Does grammar REALLY matter?

[@GeoQuag]

The funny thing is I’m actually way more interested in grammar than grinding a million vocab words.

[@pxolqopt3597]

vocab's a chore. it never ends and only gets harder since every new word you learn is rarer and rarer. At some point you reach a plateau where your learning just slows to a halt unless you consume 4+ hours a day of that language.

[@soyoltoi]

It gets harder if you go by percentage of new native content you can comprehend, but it gets easier if you go by total new words you can acquire

[@OmegaTaishu]

@GeoQuag same here

[@pseudoNAME1979]

@@GeoQuag same. It caused me an issue in my learning where I'd sketch out an elaborate sentence in my head and just not have the vocab to drop into it.

[@kahnisen]

Me too. When I studied Russian at the university a long time ago, I knew all the grammar that was in the curriculum, and maybe even more. But I failed the grammar test because it was not a traditional grammar test. Instead it was like 50 sentences that I had to translate from Swedish into Russian. I failed big because I didn't know the vocabulary. The Russian vocabulary was really difficult compared to German that I had learned before. Grammar was more interesting and easy to learn. So if it had been a traditional grammar test I would have nailed it very well. After that I lost interest and left the Russian course.

[@shanesullivan460]

"It takes a village to raise a child" -- A mysterious, eldritch entity; "It", will raise your child, but... It will demand an entire village as payment.

[@brianuke2301]

I remember @qroopaul saying “you understand what Tarzan is saying. But do you want to sound like Tarzan?”

[@vytah]

Also there's another question: does Tarzan understand what others are saying? Especially when the sentences get longer and more compound.

[@Alec72HD]

Yes, passive understanding of complex grammar can happen WITHOUT explicit study. Whether you can reproduce complex grammar without explicit understanding is hit or miss.

[@fintonmainz7845]

Tarzan was popular with the girls. Do whatever works.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

To answer that question another question: Are there people out there that are illiterate, either in both their native language and the target language, or only in the target language (different writing systems) that, therefore, didn't study grammar (they could maybe by watching videos but that's not the case) that can speak fluently with close to native or even near-native level syntax, at least for speaking purposes? Yeas, there are. You go to Thailand and you find an illiterate migrant worker, working in construction, that came from Myanmar, whose native language is Burmese, living in Thailand for about, let's say, 5 years, that can speak almost perfect Tai, plus Hindi, Nepalese, and can get his way around with Vietnamese and English. So the answer is: You ODN'T NEED to study grammar. You can, but you don't need to. I never bothered with grammar in English. I never had and English teacher in my whole life! I never had any language teacher, for that matter. First because I couldn't pay for one. an then because I learned I didn't need one.

[@papercliprain3222]

It’s because Tarzan didn’t get enough comprehensible input. 😂

[@doughughes257]

Age 81. Tried to learn diagramming in 8th grade English class but didn’t get it. Made me hate the class even more. Took Spanish in 9th grade, fell in love with it, and through Spanish grammar, I finally began to understand English grammar. Now I’m passionate about language learning and look forward to videos. ❤

[@9Q9M]

1:32 I'm Dutch and I don't think I've ever heard of the phrase "kommaneuker", while "mierenneuker" is definitely in my vocabulary. Didn't expect to ever learn new Dutch vocab from this channel!

[@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate]

What does 'mieren' mean?

[@bertcornelissen6294]

@@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate Ants (in French an equivalent expression for nitpicking is 'enculer des mouches", which means "buttf*cking flies")

[@TheLugiProductions]

​@@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinatemierenneuker = ant fucker

[@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate]

@bertcornelissen6294 thanks! Unfortunately the yt algorithm doesn't like the French equivalent :D

[@UrvonDiviner]

@@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinateants :-)

[@JohnKaman]

A long time ago I attended a Catholic school where we had to study 4 years of Latin by diagramming sentences from Julius Caesar. I found it difficult but instructive enough so that by college I read the Aeneid in Latin.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

Wow, I envy you the experience. I only read De Bello Gallico in fragments.

[@Hwelhos]

Fifth year of learning for me, I am actually studying the Aeneid right now in school and can read it mostly as long as I have a dictionary.

[@skamiikaze]

I always like to think of grammar as vitamins but not as a whole meal. It’s not all you should consume, but a little here and there to fill in gaps improves your language „health”.

[@Svensk7119]

Oh, that is so good!

