mistakes sound a bit stupid, but if they are for example british or amercian, or many other nationalities they sound cute. If they are nasty people then it sounds ugly, if they are nice and they try very hard then it sounds ok. In general, the foreigners' mistakes in French sound sweet, I really like it when they try.

[nooj]

I'm a perfectionist, I want to and strive to get everything right.

This is also probably a huge mistake and creates complexes.

As a learner, you have to make mistakes. It's physically not possible not to make mistakes as a beginner, or as an intermediate.

If you don't want to make mistakes or are afraid of making mistakes, then you might as well not speak at all ever. I'd go so far as to say that if you're not making mistakes, you're not learning (assuming you learn from that mistakes that is).

[smallwhite]

Grammatical accuracy is important to me. I try my best to achieve 100% accuracy in real life. I try to score at least 90% in grammar tests and will work on the remaining 10%. I can't imagine speaking or writing inaccurate L2 and placing the burden on my interlocutor or reader to understand me - that's not me learning my L2 but them learning my interlanguage! (I have a similar theory about illegible handwriting).

Learners of English who don't write very well sound childish and unsmart to me, and I don't want to sound like that in my L2s. Learners of Chinese often write downright incomprehensible Chinese (not just inaccurate), and of course I don't want to write like that. People's incorrect and childish output doesn't bother me, but their incomprehensible Chinese can sometimes put me in an awkward situation where I don't know how to respond.

I prefer accuracy over fluency but I drill instead of wait (silent period). I think certain mistakes are unavoidable - grammar points that are not taught in textbooks, that are rare or that don't make sense - but mistakes in everyday grammar points should be avoidable (via study or other deliberate work). And since what grammar you use in your speech or writing is up to you, I think mistakes are largely avoidable if you do want to avoid them.

Just general thoughts and probably depends on the language.

[LinguaPony]

I'm a stickler for grammar and always aim at being 100% perfect, which is, of course, impossible from the beginning. When I attend classes locally, I know that I will be making mistakes and that the teacher is paid to correct them, so I feel okay about that, but for some reason when I take online lessons I suffer agonies of shame afterwards when I realise that I got some conjugations wrong.

One of my duties at work is to correct other people's mistakes, and I'm ruthless about that. Even my status message in Skype says "I'm silently correcting your grammar", and I copied the same sentence as my Facebook intro. You get the idea.

What is Tarzanese? I don't mind an occasional silent period - they are actually very helpful - but a never-ending one won't do.

When people who learn Russian as L2 make mistakes, I'm rather tolerant about that, because I know how difficult it is to learn. I admire people for having enough courage to tackle it.