You Don't Need To Study Grammar To Learn A Foreign Language

There is an intermediate stage between -1 and -2... Let’s say stage 1.5: pointing objects with the finger while pulling your clothes. It’s not a proper language, but probably has a role on learning the true one, since it makes you to say the name of that thing.

I totally agree with you about grammar. Listening is the most important aspect of language learning. Grammar is great for educating yourself in a language but speaking and educating are two different things.

This is an interesting way of learning a language, if you dedicate yourself to it and immerse yourself in the language. I agree with you that doing solely grammar is counterproductive especially at the beginning. It’s all about accepting the language. Some students can’t get past the fact that each language has it’s way of saying something and want to know al l the little details right from the start.
I give structures and we practice those structures, those greeting sentences and the responses over and over again. At the end, they can answer like a native. Of course, if you want to go deeper in the language and really master it, the grammar part is super important. At school, in France, we do a lot of grammar otherwise it is impossible to write correctly. (and practically impossible to understand someone’s writing when there are plenty of mistakes)

Jeez ... amazing how this statement of yours can motivate the frustrated eggheads to post their nonsense and completely missing the point.
It is due to this ingrained resistance and closed mindset that formal school language learning is complete BS for most students.

I think that it really depends on the language. I’m a native English speaker who has been studying Japanese for 3 years, with an N3 certificate, and I’m currently studying in the advanced level and going for an N2 certificate this year. My speaking skills were rated as intermediate high when I took the ACTFL earlier this year, but I felt like I performed poorly on that exam compared to my potential due to feeling a lot of pressure to hit the level I needed to gain my foreign language credits for college graduation.

With that preface out of the way, I can’t imagine learning Japanese without intensively studying grammar. That being said, what is referred to as “grammar” both in the textbooks and by Japanese teachers is much different than the “grammar” that I generally refer to when talking about English, and that I can recall studying in school. These are the so called “grammar points”, and they generally refer to how to make an equivalent statement in Japanese from English, that usually is not obvious or clear from looking at the rudimentary meaning of each of the words in a sentence.

An example of this is how to say “I must do X”. The direct translation from Japanese to English would actually be more like “If I/you don’t do X I/you can’t continue.” In Japanese, this double negative form is the equivalent to “I must” or “I have to” in English. When learning these grammar points, we generally learn the grammar as I would have typically referred to it at the same time, such as verb conjugations and formatting for the grammar points when used with different parts of speech (nouns, adjectives, etc), but this kind of grammar is usually very consistent in Japanese with a few exceptions (and these exceptions are also consistent), so perhaps this is why most study time is spent instead memorizing the grammar point and it’s English equivalent.

Because much of this grammar is not at all obvious, this is why I say that I can’t imagine trying to learn Japanese simply by memorizing vocabulary and the “traditional” grammar rules (like SOV formatting, dropping the subject, verb tenses and time references, etc), and then immersing yourself in the language. You would be completely lost much of the time. Actually even now when I learn new grammar points, I sometimes will realize that I misunderstood something that I heard or read in the past even though at that time I felt I understood the meanings of the words. For instance when I learned “only after X”, I thought people were saying “I’ll do X and then start”, or something to that akin initially. That might seem like splitting hairs on semantics, but those distinctions can be really important.

I’m not a linguist or language learning expert though, as Japanese is the only other language I’ve actually gone out of my way to try to learn, so maybe this is more about the Japanese language than anything else, but I find that doubtful. I have heard some language learning partners I’ve worked with express the difficulties with this in French for example.

The other learners I have seen and worked with in groups who have a lot of difficulty speaking Japanese are usually the ones who don’t ever practice speaking or conversations. You can have all the passive knowledge in the world, but if you can’t quickly understand what you heard and then quickly formulate a response, you are likely to lose your confidence when you can’t keep up with the tempo of the conversation. Losing your confidence generally leads to a death spiral for the learner who starts making a lot of mistakes and trying to self correct mistakes they think they have made, then eventually retreats to their shell and wants to default back to their native language. This is why, in my opinion, the #1 most important thing you can do when learning a language (if your goal is to speak it), is to practice conversations with a native speaker who can correct you, be open to getting corrected, and then study the areas you needed correction on in your free time.

This article is very useful for me as a foreign language teacher. I invite my colleagues to read it carefully and try harder to incorporate these amazing ideas when planning, monitoring and evaluating students learning, because what really matters is what they can communicate using the target language and not how correct they are in terms of structures and gramma, at least not at the beginning stages.

I am Vietnamese but cannot read or write Since I came to the states at 4yo. I can speak Conversational But as my kids finally want to learn when they ask me questions I cannot answer since I am illiterate. It’s all about the tones so w/Pimsleur Vietnamese (the absolute best) what do you recommend for me to learn to read &write? After many many yrs & countless$we gave up on my kids learning Vietnamese. All traumatized by Rosetta Stone & countless others vietnamese programs & now they lost time window to speak with no accent as they are now in their teens. Pimsleur only has 1 level & no online xtras & no options for feature expansion (I inquired). Do you have a suggestion when they are done w/Pimsleur Vietnamese since Rocket language does not offer it? Lastly I am learning Spanish & am also traumatized w/Rosetta Stone thru the kids even though I still have a subscription for Rosetta Stone Spanish .which one would you choose for me to learn Spanish (took 2 hrs way back in High school) ?My kids took 4yrs of Spanish in high school but say they can’t speak it? Thanks so much for your help. You are the GOAT & inspired me & my 4 kids

Hello, I’ve learned English on my own, mostly through consuming content on the internet. I am a native Dutch speaker. I started off with some youtube videos in English, with a heavy Dutch accent. This guy wasn’t great at English, so he still used little chuncks of Dutch, or translate sentences literally. After that, I began consuming more content. I didn’t exactly know what it meant, but was getting the gist through visual clues. Not having visual clues is the biggest downside for audio-only sources.
After that, I became more and more immersed in English, social media, blogs, websites, nothing online was in Dutch. Grammar started to improve, accent became more natural.
I’m just starting to get grammatical terms, due to learning a different language.

I’m very pleased to have read this, as it’s a lesson I seem to have to keep focusing on. I simply don’t understand how people are supposed to speak even conversationally in second etc. language, if they are scanning their minds for a conjugation table. I have studied Japanese, French, Spanish and now Italian (since July ‘19, using the excellent Rocket Italian), and managed to converse in all of them, without ever focusing on grammar.

Your reference to “chunking” is the best way of describing how this is achieved.

Thanks for this post, Donovan.

Cheers, Chris

Hello, Donovan. I find your blog very useful. The part about students learning grammar for years and reading advanced texts is exactly about me, but I want to change this and explore ways to find people to practice conversational skills.

The problem is that when I try and do research on my own through google, grammatical explanations seem to be pretty much unavoidable. Say I’m reading some French and I see the word “s’est”, so I go “ok what’s that mean and when do I use it?”, so I look it up, and the explanation says “S’est is the contraction of the reflexive pronoun se and est (from être). We use it with the il, elle, on form of pronominal verbs conjugated in the passé composé tense.”

I mean I sure hope you’re right, since I have no clue what that explanation even means because I lack grammatical terminology knowledge.

I found this webpage after getting frustrated with the amount of rules that exist while learning languages. I had this in school, and even on the internet, as I learn Portuguese, German and French, I’m bombarded with rule after rule. Finally I just threw my hands in the air and wondered, “well there’s got to be a better way than memorizing 100s of rules because that’s not how I become proficient in English. Why can’t the same apply for the languages I’m trying to become fluent in?” So I went on a quest in the mighty Google and found this page which cleared all my doubt. This just confirms that I don’t have to learn all those tedious rules. It all makes sense with how I learned English when I was a child i.e. constant listening, speaking, erring and correcting and improving. Thanks for your article and web site man.

P.S. I’m a web developer, and I must say that your website is awesome. One of the best I’ve ever seen. Are you using Wordpress? Because I’m thinking of learning Wordpress as well.

Com os melhores cumprimentas,
Ezekiel Carvalho

Hi sir. Thanks for this article. Can you suggest a site Pota Focal for Spanish? Thank you.

many decades ago I learned to read and write english in a one room school house. I would like to learn greek in much the same way. with the confinement of the current epidemic, I doubt I’ll be able to sneak in the back of a kindergarten. can you point me to one of the many courses you review that will help me learn the alphabet, learn the phonics, learn to read and write first the characters and then words, speak enough to progress to your idea of chunks of language and speaking on a daily basis. please and thank you,

Is learning grammar its that easy or dificult for you?