[@kristens6861]

I learned English grammar as an adult while homeschooling our daughter. I memorized a long list of prepositions, all the parts of speech definitions, including linking and helping verb and their lists. I also memorized the definitions of phrase, clause, sentence, the sentence structures, and the clause patterns. I memorized all of this to familiar tunes like children’s songs and Christmas carols. I have also developed an algorithm that can be used with any English sentence to determine the role of each word and to identify the clause patterns. I think I love grammar so much because it creates order out of chaos and helps me better understand more complicated sentences, especially laws, which are the words that dictate just about every aspect of our lives. Knowing grammar makes me better able to guard against the tricks of sophistical wordsmiths and bad policy.

[@anthonysaunders345]

@@kristens6861 Homeschooling is a difficult, difficult endeavor. Hats off to you!

[@lolmynamehere6303]

Honestly learning grammar in my native language (in school when I was young) has been one of the most useful things for understanding grammar in other languages, even those whose grammar is very different. And a baseline understanding of grammar in a new language is absolutely necessary to even begin comprehending your input, ime

[@HippocraticHustle]

I diagramed and I LOVED IT. I'm 47. Sso much fun. I shouldve been a linguist, but instead I went to medical school and now I live in France, work on improving my mediocre french and watch youtube videos on language learning and linguistics. I'm a nerd.

[@ianslai]

Likewise! I'm 44 and I found diagramming sentences a fun exercise when I learned it in 6th grade (1991). But I was also playing around with computers in grade school and I now work in software, so maybe it was all just because I love solving puzzles and breaking things down.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

You only speak French (which is EASY for an English speaker) no other language, and you said yourself you French is mediocre. You are a poff that what he's talking in thids video DOES NOT wok AT ALL. To answer that question another question: Are there people out there that are illiterate, either in both their native language and the target language, or only in the target language (different writing systems) that, therefore, didn't study grammar (they could maybe by watching videos but that's not the case) that can speak fluently with close to native or even near-native level syntax, at least for speaking purposes? Yeas, there are. You go to Thailand and you find an illiterate migrant worker, working in construction, that came from Myanmar, whose native language is Burmese, living in Thailand for about, let's say, 5 years, that can speak almost perfect Thai, plus Hindi, Nepalese, and can get his way around with Vietnamese and English. So the answer is: You DON'T NEED to study grammar. You can, but you don't need to. I never bothered with grammar in English. I never had and English teacher in my whole life! I never had any language teacher, for that matter. First because I couldn't pay for one. and then because I learned I didn't need one. and for you example. Are there Americans who learned Japanese to a high level without studyIng grammar? the answer is also yeas. The fonder of AJATT, Khatzumoto. Linguistics sometimes looks like mainstream, orthodox liberal Economics these days. It refuses to look at the REALITY as a true s science should do. What the observed phenomena tells us?

[@revangerang]

@@ianslai Exactly! It turns sentences into puzzles, so fun~

[@serdarkilic6558]

Immediately recognized not only Persian for that second language, but thackston’s phrasing before even seeing the book on the shelf… :)

[@straybeastden]

It really matters how the grammar is taught. I still remember bothering my English teacher after school, asking her to explain the tenses to me again, because I just COULD NOT understand them. Back then, I decided that I was just bad at grammar, but now, while studying German, I noticed that even though the grammar is much more complex, it's not a pain to learn. And only now I remembered how these English tenses were taught to me. They just gave us the entire giant table at once and asked us to memorize it. And they did it year after year, and of course no one fucking learned anything.

[@hollunderjohn]

So you sucked at learning. Why fucking brag about it?

[@JRBWare1942]

I don't remember ever being taught English verb tenses in school. As a native speaker of English, why would I need to learn them? I already knew how to use them before I ever started school.

[@Nassifeh]

​@@JRBWare1942 It's sort of like learning long division, though, right? You don't really need a lesson for how to conjugate "to go" in English as a little kid, but eventually when you're older you're going to be reading things that use a lot of words that you have never encountered conversationally, and having understood how you conjugate more common verbs will help you learn how to use those new words. Everybody thinks they didn't really learn anything useful, and you probably don't remember literally all of it, but chances are that you actually did come out of it with the tools you needed to build the rest of your education on.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

To answer that question another question: Are there people out there that are illiterate, either in both their native language and the target language, or only in the target language (different writing systems) that, therefore, didn't study grammar (they could maybe by watching videos but that's not the case) that can speak fluently with close to native or even near-native level syntax, at least for speaking purposes? Yeas, there are. You go to Thailand and you find an illiterate migrant worker, working in construction, that came from Myanmar, whose native language is Burmese, living in Thailand for about, let's say, 5 years, that can speak almost perfect Thai, plus Hindi, Nepalese, and can get his way around with Vietnamese and English. So the answer is: You DON'T NEED to study grammar. You can, but you don't need to. I never bothered with grammar in English. I never had and English teacher in my whole life! I never had any language teacher, for that matter. First because I couldn't pay for one. and then because I learned I didn't need one.

