Can grammar be fun? Well, almost… At least interesting.
We all remember sitting through tedious sessions of English grammar in school. It seemed almost impossible for that to be interesting, right? But learning the grammar of a foreign language is different. The grammar is really the skeleton of the language. A language, after all, consists of basically two things.
-One is words—the flesh and clothing of the language.
-The other is grammar—the bones of the language, which hold it all together.
You never really needed to study English grammar to learn how to talk. You already knew the grammar when you started talking. But how did you learn grammar? Not out of any book, that's for sure. And your parents probably never really taught you much actual grammar, either. You learned grammar by hearing it used all around you all day long.
Let's talk a little bit about how small children learn their own language. It's important because it tells us something about how every one of us learned our first language. That will give you a few ideas about how to to go about learning a foreign language.
There are great debates among language specialists about how children learn a language. For a while a lot of experts thought that children spoke only by repeating specific things that they had heard. This theory suggested, in effect, that kids learn to speak by being little tape recorders. In theory they would hear a phrase, and then at some later time they would spew that same sentence forth again under different circumstances.
But if you think about it for one minute—or if you have ever spent much time around your own child or a little brother or sister—you would know that this theory is not quite right. Even a child of two knows some grammar rules—unconsciously. Have you ever heard a young child say something like, “I singed a song.”? Has he ever heard anyone utter such a phrase? No, never, simply because no native speaker of English over five years old would ever say such a thing.
Then why did the child say it? Because he had already heard enough sentences in his short life to have figured out a few grammar rules on his own. He figured out that if you are using the past tense—the term we use in grammar to describe something that has already happened—that you put a “-ed” on the end of the word. What that child had not been around long enough to know was that some verbs are “irregular”, that is, they don't quite follow the rules. The child had heard sentences like “I walked the dog”, or “I slammed the door”, or “It rained a lot yesterday”, so he assumed you would do the same thing with “I singed a song.”
Another example: A young child might say, “My cat caught three mouses.” Now, that child has never heard anyone say “mouses.” But he has absorbed the grammar rule that when you've got more than one of something you put an “-s” on the end. So he's applying a rule that nobody ever told him about.
Actually, the way a child learns his first language is a fairly good method. In fact, if you're a small child, there is probably no better way to learn a language than that way. And it's virtually painless. But alas, it's not so practical for us to learn a language that way now.
Why not? First of all, it takes about four or five years of around-the-clock study for a child to learn to speak the grammar correctly. You don't have time for this type of total immersion learning. We've all got much better things to do with our time. Second, for an adult, it is rather a pain to learn a language by listening to thousands upon thousands of sentences and then trying to figure out the grammar rules by example. There must be easier ways.
There are. As grown-ups, we can take advantage of our brains and our power of logic. We can learn the grammar in a more organized way than the child does. For example, after hearing one or two examples of sentences in a foreign language someone can tell us, “OK, when you have a sentence like this in the present tense and you want to make it past tense, all you do is ……………………” (depending on the language).
Let's go back to the old tape recorder again. I've already mentioned that you should never leave home without it. You should spend a lot of time listening to tapes and memorizing sentences and phrases.
Now you should see why tape recorders are so important. Listening to the tape recorder is the adult equivalent (only in a less haphazard way) of being the child and listening to adults chattering around you all day long. It puts patterns of language into your head in an organized way so that they become second nature. When these patterns have become etched in your mind, you can learn how to play around with them, to make variations on the patterns.
If you ever had to learn a foreign language “the old-fashioned way,” you might recall that you had to learn long lists of verb endings—as mere rules and without any conversational drill. (A screaming bore and not necessarily all that useful.) An up-to-date language course will let you learn a few hunks of pattern sentences at a time—learning them cold. Then you can learn something about the grammatical rules. These rules let you “manipulate” the grammar (a word linguists love to use—it just means play around with the grammar to change the meaning of the words you have learned.)
Learning the grammar is a bit like driving a car or learning how to use any other complex machine. It might be fine for you to know how to steer a car down the road in third gear if somebody shows you how. But nobody can really consider that he knows how to drive a car until he has learned to “manipulate” all parts of the car. You will want to know how to use the brakes and the other gears and a lot of other important things before you really feel comfortable in the car.
It's the same with a language. You can learn a lot of words and sentences, but until you know how to use these words in lots of different ways and change them all around, you can't really consider that you know the language very well. You don't really know how to “drive” the language yet.
We all tend to think of grammar as meaning how to speak “correctly.” But grammar rules are not basically designed to make people speak correctly. They are designed to help people get their meaning across accurately and clearly. They are meant to be shortcuts, or operating rules, that help you put together the words. They save you the hassle of having to painfully decide for yourself how you make a word plural or how to say that you “did” something instead of “are doing” something.
If a foreigner were learning English, for example, he would have to learn how to use various forms of the English verb. He would study sentences like “I go to London. I went to London. Did you go to London? He would have gone to London. Were they going to London? When will she go to London? You have gone to London.” Believe me, after you get done with that type of practicing you are positively carsick. But you will have learned a lot about the verb “to go” and how to use it.