Donovan, I’ve been an Esl teacher at a big franchised school in Brazil for the past 2 years. Throughout my experience I’ve gotten many compliments about my fluency and the way I can explain almost every grammar rule without consulting any book. I’m not giving my backgroung to brag or anything of sorts, It’s just that in the past few days I was consuming myself with the question: “Where have I learned all this things?”, you see, I haven’t attended any courses nor have I formally studied english in my entire life. Your article single handedly gave me so much peace, I’ve gotten an imense grasp as to how language learning works.

I have only one question for you: May I translate this article to portuguese and share it with my students? I will certainly give the credit!

thanks a lot!

I hate to interrupt your hoity-toity sweet nothings conversation.

Bravo, you have eloquently expressed the position on languages that I had since high school.... many decades ago. It is astonishing to me that so many educated people can’t accept the simple fact that native speakers often know almost zero grammar. Isn’t that telling enough?

Cheers!

I loved reading this article. As a teacher of French (foreign language), I have to constantly fight against other language teachers who want to give too much emphasis to grammar. That’s why I created a youtube channel and a blog to offer French learners the most comprehensible input (without grammar...).

This is fascinating and helps me rationalize not wanting to study grammar. Learning spanish, I mostly learned by physical immersion and netflix. These would point to you being right, as they’re not grammar based methods. However, if someone is going to be reading subtitles a lot, would you consider that to be a level of reading that requires the study of grammar? or would you say that’s only for more advanced levels of reading like literature.

I will wholeheartedly agree with this post with one caveat: study grammar if you find it enjoyable. I’ve learned Chinese and slowly picking up Korean while largely ignoring most of the grammar lessons presented. Not only do I find it boring, I feel the explanations rarely lead to anything useful or memorable. Often you’re stuck one one or two examples but in reality grammar has rules and exceptions to the rule for many different situations.

It is only until after 2 months of Korean did I find myself able to comprehend grammar. At first it’s merely a bunch of random rules that is mind numbingly boring. I hate to name websites but howtostudykorean is a resource that I find to be the least useful since it focuses on primarily grammar. Again, not helpful and is counterproductive as you feel you aren’t understanding the language at all.

I’ll wrap up before this post gets too long. One thing that is rarely mentioned in these types of articles/posts is that we often forget why we start studying a language in the first place. Remember to keep listening to the music and watching the movies that made you interested in the language. When the material you’re studying is too hard to comprehend, this means that you need to find something easier. Not always easy, but look online for lessons that is at your level.

And here I am speaking in a language I have no clue how I learned. All I know is that I somehow started to do some research about something I can’t remember. At some point I dropped the translator and at some point I realized; Grammar doesn’t exist.

Indeed

You can learn a language through studying grammar. I did with English. Lots of classes studying verb tenses, parts of speech, the morphology of the language etc. The difference was that my English teachers taught grammar little by little and provided us with lots, lots of speaking practice - in addition to listening exercises, writing tasks, games etc. And yet, I know plenty of people who acquired a language by simply being immersed in it. At the end of the day, it seems to me that people may have different learning styles. Some students, like me and other adults, may not develop accuracy without studying grammar, while others may successfully speak a language without knowing what an adjective is. My point is: the problem may not be whether we should study grammar or not, but who might need it and how we should study it.

I had seen a similar blog post a few years ago and am so glad to have found your post.
I have lived in Brasil for 6 years and my Portuguese is very limited.
I have attended 2 terms at a local uni for Portuguese para estrangeiros, I found little value. Mainly due to the manic obsession with grammar. As you mentioned phrase books are very useful.
I am at present using an online language class and it has student feed back. One student asked a question about a sentence structure and a lover of grammar replied at length about 2nd&3rd persons etc, the confused student replied who are these people? To which I made the comment, they are the 4th person who adds confusion to learning a language.
Together hopefully we can win the war against the grammar demigods 😀

_How are you_ example was a real bad one. You see that a person is a foreigner, why do you ask him “how are you?”? Are you expecting him to answer? No, you are just confusing him even before you start a dialog! There are so many good non-committal expressions like “Greetings, sir”, or even “G’day mate”, but idiot natives still want to play their senseless password-countersign games.

I am nearly 7 years late...but oh well.

What happened to good ol’ grammar AND speaking? The problem in the classrooms is not becaus epeople don’t speak, it’s because they have neither real motivation nor partners to talk to (it’s either teacher or their fellow students, and they talk on pre-set topics and not because they are genuinly curious about something).

Duolingo practices the same approach. Minimize the grammar or cut it out completely via A/B tests, make people go as far as possible without reading anything about their target language. As the result, comments are full with learners asking questions like “why is it ‘an’ instead of ‘a’ here?” or “what the hell is ‘nous sommes mardi’?” over an over again, when all it take it just one line of explanation to read and remember. Nouns starting with a vowel require ‘an’ in English. “Nous sommes ___” is a set phrase used in French to talk about days of the week. That’s not that hard and long a read.

Once I was supposed to go outside for a few hours and I asked the girl that was going with me if I should take water. She said she took it. Turned out she didn’t, she just mixed up tenses necause of her poor grammar. And now every time I hear or read that grammar is not really neccesary and you can do just fine without it, I sincerely wish that person to find themselves in rural India when it’s +40 (~104 F) outside with no effing water.

Sure, speaking is important, and it’s important to learn live language, not tables and spreadsheets. But it must be supported by reasonable grammar studies that will help you navigate it so much better.

You’ve missed ‘n’ in ‘impeding’, sorry.

I am fascinated by your methods. How would you apply chunking to Koine Greek and biblical Hebrew?

Hello
For the last 20 years , I’ve been teaching english with a chunk method called
L’ANGLAIS TOUT DE SUITE from Langues pour tous, because it’s the best I’ve found.
Each bilingual french/ english audio unit deals with only one structure and as there are 20 units you can enormously improve your english with this one audio.
This method is based on a scientific study that demonstates that 75 % of oral language is covered by 175 words.
Here’s a link where you can download the audios several different audio methods .
Start with the first to consolidate your oral english bases.
LISTEN to one unit ( about one minute ) everyday once for one week before going on to the second unit . If you find it too easy , your ears don’t , so give them the time to really hear the basic sound chunks that are going to change your your english.

Have fun
Christian Leconte

Thank You very much.
I don’t know why but this link doesn’t work. Are you sure this site exist?

Thank you in advance

Hello,
I would like to ask if you have any materials to learn English through chunks. Any short dialogues or videos which I could listen and also I think it is important that would be helpful if someone could explain particular chunks. Because I can find some dialogues on Youtube but for me where English is my second language it is difficult to find out which phrases are actually chunks. Do you have materials like that? Made by you or someone else?

Late to the convo. I do agree with you that speaking and reading heavily (and writing) are the best ways to learn a language. It needs to be heavily tilted that way. I have taught Latin several years and my real breakthrough was conducting the entire class in Latin orally. It’s still not as good as the old days when it was immersion in Latin and fluency in a year.

That said grammar is very important and the logic that goes with it. It can be fun and interesting. It’s mastery, however, or unconscious recall only comes from speaking or reading (the latter especially in the case of fine distinctions that are not used in oral speech). Anyways, I agree with you mostly. In learning Spanish now, I’ve done no grammer yet really. I probably will soon, but just bit by bit. I’m actually putting it all together without effort in my mind since I’m very much a grammarian.

For real grammer I recommend the site “The Underground Grammarian”, and you’ll see that their is much more to it that you think, not to mention logic and rhetoric, the lost arts.

Of course, my grammar on internet posts is deplorable. Embarrassing! But I write quickly and without attention. haha.

Hi. Super interesting discussion!! I speak 5 languages and acquired in different ways. I do believe in the complete submersion idea. Not always possible and takes conscious effort and persistence unless you are dumped in a foreign country for a while. But I don’t think grammar learning is necessary actually unless for the purpose of writing . There are fantastic musicians that don’t read music. I am thinking of many gypsy musicians who learned to play together by just learning the instrument technically and then by listening to other musicians. I guess if they were to compose music for others outside of their group or orchestra they would need to learn how to read music. Speaking and writing/ reading is two different things even though clumped together as one most often. I find languages fascinating . Speaking a language takes guts and willingness to look and sound foolish. Cheers to all of you on your journeys into uncharted territory. Many blessings!!