[@jamesbuchanan1913]

@straybeastden Honesty, many native teachers trying to teach the grammar of their native language to children who are also native speakers don't have a clue what they are talking about. Usually, only by teaching ESL or learning the language when you're a bit older do you get any funtional grasp of the grammar.

[@jmi967]

Even learning vocabulary from immersion can be problematic as it is with native learners. I never realized how much until I started looking up common words only to find a lot of them that I was never using correctly. I made a rule to try to look up any word I couldn't easily define out loud or in text.

[@ZootBurger]

We diagrammed sentences in class around 1977 (Wales) Loved the Jones / Kool Aid reference, btw 😂

[@languagejones]

My channel is so dark, but in a way the algorithm will never flag 😂

[@cowardly_wizard]

​@@languagejones considering that the figure of speech is factually wrong about the brand of the drink I fully support Jones' use in public lol

[@kamikitazawa]

I love that there is an informed and authoritative voice on language learning on KZbin. This channel has definitely challenged a lot of notions I had about language acquisition and caused me to rethink my strategies. Focusing on grammar for one thing. Realizing that grammar is actually interesting to engage with, for another.

[@Alec72HD]

Any beginner who is attempting to learn a large chunk of L2 grammar will be wasting their time. The reason is that learning L2 grammar in your NATIVE language doesn't do much. The only grammar studying method that works is to learn the same way as native school children learn. Learn L2 grammar only using L2 in the process.

[@crepinhauser5274]

@@Alec72HD Sorry, I'm not a native English speaker an maybe it's why I can't make sense of what you wrote. Isn't L2 like the abbreviated way to say second (not native) language? How would one native speaker learn L2? Is L2 in this sense a particular method of learning grammar that is mainly used for specific learning environments? All I can say, if that is what you meant, is that L2 and native learners do, in some contexts, some learning environments, use the same method to learn grammar, because the integrated sense of what the language is does not work with every native student, as well as it might work for a L2 learner with some different analysis of how syntax could go. In fact, for the speakers with the most difficulties, the L2 approach can lead to substantial progress.

[@Alec72HD]

@crepinhauser5274 Google says: A second language (L2) is a language spoken in addition to one's first language (L1). L2 is either a Target, Foreign, or Second Language

[@AB-dz7lo]

@@Alec72HD Isn’t that what people usually do when learning any new language? The L2 or LX grammar is learnt by itself or alongside a simple explanation in a language one does know.

[@Alec72HD]

@AB-dz7lo People usually don't progress beyond A1 when attempting to learn another language. I am not sure what part of my comment is unclear.

[@tenkitcoley4655]

I definitely agree with this, especially depending on the language. For a language like Korean or Japanese where the grammar is vastly different from English I just can't imagine not studying grammar at all. Something like Spanish you could maybe figure out since the differences aren't as major but when I'm studying Korean/Japanese I often find myself thinking "There's no way I would've figured that out" when learning a new grammar that I've seen used before

[@malenalucero6473]

And even in Spanish there are concepts that don't exist in English, like ser and estar, which both mean to be. And the subjunctive.

[@cicolas_nage]

@@malenalucero6473 i would argue that ser and estar can't be learned consciously. it's one of those things you need to just get a feel for

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

To answer that question another question: Are there people out there that are illiterate, either in both their native language and the target language, or only in the target language (different writing systems) that, therefore, didn't study grammar (they could maybe by watching videos but that's not the case) that can speak fluently with close to native or even near-native level syntax, at least for speaking purposes? Yeas, there are. You go to Thailand and you find an illiterate migrant worker, working in construction, that came from Myanmar, whose native language is Burmese, living in Thailand for about, let's say, 5 years, that can speak almost perfect Thai, plus Hindi, Nepalese, and can get his way around with Vietnamese and English. So the answer is: You DON'T NEED to study grammar. You can, but you don't need to. I never bothered with grammar in English. I never had and English teacher in my whole life! I never had any language teacher, for that matter. First because I couldn't pay for one. and then because I learned I didn't need one. and for you example. Are there Americans who learned Japanese to a high level without studyIng grammar? the answer is also yeas. The fonder of AJATT, Khatzumoto. Linguistics sometimes looks like mainstream, orthodox liberal Economics these days. It refuses to look at the REALITY as a true s science should do. What the observed phenomena tells us?

