Efficient grammar learning

[Tomás]

Which grammar learning techniques are most efficient? SRS with cloze sentences? FSI-style audio drills? Soaking in lots of literature and not worrying about it?

[tomgosse]

I'm learning French and what works for me are good old fashioned text books with a lot of exercises. Practice writing and output, and as you said lots of reading. When you have a chance, read iguanamon's Multi-Track Approach To Learning. SRS never worked for me. As the saying goes, Your milage may vary.

[verdastelo]

I recently discovered that I love doing exercises from Routledge's grammar series. To me, FSI's drills are boring. I have never tried cloze sentences. I love literature, but my Russian is still poor so I cannot enjoy novels and non-fiction books in the language. So it comes down to:

1. Graded books (books by Русский Мир)
2. Routledge's A Basic Russian Grammar and Workbook
3. Short texts (interviews, jokes and news stories)

That is how I am improving my knowledge of the Russian grammar.

(Although I have been stalking this forum for a few weeks, this is the first time I am writing here. So I apologise for the mistakes I may have made in answering to your question and in my English, which I do not speak natively.)

[iguanamon]

Which grammar learning techniques are most efficient? SRS with cloze sentences? FSI-style audio drills? Soaking in lots of literature and not worrying about it?

*All of the above (finding the balance that's right for you). It doesn't have to be an "either/or" choice. I, myself, don't do srs, but I can see how cloze deletion can be effective. I did drills whenever I had them available. I also did speaking and writing with correction, listening and reading. Maybe I am not efficient, but I have managed to learn a few languages to a high level.

[Expugnator]

I usually learn grammar through 'waves'. At first it's important to become familiar of how the language works: which tenses are most used, the most common word order. As I study the textbooks from the elementary level, my emphasis is on understanding, not on memorizing declensions or whatever.

I find it really stressful and inefficient to learn both vocabulary and grammar by large chunks at the same time. This is what most traditional textbooks do and where they turn a learner's life into a nightmare. You won't have a problem with vocabulary when you are learning, say, Italian, so you are even comfortable with being nitpicky at grammar at the intermediate level, but try to imagine Georgian. Estonian to some extent as well. Day after day, you are exposed to sentences where near all words are unknown and the grammar involved is, too. and you are supposed to learn everything at once. A good (or rather, 'bad') example is the Basic Course in Estonian, which is an FSI/DLI style course. Lessons are very long, teach hundreds (literally) of words at once while introducing grammar. You end up learning neither well.

With this in mind, I'm usually aware I will have to get back for most textbooks, especially the really good ones. With Estonian, the first time I went through the "Estonian Textbook" by Tuldava I was aware I was going to retain mostly the 'philosophy' of the grammar, how it works, and I would try to improve my vocabulary through this and through other means. For example, I read quite a few phrasebooks for Estonian after going through this book, for the sake of consolidating my vocabulary. Then a few weeks ago I went back to use the same textbook. Now that I am familiar with nearly all the vocabulary, I can focus on taking a deeper look at grammar, since memorizing the vocabulary AND the grammar exceptions would be too much brain-frying.

At this 'second wave' I will also usually have some native materials behind me, which means I will start to get a feeling to what feels 'right' and the grammar will come naturally (You may ask why I didn't start directly with native material? Well, because I needed the basic grammar knowledge from my 'first wave' in order to make sense of how the words related and so learn vocabulary more effectively. It's pointless to read in parallel in an opaque language when you don't even know basic word order, you'd have to translate word by word manually in order to make any sense of the text). It's also usually the time I start writing, and I use writing for fine-tuning grammar through getting corrections. I also do some chatting and Skype when available to consolidate what I already know. It's important to force oneself out of the comfort zone, to use richer vocabulary, subordinate clauses and so on.

As I start this process I count on the fact my vocabulary will also start improving and so the language will start feeding itself more efficiently through reading and watching. It may be fine to pick a grammar book aimed at learners and start paying attention at the details. The Routledge grammars can prove themselves useful at this time. From previous experiences it's not much useful to go in detail in grammar when your vocabulary and your familiarity with the language won't allow for you to make sense of what is being explained and to relate to what you have already seen. You will be reading about a lot of details that you wouldn't be able to apreehend from your usage of native materials at an early stage, as you will be too busy with approaching new layers of vocabulary.

Time goes by and we're approaching a B2 level. Then it's perhaps time to read grammar books aimed at natives, to be nitpicky (but not so much) but mostly to keep getting good practice. At this time you will be familiar with the vocabulary in many of your native materials, so you can read with a focus on grammar, for example. From then on, grammar books will remain as reference books, unless you're specifically studying for certificates and the like.

[Iversen]

I definitely symphathize with Expugnator's misgivings about mixing heavy grammar lessons with heavy doses of new vocabulary.

My cure is to read through grammars to find out what I definitely need to learn NOW - and that will most mostly be morphology and some basic sentence building patterns. And I put those things on green sheets as soon as I have decided how I want them presented. But there is one thing more which I want, but rarely get, and that's a large number of short and clear examples with minimal new vocabulary where I can se how each grammatical rule or table functions in practice. The human brain is built to see patterns, but you can't see a pattern if you only are presented with one example. And drills don't help: input before output please, and before I have absorbed the rule or whatever it is then it's also to early to ask me to use it.

As for vocabulary there are several methods to get it without too much interference from grammar, and my preference is of course wordlists, but intensive work with text is also productive.

It is a pain constantly to be confronted with new sentence constructions and unexpected endings when you have chosen to focus on vocabulary, and that's one good reason to do vocabulary learning based directly from dictionaries. But that solution is not unproblematic: in order to memorize new words it is very important already to know some old words which can be used for reference, and knowing such words also make the new ones look less intimidating. But studying a text where you have to look up almost all the words is a slow and exasparating process (especially because they are spread all over your dictionary) so I prefer to use bilingual texts at that stage, even though I also may run into some mysterious grammatical challenges there.

[Fortheo]

I only use Anki for grammar. I use the Cloze sentences function and import exercises from whatever source I chose. I'm the kind of guy that really needs to have grammar beaten into my head several times, so anki is the way to go in that regards. If I didn't use anki to continuosly test me, then I'd need to buy a limitless amount of grammar books in order to offer me a sufficient amount of exercises. My memory is so mediocre these days that I can go through a grammar book, finish that book, open that book to exercise 20 and realize that I need to practice it all over again because I'm still shakey on the subject. Anki lets me practice those exercises as many times as I want until I feel confident with them (obviously I could do that by hand too, but once I've written the answer once it's there to be seen; anki hides the answer each time, so it's effectively testing me each time).The only problem with anki is that I hate inputting exercises; it can be very time consuming.