Steve the anarchist

Alexandre ( in his comment below) thinks my anti-grammar stance is anarchic. He feels that grammar study helped him build complex sentences in English. He questions how much Russian I know.

My response.

As far as my Russian is concerned, I would be happy to have a skype conversation with Alexandre, record it in Powergramo and post in this blog. My Russian is full of holes, full of wrong grammar but I can read and I can understand some. Of course my vocabulary is very limited. But I have only been at for two months or so, on my way to and from work and a little in the evenings and on weekends, entirely on my own. I am not worried about my inability to express myself correctly. I am happy to be able to say what I can say. I am enjoying it. I would not be anywhere near this level if I had tried to make sense of the grammar explanations, which I just ignore. I would probably have stopped by now if I were forced to learn the grammar rules for a language that I have no feel for.

When I have had enough input I can start worrying about grammar. My Russian experience has caused me reflect on my experience with other languages. It was only in French that I spent a lot of time on grammar. That is what was taught at school. In German, I did look at rules and tables of the declensions of nouns, and which ones were masculine, feminine and neuter, and all of this had no, zero, effect on me. I had to do a lot of listening and reading before my German improved.

After my short Russian experience, I am more strongly anti-grammar than before. I think that grammar instruction is not only an inefficient way to learn languages, but a major disincentive to learning languages.

Many people think grammar learning is normal. That is all they know. They learned before the MP3 player, before the things that you can do with electronic text to help learners. So they cling to what they have invested a lot of time in.

The new learner needs the language, lots of it. He can afford to ignore explanations and just build up his or her vocabulary. In time, with enough listening and reading he will be ready to speak and write.

It is said that learners who did not study grammar at the beginning never get it right. I simply do not buy that. If learners can learn to read and enjoy reading, and if they can be taught to be observant of the language, they will learn to speak and write correctly and fluently.

That is not to say that there should be no explanation of usage. The explanation should be along the lines of "this is how this is said in Russian". Explanations should be used to explain why something is wrong "it is not said this way" but not to anticipate all the situations where rule 1 applies, and then where rule 2 applies and then when there are exceptions.

There is nothing logical about grammar rules. What is correct in one language is often not correct in another. Furthermore usage changes. It is enough to focus on the words and phrases the way we do at The Linguist.

At The Linguist we encourage our learners to write and then we point out all the faults of usage. We then replace poor phrases with standard ones, and the learner studies them. We minimize explanations. We certainly do not do quizzes and grammar questions.

Comments

[Alexandre Rafalovitch]

Steve,

I have written back - probably at length - in the trackback-ed article. But the summary is: The challenge is on. The next time we are both on Skype, we'll do the talk.

[shashi]

At the linguist, you have more emphasised on ‘not to concentrate on the grammar rules’. Initially when I had just started learning English, I thought that grammar was necessary to learn English. During our school days I learned English only through the grammar. In our classrooms, teachers taught us only about grammar. Our exams were also grammar oriented and they had only grammar questions and puzzles. As a result, our whole school days were gone only on studying the grammar and nothing else.

I,alos, had completed my graduation in English only but that was just an academic English. I would give speech in English and so I was thinking that I could speak in English. When I had finished my graduation and came in real world, then only I realised that I wasn’t able to speak in English. Then I had tried different grammar books and my school’s notes on grammar, but I was not succeeded. It was only when I joined the linguist, my english learning adventure picked up. Initially I didn’t believe in Steve’s methods. I was wondering how could it be possible to study English without studying grammar. Even though I had started to study with the linguist, I was still referring to dictionaries and grammar books. Every time when I found difficulties, I just referred to grammar books and spent a lot time on studying the grammar rule. Sooner I found that studying grammar is not only like to wasting time but also getting more confused with it. Initially I was curious about knowing the grammar behind every phrase and word, but I found that it affects the fluency. As, more and more I concerned about grammar, more and more it affects my learning desire. Then I stopped learning grammar and focused only on reading and listening.

So now when I find difficult word, I just save it in the data so that I can see vast examples of sentences of that word or phrase and I can get used to that word or phrase. By doing this, I am training my brain for that word so that I can use it in my speaking. It’s really amazing but simple technique to embed words and phrases in brain.