Studying your NT

[Bluepaint]

I studied English grammar for three years with a nun who threw chalk at your head if you made a mistake. Surprisingly, grammar was my favorite subject at the end of my days in her class.

I'm studying it again by teaching my kids, but I have no real desire to do it for fun.

Like Ani, I had chalk thrown at me and rulers smacked across the back of my hand, but boy oh boy did sentence diagramming really sink in. Then of course when I went to DLI to learn Russian, that was an excellent way to learn the grammar of my own language. And teaching the kids when we homeschooled, that helped too. I was very prescriptive with them.

Sentence diagramming...like you draw a picture of a sentence??

[Denzagathist]

I'll reiterate what others have mentioned about grammar study in Anglophone countries being seriously lacking. Most of what I know about English grammar I learned from studying other languages and comparing their structures back to English. In school we never did much more than learning the parts of speech and some sentence diagramming (which was something different from drawing syntax trees). I doubt that most of my classmates graduated knowing the difference between a subject and an object. I was certainly never taught what verb tenses or conjugations were until I started taking Spanish in school.

While I was an exchange student in Croatia, though, I was forced to take English as a foreign language. I was surprised that I had trouble answering some of the questions, though to be fair that was partly due to the fact that they were studying outdated British usage (whereas I spoke American English). In particular, I recall that I had never really distinguished the simple past from the pluperfect in English until I studied it formally in that class. I remember the teacher telling the other students not to listen to me because my English was "wrong". Although, I also told my classmates the same thing about her unnatural English. I also remember being surprised that in their Croatian class they studied not only Croatian literature but also morphology, phonology, syntax, the historical development of the language, and so on.

[IronMike]

I studied English grammar for three years with a nun who threw chalk at your head if you made a mistake. Surprisingly, grammar was my favorite subject at the end of my days in her class.

I'm studying it again by teaching my kids, but I have no real desire to do it for fun.

Like Ani, I had chalk thrown at me and rulers smacked across the back of my hand, but boy oh boy did sentence diagramming really sink in. Then of course when I went to DLI to learn Russian, that was an excellent way to learn the grammar of my own language. And teaching the kids when we homeschooled, that helped too. I was very prescriptive with them.

Sentence diagramming...like you draw a picture of a sentence??

Sort of.



About this horrible way of teaching grammar

[Bluepaint]

I studied English grammar for three years with a nun who threw chalk at your head if you made a mistake. Surprisingly, grammar was my favorite subject at the end of my days in her class.

I'm studying it again by teaching my kids, but I have no real desire to do it for fun.

Like Ani, I had chalk thrown at me and rulers smacked across the back of my hand, but boy oh boy did sentence diagramming really sink in. Then of course when I went to DLI to learn Russian, that was an excellent way to learn the grammar of my own language. And teaching the kids when we homeschooled, that helped too. I was very prescriptive with them.

Sentence diagramming...like you draw a picture of a sentence??

Sort of.



About this horrible way of teaching grammar

I cannot properly reply as to do so would mean using words that breach our rules. But:

[Ani]

I cannot properly reply as to do so would mean using words that breach our rules. But:

I find it hard to believe you didn't study grammar this way?

[eido]

We never studied grammar formally as far as I can remember. All I remember from before high school and getting to know more specific grammar terms in Spanish is: "A noun is a person, place, or thing!" We never learned about the history of our language. English class was for analyzing the components of literature, not learning about why those things were there in the first place. We learned about MLA, APA, Chicago... but never about the Great Vowel Shift or why we have certain letters or grammatical cases. I don't know how many kids would have been interested in that; then again not many were interested in anything, or didn't show it.

[Bluepaint]

I cannot properly reply as to do so would mean using words that breach our rules. But:

I find it hard to believe you didn't study grammar this way?

We didn't study grammar at all. I remember people at secondary school being surprised when I knew what a noun, adjective, verb, adverb and conjunction (sort of) were because it simply wasn't taught.

[cpnlsn88]

I would love to read a comparative grammar between a handful of different languages. I don't think you need much grammar in order to speak and write your native tongue (Krashen is definitely right here), parts of speech, verb tenses, considerations of register and dialect are of course helpful, as of course are conventions of spelling and punctuation (probably the only point at which native speakers need instruction and rules (so many mnemonics). All English speakers need an instruction into the use of the apostrophe (also /there, they're, their/; /your you're/ etc) as it is very counterintuitive.

If learning several languages it is helpful to work out areas where they differ. Like the conditional structure of French and English is not the same as the Konjunktiv II in German (much heartache can be avoided) and the peculiarity that in English a singular noun can sometimes has a plural verb, not usually in other languages. Also good to have enough knowledge of grammar to patiently be able to explain why split infinitives are OK.

[IronMike]

I also grew up with these commercials every Saturday morning, so that helped.

[Daniel N.]

My story is a bit weird. We all learn grammar in school, but this is "school grammar', it doesn't go really deep.

Then I got interested in linguistics when I was like 20 and basically read everything linguistic-related I could find.

And then, some 9 years ago, I started designing a web site to help foreigners learn "Croatian". And only then I realized how little grammar I know. After many issues with the site, I started a new site almost from scratch 4 years ago and then I really looked into the grammar as if I were a foreigner. What is important? What rules are needed most, and what are needed once a year?

How do people actually speak? How do they converse in the real life? There was very little in grammars about that. Furthermore, almost all grammars explained only the standard language/dialect, meaning many forms in songs, on the internet, even in newspaper headlines were left unexplained.

I had to cover as much as possible on my own. So yes, I really studied my native grammar (meaning, of the dialect I speak) and of the standard dialect in my country. And of the similar dialects which usually go by the name "Croatian" or "Serbian" which are also required.

And there are really a lot of fine points, mostly completely unmentioned in grammars. Some are mentioned in linguistic works, though.