Hi aaleks, I enjoy reading your log so I thought I'd bite...
I
would never have | would have hardly hardly would have ever understood what the Present perfect is about had I not had enough exposure to English through TV and books, i.e. without input. The way they usually explain it in textooks is insufficient, and sometimes even misleading IMO if you look at it from an English learner perspective. It happens like that: you read about the tense in a textbook, try to make some sense out of what you've read, think that you get it, then you open a book and see that the tense is used quite differently, not the way you expect it should or would
be (used).
At the same time, when I was google-searching about the Present perfect I found out that some of English learners have difficulty
understanding to understand the difference between the Present perfect and the Present perfect Continuous (Progressive). Things like: I have studied vs I have been studying. But I have figured it out just by reading, watching and listening to native materials*. So that's never been an issue to me.
...
It was
sometime | at some point/stage somewhere in the early 2000's, when I tried to learn English the first time. I never competed the textbook. I doubt that I'd gone through half of it. I got bored of the "proper" way of studying pretty fast and skipped to the last pages of the book where there were short
explanations of the grammar rules grammar rules explanations. And then I tried to read a native book which, of course, was an enormous task back then. 6 years ago I skipped
the grammar part of language learning almost completely. I only looked through those last pages to be sure that I
could can distinguish future, present and past tenses. Then I found the English learning forum and there
was a lot of talk/discussion | were a lot of posts were a lot of talks about grammar, so I felt that I was doing something wrong and I turned to
the so-often-recomended Murphy books. But I did the same - skimmed through it just to be sure I had some concept of grammar. Up to
last year, 2017, the last, 2017, year I'd not studied grammar, not paid much attention to it if at all. And even then I focused on tenses in the first place, plus articles. I remember reading about prepositions but I've not studied it in the way of grammar drilling, exercises. Adjectives, adverbs, all those"-ly", "-able", "-ness", "-ment" in the end of words, or "des-", "ir-", "un-", etc. in the beginning I
have learned from exposure. Idioms, phrasal verbs, and whatever other things like that
are called - all these I've
learned known from reading, watching, listening. And I've never had any trouble
parsing to parse a sentence, I don't know why.
I do beleive that I've been learning English by consuming a lot (or enough) of native materials in the first place. And even though I tried to find the truth about that paticular grammar topic called the Present perfect
in textbooks I ended up
figuring to figure it out from watching series, not even from reading. But I think that it wouldn't
be fair to deny the fact that textbooks helped me too in the way that they introduced me to grammatical constructions, provided some tips. My mistake was putting grammar rules above the language itself.
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I hope this is the sort of thing you wanted