It seems like the article presents the study of grammar as a straw man- the article seems to talk about cases where people focus heavily or exclusively on learning grammar, with boring materials that don’t use key vocabulary, and with translation. Of course such an approach is destined to fail- although translation is not without its merits. Like any other method, it shouldn’t be used exclusively.
The article says that all over the world, people get bad results in their learning because of focusing only on grammar. But there are places where people have good results in their learning, and they definitely study grammar. For example, in Northern European countries, they generally have a great level of English, and they definitely study grammar. Not as the core of their studies, but it is definitely in the curriculum. It’s safe to say that none of those very successful language learners learned English without learning its grammar.
I can say from my personal success stories learning languages (French, Russian, German, Spanish, all but the last at B2 level or higher), that learning grammar was one of several critical ingredients in my success.
I can also say from my own teaching- I have been teaching English since 2005- that grammar, while not critical to making oneself understood in speech, is critical when trying to understand others. I have had beginner-level students who don’t know how plural endings are pronounced, the difference between “Who do you like?” and “Who likes you?”; these people understand the words of the texts they read- but they don’t understand the message of the text because details are lost.
Lastly, if you are learning a language and are translating L2 phrases and sentences into L1 ones en masse (think Glossika), then you are in fact studying grammar in some way. But without explanations of the grammar, you are just hoping for the best. Again, grammar study is useful, but it has to have its proper place in the curriculum, not taking up too much space and not too little; grammar lessons should make use of numerous examples, and high frequency vocabulary.

Many years ago (1970s), I took two years of German in high school and then studied it for two more years and received a Two-Year Degree in German from a Junior College. Funny thing is, I never really learned German. What did we study? Mostly, grammar.

I can still recite most of a monologue I had to memorize in high school. But ask me to compose my own sentence on the fly -- probably not going to happen.

I always wonder why almost all the English native speaking teachers say that English learners should learn English without translation and without learning grammar. Have they ever seen English speaking people learning a foreign language without translation and without learning grammar? In this post the author recommends the Rocket English as a very good language learning course. Haven’t he noticed that all its language courses have English transliteration and English translation of each word and of each phrase? Furthermore, all of them have grammar sections which is accessible only in the payable version. It means that that learning program is bad because it violates the main principle of native speakers: no translation, no grammar. Why then the author recommends it as a good program? Can he learn Russian, for example, without translation and without learning grammar?

Dear Mr. Nagel,

Quite simply: You remove the FEAR of learning and introduce JOY. I am 72 yrs., of age & discovered this shortly after I left school some 56 yrs., ago, wondering why I could not remember anything I had learned, not French, maths, History etc., I picked up a ‘Learn French’ book in 1997 & realised I knew everything; it had been in my subconscious all that time. I have since applied this theory to many different skills. Thank you.

Yours faithfully

F.J.K.

I learned to speak Spanish both fluently and grammatically correctly in two years while doing volunteer work in Colombia. I arrived knowing very few words, nothing about grammar and understanding virtually nothing that was being said. The work required teaching people a set of standard lessons and the best l could do in the beginning was just read my parts as well as I could. It was clear that the people couldn’t understand what I was reading, but my fellow volunteers still had me do my parts each time. I was out among the people teaching and otherwise listening to and trying to communicate in Spanish for about twelve hours a day. After about three months of that, I found I could understand much of what was being said and speak well enough to teach my lessons without reading and otherwise meet my basic communication needs. As I started understanding more, my interest in studying grammar grew substantially because it now had become relevant to me --particularly the verb conjugations. I continued to immerse myself in the actual use of the language during my working hours and would spend some time at night studying grammar, looking up relevant words and reflecting on any communication problems I might have had during the day.

After returning, I took a 24 credit hour Spanish college course for people who had learned Spanish via a foreign experience and easily got an A. The professor expressed amazement at my command of the grammar.

While I mostly attribute my ability to understand and speak Spanish to being immersed in the use of the language, I don’t think I would speak it nearly as correctly if I hadn’t also taken the time to study the grammar. I met a lot of people who could reasonably understand and defend themselves in Spanish after two years without studying grammar but I never met such a person who speaks grammatically correct Spanish.

If I had to choose between immersion in the language and studying grammar, I would certainly recommend immersion. However, I think that studying grammar while immersed in the language is ideal.

Good comment. The method you describe puts grammar in its place.

Word. I’ve studied Portuguese for 4 years by pretty much just talking talking talking. I read a lot to improve my vocabulary. My grammar is ok. I like studying the subjunctive grammar, but really only to learn the conjunctions for more complex sentence contruction. I tell my teacher all the time “I’m done with the grammar exercises. I need to just sit and have conversations with you and talk and practice whats on this paper.” I can conjugate anything in any tense pretty much in the language, but when it comes to actually PRODUCING the sentences on a whim, it’s much more difficult. But again, for me, its very multi faceted. I wouldn’t say grammar study is worthless, but its definitely not the MOST productive thing to be doing with my time. Oh, and BTW, Rocket Languages was the first method I used to learn portuguese, and it is an AWESOME product for beginners.

There are several problems with your thesis in this article.

You say you haven’t “memorized vocabulary lists” for Irish, but you’ve obviously memorised “pre-fabricated chunks” of Irish - what are they if not items of vocabulary? You say you haven’t studied any syntax, yet all your “chunks” are in order demanded by Irish syntax.

You say you’ve “encountered students in schools around the world who can read brilliantly and know English grammar better than I do yet they can barely produce basic greetings or understand a simple spoken introduction”; iIn other words, they *don’t* know English grammar better than you!

You recommend ‘Rocket Languages’ phrasebooks, but their website says things like this: “you MUST know the mechanics of how French works for you to truly master French. French, like most languages, has a completely different sentence structure to English, which means that you need to have that structure explained to you, it’s not something that you can pick up by osmosis!” That goes against what you say in this article, and is also not at all true - French has a very similar sentence structure to English (i.e. SVO, placement of adjuncts and adverbials).

Also, try learning a polysynthetic language and getting the morphemes in the wrong order - “pre-fabricated chunks” just don’t work in such agglutinative languages - you’ll soon realise the importance of ‘grammar’. Ditto the particles in Japanese - insert those by the wrong chunk and you’ll come a cropper.

I hate to say it, but I could go on.

Jac, you can know something through studying it, or by internalizing it. They are not the same, you know. I myself have internalized the patterns of English, Dutch, German and Japanese to some extent using a no-grammar, or grammar-lite approach. And you can remember words, phrases and word patterns through means other than memorization too.

I think you’re the only person in the comments who hasn’t understood that Donovan is talking about sitting down and purposefully studying specific points of language. Getting a sentence and repeating it and studying grammar purposefully to put your own sentences together aren’t the same things. You don’t seem to have realised that in your criticism.

Khatzumoto of AJATT fame learned Japanese without explicitly studying grammar. So there goes that theory of yours.

I was originally going to disagree with you, but after reading your post and a long debate between you and someone else in the comments, I think that I now mostly agree with you. I still believe that grammar is important, but I think that it may be best to leave everything aside from the very basics to after you have achieved some fluency in the language. Personally, I have found that learning German is somewhat easier because I started with a program that focused primarily on pronunciation and dialogues instead of jumping straight into heavy grammar instruction.

Anyway, I believe that it would be beneficial to start focusing a little more on learning chunks of a language as you explained in your post. I am currently teaching myself German. Do you have any suggestions (beyond using phrasebooks) on how to start using this method? For example, would it be beneficial for a beginner to listen to a German podcast or read a German newspaper?

I disagree. An adult has to eventually come to grips with learning some of the grammar of the target language, L2. Just simply because you’re an adult. That’s just something you won’t escape, maybe except by total immersion where you have the opportunity of, as a friend put it, ‘redoing your child’. Most native speakers of the target language you’ll meet aren’t gonna be five year olds, they’d be adults who, in addition to being totally immersed, have had varying degrees of formal education on their language, including grammar obviously. You have to realise that most adult L2 learners don’t have the immediate opportunity of an immersive experience, so they easily rush off to the nearest language book/class/school/course to meet their learning needs. The question is, do they know what exactly these needs/skills are before diving in? Here they are in general.

