Because I learned outside of school and I taught myself mostly everything, I ended up learning to read and write a lot later than other kids my age. They were reading and studying boring grammar in school, but I was looking around at street signs going “wtf do all those symbols mean?” Yet, I could speak quite well and understand all kinds of technical, “advanced adult” talk.
The only grammar I remember studying, at first, was a phonetics book… and even that I picked up out of curiosity and a desire to learn to read, finally. I remember looking at it maybe only up to five times. I read things like ‘A makes this sound and Th makes that sound….’ and that was it.
Then, I read a few sentences in a children’s book. And one night, I picked up a novel (by Laura Ingalls Wilder, I believe) and I read the whole freakin thing. I was like “woah, holy frick mum, I just read me a book!!” lol
After that I went on to read things like ‘The French Lieutenant’s Wife” and Nelson Mandela’s biography. And I *enjoyed* them, lol. And I was only 11 yrs old. XD

When I eventually did go to school (in highschool and college) my English teachers were surprised at my levels of English and writing. They gave me really high marks and said they admired my writing style. I’m not full of myself, really… just look at the way I write sometimes!! I can be damn lazy and write all kinds of weird run-on sentences and things. But what I’m saying is, I was able to read and write pretty well, and I never learned much about grammar at all.
To be honest, my teachers would have been quite surprised to know that I didn’t (and actually still don’t really) know what an adverb is. Seriously. I never seriously studied all of those technical things and terms… I just did what worked, and…. it WORKED!!

So… just saying… I think it’s really true, all this about grammar. It’s far more important to just know HOW to produce things like spoken sentences and written sentences that make sense without necessarily knowing WHY it is that way. Atleast at first. There’s nothing wrong with learning the technicalities after the fact or later on into your studies, of course. But from the beginning – just learn how to do things by following examples and ingesting it all from your environment – and eventually the understanding and then the output will come!! And after that you can learn perhaps what the names are for all of those systems of talk and writing you’re using… or not.
Blaaaah……..I can’t believe I just wrote all of that!!!!

Basically, I’m now just reminded of how I learned English reading and writing… and I am going to learn Japanese the same way, pretty much. Thanks for the article, awesome person of awesome!!! ^_^

I always have kids say things out loud or look at other books to check their work. Everything they need is in their environment, not in abstract rules. They see it other places, they copy the structures, they get more and more literate. The kids who focus hour after hour, day after day, get very good, very quickly. Of course, they spend time doing all kinds of other things as well. They’re kids after all and developing in every area. But they never really learn grammar per se, I NEVER teach it. It doesn’t work.

And while there are heaps of studies showing how tweaks in teacher to student questioning can help with development, it remains very clear that a students’ fluency and language level correlate, with brutal in your face clarity, to the hours of focused reading the child puts in. Just plain old hard work and support at home and at school.

If my brain based instruction theory is correct here, the reason learning grammar’s abstract rules apriori doesn’t work is there are no experiences to organize in your head. That’s certainly true for children and given how slippery a new language always is in my head, I bet that’s exactly what’s happening in our adult heads. There’s nothing to hang that abstract knowledge on in your head. And your brain consequently says “That’s useless, I’m not going to bother with that. This is boring, lets do something else… where is that PS3…”.

I think it’s not just that it’s not profitable to learn grammar first, I think we CAN’T learn grammar before we have some language to organize. It’s just memorizing random digits without stuff for it to organize. You just can’t understand it in any meaningful way when it’s all 生 like that.

So I think we can boil things down here with a little help from good old Steven Covey. Begin with the end in mind. If we are interested in learning to speak and read reasonably fluently, studying grammar doesn’t matter and isn’t worth your time unless you are trying to puzzle out what a sentence means, instance by instance. AFTER. When you have your hours of material to organize. So, make like the kiddies and put in those hours! For every 10 pages you read, every hour of listening, I’ll give you a gold sticker. There’ll be a prize given to the top three sticker holders in the class at the end of the week.

There is another type of grammar, the kind that linguists deal with, called descriptive grammar. Descriptive grammar doesn’t give a damn about telling you how to talk. Instead it merely tries to describe how native speakers of the language talk. Not to aid language learning, but in an effort to study how languages work and ultimately what, if anything, different languages have in common.

So yeah, there is no grammar that will teach you a language. Grammar is really only useful after you learn the language if you want to study it, but it is by no means the way to learn the language. By the way I’m a linguistics major, and grammar certainly exists. I don’t think this is necessarily the place for that discussion though. Also before you try to debate this, I think you should know that grammar is a more complex idea than what the general public takes it for. Again, I am mostly referring to descriptive grammar, not prescriptive.

“construct a sentence in english only using grammer rules”

they cant do it, they dont know them, maybe theve deduced the basic ones or know complex ones they were forced to study, buyt largely the dont know how the construct sentences, the work on feeling/ semantic levels

then i ask

“construct a sentence in japanese only using grammer rules”

and they can, eaisly but it takes them too loong and the sentences suck in their mechanical nature

try it on the next guy who disagrees with you

; )

I speak and write grammatical English but it wasn’t until mid-college or so, when I started reading web sites and books by grammar geeks, that I really had any clue of what the rules of grammar were. Now I can rattle a bunch of them off and tell you the difference between a mass noun and a count noun and how it affects article usage, but…I didn’t need to know that to be able to use grammar correctly.

I’m trying to do a serious program of self-study for Mandarin Chinese (which I grew up speaking but am functionally illiterate in) and Japanese (married a Japanese guy, would LOVE to be fluent enough to converse with my in-laws). Anyways, you’ve given me something to think about (and aspire to) as I begin my own journey.