[@malenalucero6473]

@@JohnnyLynnLee That for every adult that didn't need to learn grammar there are a million others that did need it.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@malenalucero6473 And NONE of them are on TV on the target language. And what you said is objectively FALSE. Most people in the world learn this way. The world is NOT only American and Europe. At every corner in Nigeria or Indonesia there's a different language. People move to a different part of the country, for work, as working adults, and become fluent in the local LANGUAGE (not dialect). That's the RTULE, not the exception.

[@Auradnor]

I was actually made to diagram English sentences in primary school. Never thought it'd come in useful, and I've forgotten how to do it since. 12 years later, and here I am learning Japanese with explicit grammar marker particles. Still don't think it primed my brain or anything, but who knows, maybe on a subconscious level. I did notice that I was head and shoulders above everyone else in terms of understanding how these particles acted on say the direct objects and that, though.

[@SnabbKassa]

The syntax of Sarah Palin and D. Trump makes diagramming impossible. It's just stream-of-consciousness rambling.

[@unvergebeneid]

Hey look, I would argue that it comes in really handy even if you never learn a foreign language. Two years back a dude in our group chat wanted to complain about the overuse of buzzwords in emails he got and said they would all use "the favorite hot adjective:" .... only to then go on and list two nouns and a verb 💀 So kids, do your English homework and you will save yourself from some absolutely preventable humiliation 20 years later in a group chat. Oh and yes I agree, the sentence was dodgy English even before the colon but "dodgy" and "epic self own" are two completely different categories when it comes to how long your friends will mock you for something ;)

[@WeibenWang]

I'm not a linguist, but I read language textbooks for fun. I learn a whole lot more about languages than I actually learn languages. And learning grammar is fun, cause it's systematic and rule driven, whereas leaning vocabulary is unbearably tedious, as it comes down to rote memorization. I learned German to fluency as an adult. I got several years of typical high school language classes, with much learning grammar rules and memorizing paradigms, etc. Then a year living in Germany taught me to apply all those textbook grammar rules on the fly. And, now, since I'm a bit rusty, I find myself consciously thinking, oh yeah, n on that attributive adjective, cause definite article in oblique case. I can't imagine working out German hard and soft adjective rules all on my own through emersion. Living in Germany without a groundwork in German grammar would have been incredibly frustrating. PS As a native Mandarin speaker, I have no idea how definiteness works in Chinese, except when someone points it out I go, huh, do I say that? I guess that makes sense.

[@CaroAbebe]

It does make sense that you wouldn’t consciously know how certain things work in your native language. My husband, a non native German speaker, used to explain my own language back to me 😅

[@jannepeltonen2036]

@@CaroAbebe My uncle spent a year as an exchange student (high school age) in the GDR. He would help the host family's daughter prepare for grammar exams.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

I had a solid knowledge of German because I learned it as a kid at school to a very decent level and now, after decades I still remember the rules and can accurately use them.

[@milanprolix2511]

I recognize myself a lot in your description of your experience with grammar. What killed the fun out of grammar for me, as a teenager, was my teachers not seeing the difference between not understanding grammar and not knowing the gender of specific words in my target language, or not knowing all forms of some random irregular verbs... It took me a couple of years after high school to start enjoying grammar again.

[@fieryweasel]

I did quite a few sentence diagrams when I was getting introduced to "Garden Path Sentences". They're very helpful. (early 40s)

[@jaroslavkyprianpolak]

Your videos always bring me back to reality, including my idea of knowing English! Your very sophisticated language makes me listen to some parts more than once, which I usually don't have to do with other videos and podcasts. And I appreciate it! I studied English for 9 years in school and later by immersion - books, movies, KZbin... I would also differentiate between learning related and unrelated languages. I'm Czech, about to turn 50 and I'm learning Ukrainian. There immersion works quite well, although I work with a grammar book as well. But I can't imagine I'd get anywhere if I wanted to learn by watching movies or podcasts in, say, Japanese...

[@eltedioso]

Thank you for touching on what grammar is NOT. I try to point this out on the grammar subreddit when people get really pedantic about usage rules and punctuation, etc.

