smallwhite wrote:When you make a grammatical mistake, are you usually applying the wrong grammar rule, or are you usually applying the correct rule incorrectly?
When you read native material, do you know what grammar rules are being applied and why? Eg.:
> "So my review week is wrapping up".
Adverb, comma optional;
( Possessive adjective + noun as adjective + main noun ) as subject;
possessive adjective and not possessive pronoun because modifying noun;
present continuous indicative because actively happening around the present;
verb used intransitively without object but used as vt also possible;
1 main clause, no sub-clause, SV word order;
etc?
This is actually hard to answer.
These days I am corrected mostly in two ways:
1) Grammar which I have missed
eg: 어렸을 때
학교 다녔을 때는 --> 어렸을 때
학교에 다녔을 때는...
I thought that this was a fine place to drop the '에' but the correction shows I shouldn't do this.
2) Incorrect choice of grammar (basically rephrasing a portion of my sentence)
eg: 나이가 되면서 몸이... (intention: with getting older, the body...) corrected to be 나이를 먹어감 에 따라 몸이...
Half the time I see the alternate wording and it makes sense, but the other half the time it can be a bit of a mystery to me as to why my version is incorrect. Sometimes it is grammatically wrong, but sometimes the reply is essentially "because we dont say that".
As for your question on how much I understand grammar when I read (or listen) to it:
I don't know. There are things I feel I understand. I test them by sometimes taking a piece of Korean and translating it to English then checking against a known good translation to see how far off I am. Its possibly a poor assumption, but my assumption is that if my translation is good then it is confirmation that my understanding is good - and that would include the grammar being used (to a reasonable degree).
Having said that, there are plenty of native written (or spoken) sentences in Korean which I *understand* (that is to say I could repeat it in English to demonstrate I know what is being communicated) BUT the sentence is awkward for me. Such sentences feel like foreign constructions, even for Korean, and I would be at a loss to say why they are phrased as they are.
Of course there are still lots of sentences in Korean which are more than mildly confusing - even short ones filled with words I already know! But I suspect this is the case for all Korean learners.