English Grammar for Students of X (Olivia & Hill Series)

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sirgregory
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English Grammar for Students of X (Olivia & Hill Series)

Postby sirgregory » Thu Jul 01, 2021 7:03 am

I found this series on Amazon yesterday and wanted to share since I don't recall seeing any other language books quite like these.

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0934034427/

I don't know how things are over in Europe or other parts of the world, but in most American schools English grammar has not been taught for many decades. I myself was taught the most basic parts of speech like noun, verb, and adjective, but almost nothing beyond that. One consequence of this is that people don't understand the grammatical terms that are used in most foreign language textbooks.

One way around this problem is to double down on the no-grammar and try to teach foreign languages without using any grammatical jargon. This series takes the opposite approach and attempts to provide a remedial course in elementary grammar. Judging from the sample pages, the approach is to have a short chapter on a given part of speech or grammatical concept (e.g. "What is a participle?) It assumes you do not know what these terms mean. It explains the concept first from the perspective of English, and then it describes how the concept works in the foreign language. The title ("English Grammar ...") is rather misleading because these books actually cover quite a lot of the target language grammar, though not comprehensively.

For those who already know the grammatical terms, something like this would not be necessary. But I think this could fill a gap for people who were never taught the parts of speech, etc. Another way I could see this used is for people who like to get a bird's-eye view of the grammar of a language right at the beginning when they start a language. I like to do this before I really dive in, but I find it hard to find the right book for this. For German, I used Wikipedia and a pocket reference grammar. That was okay, but this would have probably been better.

Languages: Spanish, French, German, Italian, Latin, Russian, Japanese, Arabic, Chinese. And English for Spanish speakers.
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księżycowy
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Re: English Grammar for Students of X (Olivia & Hill Series)

Postby księżycowy » Thu Jul 01, 2021 9:24 am

I have the Japanese and German books in the series. I've had them for years. I don't find myself using them all that much these days, but I have found them quite helpful at times.
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