Pre-literate: Speaking and (therefore) listening.
Literate: Reading and writing.

I guess your argument here is in favour of acquiring the former first, and I will agree with you on that. Even then, some grammar learning will still be included in those.

Rather dogmatic approach. I fluently speak, read and write in 3 languages, but I could not tell you a simple grammar rule in any of those 3, even if I probably had to pass some exams at some stage in my life that demanded knowledge of those rules (not knowledge of rule language). I am quite militant when it comes to grammar, and I truly believe that most of it is simply rubbish, not just unnecessary. Enjoy your grammar, I’ll enjoy my conversations.

Hi everybody
Thanks Donovan I feel I’ve finally found my language soulmate that I’ve been l
looking for , for years!
After learning my English mother tongue in the US , I learned French at 8 when the family moved to Paris so with my sister we are, what we call indetectable bilinguals.
This sounds very impressive but it turns
out half of the world population speaks two languages every day( one of which has no written grammatical rules ) and most of them are illeterate.
30 years ago , I joined my father who had been teaching languages both French and English orally for the previous 30 years.

1 First of all being an agricultural engineer he gave me some scientific information about oal language:

A study by the Sorbonne linguists recording 300000 words of adult conversations all around France:
175 words represented 80 % of them

2 Another study by a language school named Rapid English showed a Britsh persons use of spoken english:
3 tenses represent 60%
Present :20%
Preterit :25%
Future: 15%
Present Perfect: 3.8 %
Present Continuous 1.8 %

3 A French linguist doctorate reseacher in the Lyon university discovered the following scientific facts about oral French
Oral language speed 12/16 sounds per second .
Aural (hearing ) 4/ 6 sounds per second

The Stroop effect discovered by this scientist and explained in his PHD thesis in the 1930’s
It demontrates quite simply the great difficulty of processing two pieces of information at the same time(try it online
,it’s fun)

Personally , I’ ve continued on this quest for scientific facts to help me understand

1 An article in “Courrier international “
in 1992 described the following market study

4500 adulfs from 10 founding European countries were thoroughly tested for their understanding of a fictitious english tv news program

Scandinavian countries+Holland 75/80%
( they have no dubbing on tv so they english every day)

Others:less than 10%
Portugal 10% only dubbed partially)
Germany 9%
Belgium 9%( the Flemish don’t dub)

France2.5%
Italy 2%
Spain 2%

2 Equally an article in 2005 in Courrier International read by CEO ‘s in France :

South Koreans spend 17 billion dollars in english language learning evey year
As it’s their personal money they spend 900 million dollars a year in recognized tests like the TOEIC

World rank in 2005 : 120th country

At my son’s marriiage to a South Korean I experienced this firsthand in the high tech city of Daejon .
Only international hotel personnel understood english. In the enormous showcase Samsung store with 50 employees, only one spoke english.

3 The M.I.T director of the Cognitive Science deparment Steven Pinker talks about the following experiment in his book : Instinct of Language
They reproduced electronically the sound frequencies of an 8 word common sentence.(no human sounds

They asked a large number of people to hear it individually with no explanation to see if anybody would recognize it.

Nobody did
Most people said they heard electronic beeps
Some said it sounded like Star Trek

Luckily one said it sounded like the robot R2D2 in Star Wars.

Happy that one person recogniised a communication system and,
after thinking about it they decided to tell them the truth and asked them if the recognised the sentence

30% recognised it!
The most extraordinary thing is that

4 Children learn to understand their language much faster than I thought

One of my cousins who lived in Montreal started teaching a very simplified sign language to her 8 month old baby girl.
A few months laterghis cousin visited my mother in her ihouse in the U.S
She told me that this 1 year old came into the kitchen and asked where the cat was in sign language . My mother explained to her without gesturing where she thought it was , and the little one came back with the kitten a few minutes later.

All this boils down to a simple discovery that you’ve experienced yourself .

Something stops people who have learned languages in school from being able to understand them.

Analysing what indetectable bilinguals do with their oral languages that monolingjals don’t is a possible answer:

1 They don’t have a word dictionary in their head which means they very rarely translate words .
To translate a word I need to say a sentence with it , which brings up a similar sentence in the second language.

2 Most important and practically impossible for school trained monolonguals.

They separate their eyes from their ears:

Most language learners can’t help seeing the words in their heads when they hear them in a sentence and many think it’s useful.

3 They don’t divide back into words contracted and linked sounds heard.

To make sure they understand, monlinguals often want to
isolaTEACHWORD ( because of links and contractions other words and sounds appear in english sentences like CHW TEACH....)

4 They never refer to grammar either tne functions or the rules.

Just to wrap up the situation .

Maybe but just maybe, if language learners , including myself in german and russian could begin to acquire these four
bilingual approaches , providing they stop reading english and they listen everyday to very basic english audios. .
There’s a good chance fast oral progress in their school learned languages will appear even in the first month of listening.

There was a language revolution in the first years of the 20th century but there were no blogs so each linguist around the world had only one new idea. My favourite is the British linguist Edgar or Edward Sweet:

”Although language is made of words we do not speak in words but in sentences.
From a practical point of view, as well as a scientific point of view the unit of language is the sentence not the word.
From a purely phonetic point of view the word does not exist.
If someone can learn their mother tongue by repetition , reproduction and imitation of sound patterns without learning anything by heart
then they can learn any other language the same way.”

Again it’s great this blog exists

Thank’s all

Christian Leconte

I’ve really enjoyed the article above, as well as many of the comments! I agree that, while useful, knowledge of grammar isn’t essential when looking to learn a language. Even in English, my native tongue, knowledge of correct grammar can at times be a hinderance, especially when speaking with people with a speech pattern which uses grammar ‘incorrectly’. I certainly don’t attempt to ‘correct’ my conversational partner when I hear “I goes to school”, “She do drive a bus”, or “Where to you going?”, as the meaning of the phrases are obvious, despite not being what one would learn from a textbook. I’m at the very early stages of learning Levantine Arabic, and my future conversational partners will range from those who are fully-educated and proficient in their own tongue, to many who might be illiterate and may themselves have scant regard for grammar. All I want to do is to learn enough to ensure that I can make myself understood, and to understand those with whom I speak. I’ll leave ‘correct’ grammar for later!

I agree completely, and what a great bunch of comments. As well as using the idea of ‘chunks of language’ another idea is that we learn through pattern recognition. For example, we remember a face as a whole, not by working out various distances between and sizes of eyes, ears, nose etc.

Very interesting look at grammar Donovan, I’m impressed. I’ve found myself discovering something similar when learning Mandarin, i.e. don’t focus on exact translation rather focus on getting the gist of what the other person is saying and learn how to repeat that. Good article.

The start of this article was quite good, but when the author start
using a child as example, it completely makes me scroll down all the way to the comment section to write this up,
Children leaning speak first and grammar later because it’s their first language, because it’s quite impossible to learn otherwise.
That’s the main cause of illiterate of native speakers.
When you are talking about learning foreign language to learn, which is completely different from your mother language, you will
and definitely need to learn the grammar first.
It’s remains true to me as someone who learning English as my second language, which is quite different in grammatical order of my language.
As you stated at some of the phrases up there that your grammar and vocab maybe a little inferior, so I will just make a simple example,
Try making a sentence out from Japanese dictionary without having a clue of their grammar, you can figure how bad it is.
Vise versa to Japanese people who trying to making sentence out from English dictionary without knowing a clue of English grammar, it will just ends up like this :
魚が好きな人 (chisana ga suki na hito)
”Person who likes fish”
But when you translate it out right from dictionary, it would be
”Fish is like person”
Which is doesn’t make any sense.

So let me point this out once again, learning grammar of a completely different language from your native language is essential.

What you have written is simply brilliant!

I live in Denmark, where the English spoken here is rated quite highly amongst nations who speak it as a second language.

They study lots of grammar, and yet can never differentiate between things like ‘he has’ v ‘he have’. As a native English speaker ‘he have’ simply sounds and feels wrong.

My children speak both English and Danish and my youngest can understand statements like ‘se facessi questa un’altra volta, ti metteresti nei guai’. I don’t fully understand the learning process, but those who neither listen to a language nor try to speak will never become fluent irrespective of how much grammar they have learnt!!

