Grammar Does Exist
There are several prominent voices on the Interwebs that’ll tell you that grammar is not worth studying in foreign language learning. Now, I think what they’re getting at is that one shouldn’t be working exclusively from a textbook or grammar, but I think it’s a little misleading – you definitely do need to do some studying to master a second language quickly! Furthermore, I think there’s a real risk of ditching L1 (English) too quickly, insofar as it can be difficult to infer precise nuance in L2.
I realised recently that I can actually still follow most of what’s being said in Japanese-language anime, despite not having looked at the language for over a year. A big part of Japanese for a learner are the many verb and adjective inflections – yet I could still understand the precise meaning of each. Japanese inflections were something I’d purposefully studied in detail before, from a textbook – not great fun, but it paid off. In doing so, I’d looked at hundreds (thousands?) of English-Japanese sentence pairs – this practice meant I could understand exactly what a given construction meant.
For Cantonese however, I hadn’t (until recently) done similar study on different aspects of grammar; working out exactly what someone said took somewhat longer than just getting the gist. Additionally, I’d dropped English comparatively quickly from my study, making understanding constructions exactly difficult. So, I created a new Anki deck based on Cantonese-English sentences pairs, without Chinese characters, to try to hone the grammar points I was missing – I’ve made between 50 and 70 cards for each grammar point.
Now, this is just extra practice – I already had a good idea of what most sentences meant (new vocabulary notwithstanding) – but it’s been worth it to be completely and immediately understand what’s being said in real life.
Why do children not seem to need this explicit clarification of grammar points? Actually, I think they do – if you watch children’s TV shows, they’ll tend to go over the same point over and over (usually ideas rather than grammar, but they repeat the same constructions anyway) – and usually with a practical demonstration. Parents will also correct children if they make mistakes; when kids go to school, they’ll also have specific tuition on the grammar of their own language.
The key ingredient here though is time. It takes a child many more years to speak grammatically in their own language than it takes a second language learner with a good method. Using a grammar and spending some time understanding sentence equivalents (between L2 and L1) is a way of shortcutting the many years of practice a child has to have to speak grammatically. Don’t spend all your time masochistically studying verb tables, but don’t write off your language’s rules as a waste of time either.
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