[@crepinhauser5274]

It's not what grammar is not, but rather what grammar not solely is? Rules and punctuation are not only an arbitrary set of limits made to classify and discriminate people, but also a reference, a codex that can help certain learners to navigate, comfort themselves with knowing where they are and that the common enemy is the miscommunication that can be helped against by using a common set of... rules.

[@hebozhe]

That quick piano interlude returning at 4:11 -- mwah! Comedic gold! I think the only sound recommendation I got from the materials I've read were to START with the examples, taken from real-world sources, understand their messages, and then allow for a brief exegesis on a single grammar point. Syntax books and grammar-centric textbooks do this backwards. They explain the phenomenon and then justify their claim with two or three examples. I think the way the DLPT does it makes more sense, then. Even if you're not gaining explicit jargon for grammatical structures, you are having to use adult analytic skills to infer meaning beyond previously understood inputs. That's also how we understand math and logic. We don't start with the foundational theory (e.g., a natural number is a successor function that encloses the value of an entire set, starting from the assumed empty set as 0, and appends it as a unique member to the set N), and then explain how the `+` operator works to explain how the result `12 + 21` sums up to 33. We drill some arithmetic or proof-procedural patterns, and then justify these syntactic moves with the background semantic theory and primitive definitions. A grammar-translation approach does that exactly backwards.

[@JRBWare1942]

I had to google DLPT to learn it stands for Defense Language Proficiency Test.

[@thelbekk]

I'm 62, and we did sentence diagrams in Norwegian elementary school. Of course, most of the technical terms we learned back then have changed by now... As for learning a language without actively learning the grammar: I've been learning Latin by reading simple (learner oriented) Latin, and I find that while I'm certainly progressing, I'm never sure of, and certainly can't at need express correctly, the tenses of verbs. I've recently decided that I need to step back, and do some proper grammar learning. Oh, and thanks for the video on the subjunctive mood! That was very informative, and I'll be watching it again (probably several times).

[@silverharloe]

the expectation that you can intuit grammar from exposure is kind of meaningless for a dead language. All the "learner oriented" sentences are artificial. Your decision to step back and study it is a really, really good idea if you're planning on reading the Aeneid or the Bible.

[@JRBWare1942]

@@silverharloe In this context, what difference does it make if the language is dead or living?

[@silverharloe]

​@@JRBWare1942 If I remember the premise of the video correctly, the "no grammar" position is that if you have enough vocabulary, you can pick up how to communicate by immersion, and immersion in a dead language is not possible - you can't have conversations with people , can't be corrected by native speakers, can't watch a movie, can't try to order off a menu, can't ask for or try to give directions and so on and so forth.

[@unvergebeneid]

@@silverharloe These days it's easy to find communities where people actually converse in Latin or Ancient Greek. Probably also Sanskrit or what have you. So yes, you can absolutely learn Latin like any other language, if you choose to eschew unnecessary punishment. Although full disclosure, I've never tried to learn any dead language. I've just spoken with people who learned English in school the way Latin is taught. And their language level did not match my expectations given how numerous and how recent their years of studying English had been. Discere faciendo.

[@aelfrice]

Buy the text and workbooks for Wheelock's Latin. They leave the subjunctive for the second half/year.

[@shawnmoore3472]

They way I learned French & German was very algorithmically where I used grammar to build sentences like equations once I learned the vocab and it’s worked well for me

[@barrysteven5964]

I'll leave a comment just for your algorithm. Ignoring the grammar for me makes language learning really confusing. I don't want to have to guess and work it out for myself. Learning the grammar though is done through practice. You learn what the 'rule' or pattern is and once you're aware of what's going on you practise it until the brain's muscle memory makes it sound natural. But this process is so much quicker when you actually know what's going on but you're just practising it. Especially languages with complex declensions and conjugations. I suspect some 'I don't do grammar' learners overestimate the efficiency of their method because they overestimate their own levels.

[@Alec72HD]

What's important is what language you should use to learn L2 grammar. I say, always use English. If you are learning English, definitely use English to clarify confusing grammar points. This way, you can progress to a near native proficiency in English. Trust me, using Chinese or Russian to learn English doesn't work. If you are a native English speaker who is learning some irrelevant foreign language, also use English. For you Grammar Translation is the best method. That L2 doesn't really matter anyway. English is the international language, you won🏆.