I agree with your approach, but don’t think it’s revolutionary - outside the formal education system things have been moving this way for a while

Different individuals have different preferences and strengths in language learning. Young children simply cannot learn complex grammar structures directly. Adults can. The advantages to teaching and learning grammar are input flooding (many examples of the same thing) and the ability to write, practice independently, and self-correct. Personally, I have learned several languages and I cannot stand the “just soak it in” approach. Some of my siblings are the opposite and learn best that way. I’m a grammar nerd and successful language learner. But I realize not everyone is the same.

Personally, I think that grammar is important in learning foreign languages. The question, of course, is what do we mean by “grammar”? The Grammar-Translation method is a hopeless way of learning to speak a language. It’s like learning ABOUT a language rather than learning to use a language. And learning grammatical terminology, while useful as a kind of shorthand (it’s useful to be able to refer to the “definite article”, for instance), is pretty useless when you’re learning how to speak.

One of the big problems with grammar is that it has been perverted by educators who try to use knowledge of ‘grammar rules’ as a convenient way of testing students in exams, without regard to their actual ability to use the language.

But I don’t think it has to be that way. If grammar, especially in the form of word and sentence patterns, can be tied directly to speaking, then I think that it can be very useful in learning languages. For instance, you mentioned the imperfect/passive form in Gaelic. Rather than picking it up tiny bit by bit, I suggest that it’s more efficient to learn it as a grammatical pattern that you can expand and use in a flexible way. But the key is tying grammatical patterns to actual speech, whether through pattern drills or (preferably) a range of examples that students can refer to and apply. Language should always be aural. Hearing structures and rhythms is a good way of memorising them and putting them to use. The idea is that grammar should be made to SERVE language learning rather than having a life of its own divorced from any kind of practice.

Needless to say, grammar is only one aspect of language. “Chunks” and set phrases are extremely useful, and communicative ability -- the joy of finding that you can actually communicate with the speaker of a foreign language in their language -- should also be given priority. But grammar, not as esoteric rules and terminology, but in the form of patterns that can be listened to, memorised and used, seems to me to be a useful addition to the arsenal of language learning.

GRAMMAR STUDY KILLS YOUR ENGLISH SPEAKING ABILITY, KILLS YOUR ENGLISH FLUENCY AND WHATNOT? Do not study grammar again. Grammar is the reason why you’re not making progress after 2 or 3 or many years of learning english.

I truly appreciate this post. I’ve been looking all over for this!

One thing it seems no one mentions but nonetheless important.
Without enough attention to grammar, you run the risk of falling into the pidgen trap. Haven’t all of us seen someone speaking a horrible version of a langugae barely understandable. I’ve seen a guy from South America who has lived in the US for over 25 years but speaks such a mangled English because he apparently lacked formal schooling and studying. It’s as if his English is advertising his unflattering background.
It’s one thing if you’re already a learned, language sensitive guy, but for an average person studying proper grammar keeps you from acquiring a butchered version of the language.

Humongous post alert! My sense of unease at Donovan’s suggestions have stimulated me to have a go at articulating the approach that I’ve been groping towards on my own language journey. It will be a useful exercise for me, and it may be helpful for someone else.

I’m with Darren X, I think. It takes a child 50,000 hours of immersion and constant correction by committed and loving adults to reach the 7-year-old level. As adult learners we surely need to find a radically faster and more self-reliant way that leverages our adult skills and experience?

What seems to be happening in language pedagogy is that theorists are over-reacting against the grammar-translation approach that failed me and so many other school-kids by developing a phobia against both grammar and translation.

So we get the Natural Approach that avoids translation at all costs, but which relies on skilled teaching and is not practical for adult self-learners. Working independently, translation is surely much the most practical entry-point into the language? Target-language-only resources are simply baffling in the absence of a teacher. Why not leverage our advanced understanding of our native tongue and use it to bridge into the target language? The view that translation in the early stages cripples later fluency just doesn’t hold water: there are many outstanding polyglots who start with translation-based resources such as Assimil.

Or we get the Lexical Approach which allows translation, but in its more extreme forms proposes learning grammar entirely deductively.

But as Darren points out, the main reason the grammar-translation approach failed so dismally is that it was taught without significant practice in speaking and listening. So it’s hardly surprising that students would emerge from years of study with poor speaking and comprehension skills. Rather than throw out the baby with the bathwater, it seems to me that we should be incorporating the most useful aspects of grammar and translation into a more balanced and functional approach that incorporates insights such as the importance of lexical patterns and the need for real speech practice with natives without obsessing about making mistakes..

I’m becoming wary of these “one best way” theories. Looking at the literature, it seems that successful adult self-learners use a wide variety of approaches. The main thing they have in common seems to be that they have consciously developed an approach that motivates them and that suits their personal preferences and goals. If someone is phobic about grammar it would obviously be better to use another method. But for someone like myself who actually enjoys grammar, why on earth would I deliberately omit it from my toolkit?

To me it seems that a purely deductive approach to languages is wasteful. Figuring out something as complex as grammar by parroting lexical chunks will take countless thousands of repetitions. One of the few strong results in learning research is the value of overview: we learn and remember faster when we can slot new information into a patterned overview of the ground we are going to cover. Having an overall framework from the start sensitises us to what we are looking for and helps us to categorise what we find. It’s the same with pronunciation: learning about the difficult aspects of the language from the start helps sensitise our ear to what we should be listening for - otherwise we may simply overlook key issues.

The deductive approach to grammar ignores this insight and leaves the learner groping for the underlying patterns. A balanced approach, I feel, would involve an ascending cycle of learning, where we learn grammar patterns in the context of inputs, as with Assimil, and useful outputs in the context of grammar patterns, such as with the Teach Yourself functional grammars. This way, functional skills and the understanding of the patterns that underlie them will grow hand-in-hand.

My own approach to a new language is to take a good simplified grammar and draw a quick mind-map of how its basic structures work. I don’t worry about details or exceptions - just the fundamentals. Now I have an overview my mind can use to quickly recognise and classify the patterns it encounters and I find that this makes it much easier to learn from inputs. I gradually elaborate this initial skeleton map as my needs and understanding evolve.

Then I use an eclectic approach.

For speaking I’ll start with phrasebooks and Michel Thomas. This gives me basic sentence frames such as “How much is that [noun], please?” that get me started with simple functional conversations. Then I’ll work with progressive input such as Assimil and the Teach Yourself functional grammars to develop my production skills in the context of an evolving understanding of the grammar.

At the same time I’ll work on higher level passive skills in a digital immersion environment such as Yabla, so I can understand native speakers.

For words with low lexical linkage such as “glacier”, “stonefall” or “warm front” that I need for my own personal activities I’ll learn them in isolation using spaced repetition and I find that I can use them fine in practice.

For structural words such as articles, or words that are generally embedded in lexical patterns such as “to make” or “to love” I’ll learn them in lexical chunks. But I’ll also make up little drills with reference to grammatical material so I can produce them fluently. It seems to be that investing a few hours learning to decline “to be” and “to have” and the model regular verbs, for example, will pay off in spades because I can now recognise them in input without having to stop to look them up.

From my reading and listening I sentence-mine colloquial patterns that I feel will be useful to my conversation style and interests and feed them into a spaced repetition system.

And at an early stage I hook up with local language schools for face-to-face language exchanges with their students.

It seems to me that this kind of eclectic approach, adapted to the preferences of the individual learner, will likely work better for most people than sticking religiously to any particular purist theory. There is clearly a good deal of useful common-sense in Lewis’s insights. But there’s little research data to back up any claim that it’s the “one best way”, and I for one won’t be turning it into a stand-alone learning method.

”Some will criticize it that it will develop “fossilized” problems. My son right now says chik win to say chicken wing. I am not worried that will be fossilized, because I know it will slowly correct itself as he talk and listens.”

”Chik win” sounds cute when your son says it. It doesn’t sound so cute if a 40 year old man says it. (of course, this example isn’t a good one, as this is a vocabularly problem which can’t be fixed by studying grammar).

What’s better for your language development: hearing other peoples *correct* target langugage, or your own error-riddled beginner attempts?