The fact is that a huge list of words is not much good if you don't know how all the words go together. You might be able to blurt out enough words in some crude way that will get across your basic needs. But your goal here is not to sound like a caveman—”Me go London.” “Give food.” You hope actually to be able to talk like a reasonably educated person. That means knowing how the words go together—or what we call the grammar.
When you learn the grammar you are getting “inside” the language. You are starting to figure out how people of that country actually use their mental processes to express themselves. The grammar is really the key to this new world you are entering. It describes the set of building blocks that is unique in every language. It is the “secret code”—the concepts in which Frenchmen or Russians or Arabs or Burmese think.
Pay close attention to this part of the process. You will be surprised—maybe fascinated—at the distinctions that other languages take great care to spell out, which in English we don't care so much about. Or at the distinctions in English which we seem to care about expressing but which another language doesn't. Let me give you some examples:
Speakers of Russian, French, Turkish and many other languages change the endings of the verb to indicate whether it is “I” who am talking about myself (so-called “first person”), or if I am addressing “you” (“second person”), or if I am talking about some third person—“he” or “she.” So a Russian would use these endings in a verb in the present tense:
| 1st | I know | Ya znayu |
| 2nd | You (one person) know | Ty znayesh |
| 3rd | He (or she or it) knows | On znayet |
| 1st pl. | We know | My znayem |
| 2nd pl. | You (several people) know | Vy znayete |
| 3rd pl. | They know | Oni znayut |
A Turk would do it this way:
| 1st | I know | biliyorum |
| 2nd | You know | biliyorsun |
| 3rd | He, she, it knows | biliyor |
| 1st pl. | We know | biliyoruz |
| 2nd pl. | You (plural) know | biliyorsunuz |
| 3rd pl. | They know | biliyorlar |
But if you use the word “I”,” you”, or “he”, what need is there to have to put an extra “ending” on the end of the verb? Good question. In English we don't do it that way any more. (Old English did.) But in Russian, or Turkish, you have to do it that way because that's the way the language works. The ending on the verb has to indicate who it is that is talking. If you put the wrong ending on the verb you will completely confuse your listener because the wrong ending might mean “I vomit” instead of “you vomit”—a distinction in which you might have an interest. (And the verbs in a great number of other languages you're likely to study work that way too.)
But hold on. Even in English we did make one change. We suddenly put an “-s” on the end of the “he” form. We can say “I know, you know”, but “he knows”. Why? Because that's the way English works. The third person form always has to have an “-s” ending. Furthermore, it's not correct without it. Sure, you could understand it without the “-s” on the end—“he go”. But that's not the way the language works. And it sounds like Tarzan.
Actually there is a reason why most languages—even Old English—put endings on verbs to denote “person”. The point was that the actual verb—without the pronouns “I”, “you”, or “he” or whatever—could be used by itself. In Russian today you can use just the one word “znayete” and it's clear that you mean “you know” without actually using a second word “vy” meaning “you”. Before dismissing verb endings as “un-English” and impossible to master, take a look at Shakespeare or even at the Bible. You'll find lots of phrases like “thou knowest” and “whither goeth John.” These don't give us a problem there, so we shouldn't be bothered by verb endings in foreign languages. Our own language simplified itself many hundreds of years ago so it doesn't draw those distinctions anymore, except in the “he” “she” “it” form where it keeps the ancient “-s” ending.
But then from the point of view of some other languages, English is fussy where they are not: In Chinese they say “one book, two book, many book”, while in English we have to put an “-s” on the end of each word to show it is plural: “one book”, but “two books, many books”. The Chinese asks, “Why do you need to put an “-s” on the end of the word when the words “two” and “many” already clearly indicate that there is more than one book anyway?” The Chinese would be right—from his point of view. But you have to remember that languages are never intrinsically logical. And each speaker of a language thinks the way that other people speak their language is illogical, complicated or unnecessary.
Both Arabic and Hebrew have different words for “you” (to a man), and “you” (to a woman), in addition to a difference in verb ending. An English speaker would say, “That's completely unnecessary. One word “you” does perfectly well for both.” Who's right?
The Turks have just one word for “he”, “she”, and “it”. They look at English and say, “Why do you have three different words for these things when one word does perfectly well for all of them?”. Japanese and Javanese (Indonesia) regularly distinguish between levels of politeness by the verb they use.
The fact is, you can't really spend time arguing about such matters. That's just the way they are. But it is interesting to see how thought processes differ from language to language—and country to country. That's what languages are all about. And that's why language study teaches us so much about foreign cultures, and about our own language as well. Things that we take for granted as “natural” turn out not to be natural at all, but simply the way that we do things.
1. Grammar is the skeletal structure that links words together and gives them full meaning.
2. Correct grammar is not so much designed to create elegant speech as it is to make clear what the relationship is among words. This is why we have to learn it.
3. Each language makes its own sharp distinctions. You need to be ready to: a) learn new distinctions that we don't make in English, and b) ignore the distinctions we make in English that are not there in the foreign language.