I really do have to disagree with you here, Donovan. I don’t think your advice is generally applicable. I’m an English speaker learning French, and it is inconceivable to me that any adult could do this without taking advantage of the ability to learn and understand grammar. (first language acquisition as a child and second language acquisition as an adult are really nothing alike, for a host of reasons which you acknowledge). Yes, I suppose I would learn to just “get it” if I exposed myself to enough examples of correct grammar, but rather than building a (perhaps incorrect) set of grammatical rules, why not just learn the correct ones at the outset?

The French have the imperfect and the passe compose for the past, and the future proche and future simple for the future. Which one do you use when? What’s the subjunctive for? Won’t the rule be easier to internalize if you already know what it is?

Your example of students who did nothing but study grammar, and are thus unable to have conversations, was not compelling to me. OF COURSE if you do nothing but study grammar, and never have conversations, you’ll be terrible at having conversation, but nobody advocates this approach.

Besides, I *LIKE* studying grammar. It’s fun. I don’t *WANT* to just “let it go, don’t wonder what the rules are, don’t worry about it.” I *LIKE* knowing the rules.

I honestly think the best advice is: learn language in the way that is fun for you, and addresses your particular desires, goals, shortcomings, and background.

For example: No matter how much time you spend studying the conjugation chart for avoir, you’ll never effortlessly say “ils ont” instead of “il a” until you say “ils a” and the instructor corrects you (perhaps several times :). So there’s no substitute for practice. However, if you *never* study grammar, you’ll never know that “ils ont” and “il a” refer to the same verb, and thus you’ll never be able to build new phrases in the passe compose, no matter how many “chunks” you expose yourself to. And if you never study grammar, lotsa luck trying to figure out why the passe compose isn’t always conjugated using ‘avoir’....

Your entire concept of language acquisition is simply wrong i’m afraid. You’ll never effortlessly say ‘ils ont’ until you get corrected by a teacher ? Total nonsense.

I’m fluent in French and i’ve never studied grammar in my life. I’m not sure i need grammar rules to be able to look up ‘ils ont’ and ‘Il a’ to see meaning. One means they have and one is he has. Why on earth do you think i would need to know that these refer to the same infinitive verb ?

N’importe quoi.

Excellent points- this article was fantastic. When children are first learning how to speak, do we sit them down and teach them what verbs and nouns are? No! We refine their grammar later, and that is exactly what we should be doing with foreign language students. We definitely need to update our teaching methods.

I agree! Personally learning grammar drills is a very non motivating task for me. I have a grammar book with boring drill after drill which I no longer use. I think repetition is better because in a conversation I won’t remember Spanish stem changing verbs or irregular verbs.

I learnt Arabic using grammer and can read just about anything in Arabic. I hav not concentrated on the speaking aspect but have to agree with what you said. As a matter of fact I am going to use this technique of yours and see what happens. Wish me luck!

I learned Italian in Italy with an Italian phrase book/

bilingual dictionary. Took no Italian classes and did not study grammar yet I learned to speak Italian. I had Italian speaking friends watched and listened to Italian TV/radio.

That\’s the best way to do it. ;)

Hello there,

I feel like I can only agree with you up to a point. On one hand, my husband, who learned German to the point of near-native fluency, had no idea what I was talking about when I asked him about strong/mixed/weak adjectivial declension agreement. But alas, it turned out he did know the rules in and out-- he just picked the rules up subconsciously via conversational practice, and lots of it, which allowed him to go beyond the boxed-in German taught in his university classroom.

On the other hand, I feel like the old method of vocab lists and grammar rules has its usefulness, particularly to people like me who like handling formulas just to be able to produce ideas (albeit at the expense of sounding natural/native) and then have it be corrected over time through conversation.

2-3 months prior to a fortnight-long trip to Argentina, I decided to cram Spanish via grammar tables and vocab lists (though this is helped with prior French experience). A fluent friend filled me in on the basic conversational phrases.

When I got to Argentina, after the initial shock of the regional dialect I was able to communicate and befriend locals and have complex conversations about lives, art, dreams, politics, etc etc (granted with a lot of English and French cognates filling words in on the fly). I’m SURE I sounded like a 6-year old caveman, but hey, they understood what I said and I understood most of what they said, and we’re still friends to this date. They spoke no English by the way so what I had crammed methodically over those 2/3 months was the only common denominator linking us. With only 2-3 months of prep, using the method of going through conversational phrases and their variations would not have allowed me to express as wide a range of ideas and sentences as my method, although I probably admittedly damaged longer term prospects of sounding natural when speaking Spanish in doing things the way that I did.

it is true. in my opinion the best way to learn grammar is by using phrases/sentences that have the grammar topic we are interested in, and highlighting the important words. i have been using this method since i started learning english and i think i have improved alot. For instance:

how long does it take to learn a languange?

¿cuanto tiempo toma aprender un idioma?

with the example above i would highlight ¨How long¨ and ¨take¨ to know that that is the way to say: cuanto tiempo toma.....

That’s not how I would say it in Spanish. It would actually be “¿cuánto se tarda en aprender un idioma?

The actual conversation process consists of two integral parts: listening and speaking.
Only adequate regular long-term practice in listening comprehension and speaking a language including of course communication with native speakers can develop fluent speaking skills. Correct oral communication in English is based on knowledge of English phonetics, grammar, vocabulary, and on practice and experience in communicating with native English speakers in real life. In my opinion learners can learn grammar and practice it in communicative grammar exercises with real life content (with sentences that most likely can be used in real life situations).
In the process of learning English grammar learners can devote a portion of time at each lesson for learning first fixed thematic conversational phrases that don’t require grammar knowledge. Later based on known grammar learners can concentrate more productively on listening, speaking, reading and writing practice on each daily life topic and on thematic vocabulary expansion. Grammar exercises that contain dialogues, interrogative and statement (or narrative) sentences on everyday topics, thematic texts and narrative stories are especially effective for mastering grammatical structures. Grammar practice should include exercises in listening comprehension, speaking, reading and writing.
I believe that vocabulary matters much more than grammar to use a language. The more vocabulary a learner knows how to use correctly the easier it is to convey a thought in a language in writing and in speaking, and to understand the listening and the reading content. And there is another fact that knowledge of grammar rules reduces making grammatical mistakes by learners. Without adequate knowledge of English grammar rules learners often cannot create their own grammatically correct sentences and often cannot understand what they read or hear in English exactly. It would take foreign learners much less time to learn grammar rules that are explained to learners than to figure out grammar rules on their own intuitively from texts because grammar rules may have exceptions and other peculiarities. Grammar books with explanations and exercises have been published by knowledgeable language specialists to make learning grammar easier so that learners don’t have to discover grammar rules anew the hard long way.

BRAVO!
I love this....all of it! I have been trying for a few years to explain this to people. I have had about nine years of Spanish and all throughout high school (even college) my language acquisition skills were completely swarmed in grammar drills with an emphasis on grammar, focusing on GRAMMAR.
I grew up in Chicago where I had many spanish-speaking neighbors and friends, and I can honestly say that I remember basic phrases they spoke, or their parents spoke to them, more than most of the grammatical points that I have learned in my Spanish speaking journey. I feel as though all of these years I was so caught up and distracted with getting key grammatical points correct, that I couldn’t really immerse myself in the actual language.
When I moved to Spain for about six months, my speaking abilities, alongside with my listening capacity, skyrocketed! Living around the target language, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week allowed my to REALLY build up those language “chunks” and speaking came easier and it actually gave me the confidence to just SPEAK the language and not care about mistaking a word or speaking incorrectly. I found that with time, I was able to build those key phrases that I heard daily into authentic Spanish conversations and truly was able to communicate flawlessly.

I think its endlessly important for an individual learning a second language to learn its speaking habits first, and THEN learn the grammar, because like you stated, it is how we mastered our mother tongue! I am currently learning German, and am going to take French. My goal would be to learn German and French in SPANISH......but, there is not much opportunity (that I am aware of) in the United States to do such a thing. .....which, Foreign Language development in the United States is another mess I choose not to declaim... for I do not have sufficient time, nor patience to do so.

As an English teacher and a Chinese learner I find this very interesting. Thinking about the way I teach....it is actually in chunks. We know what grammar point we’re teaching but they don’t. They just know it’s a new sentence and a new topic of discussion. As a Chinese learner I am definitely aware of the grammar. At this point I’m not sure I could go back - especially since I’m also writing. BUT I’ve noticed that I haven’t fully learned the grammar properly and by listening to native speakers its helped to correct my mistakes. I wish I was a child and could just soak it up. I think about it too much and too often I care about making mistakes.

Hey Joy.

Thanks for your comment. It’s great to hear from another ESL teacher/language blogger in the region :)

As adults we’re always going to be aware of grammar to an extent. There’s no way to change that. In Korean at the moment I’m learning new aspects of grammar without actually studying grammar which I’m definitely aware of.

Embrace your mistakes :) Fear of making mistakes is what holds most people back.

How’s your Chinese coming along?

I reckon you´re right, and wrong mate.
Obviously, language acquisition is no simple task, and is one which has been debated since the first Neanderthal grunt.
I believe it is entirely possible to use a langauge, even to a high level, without studying grammar (as I myself am doing in spanish, though this is due more to laziness, and a preference for the practical rather than the theoretical)
I do believe, however, that a sound grammatical knowledge of the language being learnt, provides the learner with a greater depth of comprehension and production (as is the case in ones first language), and also with the ability to form and understand, more varied and original (if only to them) constructions.
To achieve a similar depth, the non-grammarian would have to read and listen to a mountain of material, and of huge variety, which would probably bore them to death.
At the end of the day, it depends on the leaners needs, abilities, wishes and intentions, I guess.
I also think it inappropriate to compare a childs first language acquisition, with an adults second, due to factors such as; previous experience, learning preference, environment (EFL or ESL) etc.
You´ve got your opinion, I´ve got mine, everyone´s got theirs, let the debate continue...but hopefully, always with the best intentions for the learner in mind, coz it´s all about them.
On a final note, it´s good to see you put your head above the parapet mate, and well done for raising such a controversial, but important, subject.

To speak a language correctly, you must know the grammar—whether consciously or unconsciously. I’ve seen what happens when people use this approach. Last year, I finished a fifth-year university course in German. One of my fellow students had obviously been taught somewhere else by this method of “let’s forget all that corny old stuff about genders, cases, and adjective agreement*. If you didn’t know German you would have been quite impressed, because she sounded so fluent and confident; but actually it came out like “Me Tarzan, You Jane”.

I could list multiple examples of cases where that hasn’t been the case.

You shouldn’t reject this idea because of one person who spoke poorly especially when you’re not even sure if she was actually taught using a method like this.

I’ve met people - linguists included - who know grammar like the back of their hand but speak shockingly bad.

One guy I met in Ireland last month who had been studying Irish for years (much longer than myself) simply couldn’t communicate even though his knowledge of Irish grammar was extremely good. Whenever he spoke you could see him scanning his mind for grammar rules trying to piece dialogue together and it took him 5 minutes to get a sentence out.

Nice article! If you are interested, there is a newish textbook on the market called English Unlimited. It is based on a nice corpus of English and presents students with language chunks to build up their speaking confidence. I’ve used it in beginner classes and compared to other texts I’ve used it’s fabulous!

All the best,

Anthony.

Will check that out. Thanks Anthony!

I love this. After spending several ultimately fruitless years learning grammer rules, I can say that “chunking” rings with truth. It dispels the idea that learning language necessitates INSTANT understanding of abstract matrices and tables. Those things are well and good, but only context truly gives meaning to grammar, and in the meantime you might as well be speaking meaningful utterances.

It also highlights two excellent concepts brought up again and again in this blog: 1. meaningful conversation with real human beings, and 2. making lots of mistakes in order to learn. Knowledge for its own sake quickly stagnates, but the prospect of creating community with your knowledge makes it very worth while.

Keep up the good work.

Thanks a lot, Matthew :)

Hello Donovan,

I love the core idea - everything that you thought you needed to do to learn a language (and that scared you off) is wrong.

In the spirit of language-nerdery, I might just add my own touch of nuance:

Yes, you don’t need to learn grammar and can focus on other things in the early stages of learning a new language. However, you may choose to consider grammar, if;
A: it suits your personal learning style and/or
B: it is relevant to your language learning situation

I tend to think quite mathematically (as opposed to say, mind-mapping) and so I quite like tables (German word-endings or Hebrew future verb constructions) Someone else might look at a set of German adjectives and run screaming from the room. That’s fine, just leave that until you have had enough exposure to make the table seem familiar rather than daunting.

On the Semitic theme, I am currently learning Arabic and have been quite keen to see the Arabic structures (grammar) laid out, so that I can assess where they are similar to, or differ from the Hebrew that I have already learned.

Have you taken similar approaches to your Gaelic and Korean? If you are using TTMIK, you will have noticed (as I did) that they like to introduce grammar in a modest chunking kind-of-way. Or do you see it differently?

Ian

Hi Ian.

I’m very happy with the approach that Talk To Me In Korean takes by not talking too much about grammar and instead focusing on useful chunks. I’m thoroughly enjoying their lessons and would recommend the site to everybody. Hopefully I’ll get a chance to meet up with them when I get over there next month.

I am taking the same approach to Korean as I have with Irish. I’ll be posting progress videos over the next 12 months and hopefully get in some native speaker conversations and interviews while I’m in Korea to prove that grammar study is unnecessary for people wanting to become conversational.

Don’t get me wrong - I am a language nerd too and I don’t dislike grammar. Like you I was fascinated looking at the similarities between Hebrew and Arabic, and comparing grammatical features and so on but so much of what I studied didn’t actually improve my conversational fluency at all. It was interesting information from a linguistics perspective but as a conversational language learner it wasn’t overly beneficial to me.

These days I study Modern Standard Arabic grammar a lot only because I spend a lot of time reading Arabic documents for translation and news articles.

How are your languages coming along?

This is great content! As a fellow lover of languages, I fully agree with EVERYTHING you shared.

I personally prefer to listen to and say phrases/sentences, instead of paying attention to grammar.

I am fairly convinced that just by hearing the language over and over, I will gradually intuit the grammar and thereby speak correctly. So this is more or less a top-down approach or like seeing the big picture first, and then looking at the details (grammar) later.

Yep.

Thanks Jason! :)

Thanks.

Thanks! Great article! Although is not easy for adults to learn like children (it´s just not the same ! ;-) it´s possible to learn a language without learning lot of grammar. I know of some great language learning methods (e.g. audio-visual method, story telling approach, immersive learning, etc.) which works for most adults. These methods are very easy and it´s fun to learn. Lingorilla.com is combining these methods into the concept “learning languages with videos”.

Hi Ruth.

Thanks very much for sharing Lingorilla. I’ll get in touch with you by email shortly with a few questions.

Donovan,

This is great news for many of us who suffered through language classes through school. I had the typical experience of many people in the US (and I’m guessing other countries) of studying Spanish for 6 years and yet knowing almost nothing after those years. There is a whole lot of blame to go around (including for myself, I wasn’t the most eager student) but it mostly comes down to having boring classes. And I attribute that in part to the grammar we were force-fed.

I am (slowly) working through a Pimsleur course at the moment and I’m amazed at my Italian level after 25 lessons, each about 25 minutes. There’s no grammar at all. And I’m enjoying the lessons.

I have learned throughout the years that the key to learning a foreign language (perhaps more than learning other things) is to understand yourself and be honest about your interests and time commitment. I started really learning Spanish through an hour long class every day during my lunch hour at a job. The class was great. And early on I let the teacher know I’d be there every day, wouldn’t miss a class, but would do absolutely nothing to study or prepare outside of that hour. She adjusted her teaching based on this and everything worked out well.

Had I not first been honest with myself about my time commitment I would not have been honest with her either. And she would have been expecting me to show up having completed the day’s assignment. And when she would have found out I did nothing, it would have thrown off her day’s plan.

The key to successfully learning a language is to find what works specifically for you. I hear people often looking for the “right” answer about how to learn a language instead of looking for the answer to how that person best learns a language. For most of us, a focus on grammar is not the way to go. But I have also seen posts where people mention all they do is study grammar at the beginning and its a fundamental part of their early language study.

Am I the only one that thinks “chucking a tanny” sounds a whole lot more raunchy than throwing a tantrum?

Jared

It does sound raunchy. Oops.
Of course you were the one to notice it though! :)

I don’t mean to sound like I’m saying that “my way is the way” and I do know a lot of people who have a strong grammar focus and manage to become fluent speakers.

I’m sure however that reading a post like this is very reassuring for a lot of people who hate grammar and are convinced that in order to be conversational they need to be able to conjugate every verb and so on.

Good grief. You can’t even take a little robust criticism. But have no fear - it’s massively unlikely that I’ll be back for your TEFLing tips, though whilst I’m here I feel I ought to point out that if you’re writing about how you don’t need to study grammar, it’s wise to make sure you make no mistakes of your own (and in your mother tongue, no less):

”it’s application to learning foreign languages is incredible.”

Hmm. Is it indeed? Perhaps a few grammar classes are no bad thing, eh.

I removed your comment because it was unnecessarily hostile and downright rude (exactly the type of response I was talking about in the second paragraph above).

I don’t like to censor people but if you come on here shooting your mouth off with insulting garbage like you did then I’ll hit the spam button.

Thanks for pointing out the typo. Fixed.

Here here! You have put together a fantastically simple, yet powerful way to explain what I have been trying to tell people all the time. I have 4 kids and watched them all learn to speak English fluently. It happens in Chunks. That I why I recommend people do what I call Speak Your Language. Which means speak what you know in the Target language and fill in with English. The filling in with English is more for our own mental benefit to feel like we finished a thought or sentence. What it does is lets you develop the Chunks you know.

Some will criticize it that it will develop “fossilized” problems. My son right now says chik win to say chicken wing. I am not worried that will be fossilized, because I know it will slowly correct itself as he talk and listens. Anyway Great post!

Thanks mate!

Great to get some feedback from a parent. :)

I agree. Excellent point. Sounds a lot like bilingual code-switching and it’s definitely an effective way to practice the parts of your target language that you do know.

I believe the real answer is somewhere in between. Studying a little bit of grammar can really speed up the process or at least give you an overview of what you are up against, like a general map of a landscape, but after that, you are right, it is much more useful to memorize chunks: common phrases, expressions, verb-noun combinations etc. so that these become automatic, rather than memorizing meaningless tables of verbs, for example. This was how I learned English: We learned grammar at school, but it was when I started reading books on my own, and completely stopped paying attention to any grammar and instead just memorized words, phrases and expressions that I learned to speak English perfectly.

Let me first start off by saying I’ve studied Italian on my own for 1.5 years and now Portuguese for 4 months. I wouldn’t consider myself fluent in either of these languages, yet.

I always find it weird when people compare children to adults. Firstly, children are immersed in the language 24/7. That is huge. I think that if I were to be dropped off in the middle of China without a single english speaking person, no phone to call home/friends, and no internet, tv, radio, newspapers, books etc. in English, I would manage to become fluent much faster than a child could in 5 years.

Most children also have the benefit of a parent/teacher/guardian who cares and will constantly correct their pronunciation and grammar. My mom still corrects me to this day and that is why I don’t have the same accent as my friends that I grew up with. My mother frowned upon the locals accent and considered it lower class and uneducated. I find it hard when talking with Italians or Brazilians, to get them to correct me. I feel like most of the time they are so impressed that an American (english speaker) is learning their language that they seem content to just let you speak poorly as long as they can understand the gist of what you’re trying to say.

I don’t enjoy studying grammar. I took French in high school for 4 years and never spoke it partly due to the focus on grammar and partly due to the fact that I hated the teacher. Coming from such a small school we only had one teacher that taught both French and Spanish. I was stuck with her for ALL 4 YEARS! However I find that studying a little bit of grammar can be a huge help.

On a side note, have you ever heard of the language learning game “Where Are Your Keys?” I recently stumbled upon this online and am quite fascinated by it. There’s a lot to it so I’ll let you check it out for yourself. Here is an introduction (Gaeilge!) and a few resources.

I would love to hear what you think about this WAYK method. I think it’s pretty amazing but haven’t had the chance to try playing it with anyone yet.

I have had a similar experience. I’ve found native speakers are unlikely to correct the mistakes I make if they understand me. It’s frustrating, but at the same time, having someone correct every mistake we make in another language would eliminate any fluency that the conversation would otherwise have and would actually be rather frustrating.

G’day Briar.

As I said above, parents do correct their kids but not enough for us to say that it plays a major role in how we learn grammar for our first language.

Most of what we know is acquired by hearing and repeating exactly what those around us are saying. There’s no other way to explain how we acquire so much without being explicitly taught.

I have heard of the WAYK method and I think it’s a brilliant concept. I’ll try it out soon myself and let you know how it goes.

Thanks :)

A great tool I’ve found when learning a foreign language is HelloTalk. It’s a phone app similar to What’sapp. Say you’re learning Russian. You can talk with Russians in Russia who are learning English and help each other. Making connections to native speakers aside, the app also always both you and the person you’re talking with to correct your sentences. It will show you a before and after the correction as well.

Donovan,
First of all, obviously you need to clarify what it means to “learn” a foreign language. Those students you describe who “can read brilliantly” obviously HAVE learned English, at least one component of it, to excellence, despite “wasteful” instruction.

Second of all, there are more serious problems with comparing adult and child language acquisition than the ones you mentioned here. I actually wrote specifically about this.
The problem is that you’re comparing child FIRST language acquisition with adult SECOND language acquisition, meaning you’re changing two different unique variables, which creates a pretty shaky comparison.

And as far as the argument that children just learn things by chunking - almost everything I’ve read about child language acquisition recognizes that the transition away from unanalyzed chunks is precisely how we distinguish between a child-like experimenter and a fluent, adult-like speaker. You say that “very little of what we say is original content,” but very much of what we say, if we are intelligent adults and not linguistically fumbling children, consists of novel utterances. Meaning, I was able to just say the phrase “consists of novel utterances” not because I’ve memorized that phrase as a whole, but because I know each of those words and I know how to put them together - in other words, because I’m an adult.

Right at the start I said, “You don’t need to study grammar to learn to speak a foreign language.” It was clarified at the beginning.

The students I mentioned have not learned English. They use dictionaries and grammar charts to meticulously translate (often word-for-word) texts that they would never be able to reproduce or understand in a spoken setting.

Of course we’re not the same as children and I’ve acknowledged that there are major differences but that doesn’t mean that academics should dispense entirely with any notion of us being able to learn from their acquisition process.

We do learn in chunks.

”Consists of novel utterances” is not a prefabricated chunk, but “consists of”, “novel” and “utterances” are.

To prove my point:
Google search (with quotation marks) these examples:

Consists of other utterances.
Consists of small utterances.
Consists of utterances.
Consists of noisy utterances.

That pattern is not as original as you thought.

Dear Polyglossic,
The comparison made by Donovan is quite acceptable. I am a second language arabic learner and I have encountered the exact scenarios. Speaking, at first, is broken, as it is difficult to phrase the words you have learnt correctly. Granted, I am not yet an adult, but the rest of my family is, and they are learning arabic in the same way. It requires listening to people, even though you don’t understand a word, and then questioning the meaning. so then you learn certain word, then you have to learn how to say that word in a sentence, which takes a lot of trial and error... exactly how you hear a toddler speaking.

Excellent, Donovan, as usual. I particularly agree with you on two points:

1. Using actual contemporary sources where the language is being used ‘for real’, e.g. movies and books that are popular with actual native speakers of the language. This not only makes it a lot more fun but it results in you learning the ‘real’ language as it’s actually used, not some contrived example in a textbook that a native speaker would never actually say or write.

2. Make it fun. This is huge. In fact I would say it’s the most important factor in determining whether or not you will succeed at learning a language because it goes straight to motivation: making it fun gives you a reason to do it every day and it removes reasons (boredom, difficulty) not to do it.

@Shannon: This is what language exchanges are for. You have a structured environment where you’re communicating with a native speaker and the whole point of it is for them to point out your mistakes and teach you how to say it correctly. I LOVE language exchanges for this reason and others (best one I’ve tried so far is iTalki, by the way). It’s not surprising at all that natives won’t correct you while you’re buying something in a shop (they don’t want to spend the time and effort in that case, plus they may be afraid it will come across as rude) or while conversing with you casually as a friend (again, they likely don’t want to seem rude and pedantic). Set up a specific time at a specific occasion where you and a native (either a friend or a language exchange partner you can talk to on skype) have agreed to speak where they will correct any and all mistakes you make. This will fix your problem.

Cheers,

Andrew

Thanks Andrew.

How’s your Spanish coming along at this stage? I’d be interested to hear how much time you’ve put into grammar study compared to movies and so on, and how effective (or ineffective) you’ve found that to be.