[@foogod4237]

I've always felt that there are actually three different "stages" to learning grammar, and they have different significance and ways that they can and should be done: When you first start learning a language (as an adult), learning the _basic_ grammar first is, IMHO, pretty much essential. This is why a lot of "purely immersive" techniques just utterly fail a large portion of their students, because if you don't understand the very basics of how the language goes together and how words connect to other words, you're just left with "vocabulary soup" and you can't even really start to construct real sentences at all, and all the vocabulary in the world won't help you get better at that. Some people have brains that can work around this by really good pattern recognition, and eventually figure it out, but _not most people,_ and even for the ones who can, it can make early stages of language acquisition really unnecessarily slow and tedious (which is really not fun). Intermediate grammar can often be picked up over time simply from interacting in the language, if you have the basics down, so you can actually notice when people around you deviate from that and in what ways, under what conditions. This requires a lot of exposure to those specific constructs, though, so it only works with grammar elements that are (a) not so basic that without them you can't use the language at all, but also (b) so commonly used that you will actually encounter them a lot in everyday speech. There's nothing wrong with learning these explicitly anyway, though, and it can often make it easier to recognize them when you do come across them in the real world. Finally, really advanced grammar constructs pretty much have to be explicitly learned, because you just won't experience them enough (and in enough different situations) to really reliably pick them up just from exposure and context (unless your brain is really special).

[@jannaj]

100% agree

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

You still crying here but here a video YT suggested me "Como eu aprendi português & Dicas para aprender idiomas" from the Chanel Dana no Brasil. Shje speaks Portuguese EXTREMELY well, has an YT channel in Portuguese and she's been in Brazil only since from 2021, and came here knowing ZERO Portuguese. and she OPENS the video saying "no grammar". We are EVERYWHERE.

[@gluehfunke1547]

I heavily depends on what the language is. For German and Russian, I’ve found that what you’re saying is often (though not always) true. In the case of Japanese, the first language I ever attempted, that strategy didn’t work at all. Then I came back to Japanese 2 years ago, this time with a heavy focus on nailing down how the grammar actually works, and now I can understand most of the language. The problem is that if a language’s phraseology is too radically different from your own *and* the traditional grammar explanations are misleading, you don’t have the tools to logically decode it yourself. Instead you‘ll just end up in a limbo where you know a lot of words but can’t make sense of anything.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@gluehfunke1547 あ、そうですか？文法を集中するの戦略というのは日本語の場合で効果的な行動と思いますか？もっと明らかにどれぐらい日本語分かっているのを説明してくれませんか？

[@bertcornelissen6294]

Immersion did wonders for my French, but that was after having had it taught to me for 6 years as a second language in secondary school. That basis wasn't enough for me to be fluent, but because of it, I quickly (over the course of several months) became fluent enough through immersion to hold my own in French.

[@JRBWare1942]

When I was in my early 30's, I was surrounded by a lot of Spanish speakers (a mixture of natives & Americans who had learned it as an L2). They would often speak Spanish to me, as if I should be able to understand it with no study and minimal exposure to the language--and they got mad at me when I couldn't understand them. (I had studied both French and Latin previously, but that was no help.) Twenty years later, I did start understanding simple Spanish without study and not much more exposure to the language. I guess something changed in my brain--but I don't know what.

[@paulwalther5237]

I couldn’t understand English grammar beyond the most basic concepts until I got really motivated to learn German around age 21. Somehow it made more sense when I had something to compare it to and also I had a real need to understand it. I’m also not sure if my English teachers before then really didn’t want me to understand it or maybe didn’t understand it completely themselves and weren’t bluffing. As for grammar in foreign languages… I personally have found it super useful to study it but sometimes it doesn’t stick well and I can either come back to it later or decide it’s not important and just ignore it. I do both.

[@JRBWare1942]

As I've learned more and more about linguistics, I've realized that all my English teachers AND all my foreign language teachers had a very superficial understanding of grammar.

[@tetsi0815]

Yeah... for a lot of people grammar and learning about it only starts making sense once they start studying another language. I find it super interesting that we can actually use grammar correctly in our first language without actually knowing anything about it. Just from imitation and use and being corrected by other speakers.

[@JRBWare1942]

@@tetsi0815 That's my experience exactly. Children are born seeking to learn language. The ability to acquire language in that fashion fades away in one's teen years. Chomsky and his buddies proposed the existence of a "mental organ" called "the language acquisition device" which atrophies in adolescence. The crowd promoting immersion-only are rabidly opposed to this idea.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

I love comparative method, especially for grammar.

[@abmindprof]

It's worth keeping in mind that there are reasons for the 'no grammar' approach beyond dogmatic ones. A lot of people have experiences like I did in middle, high school, and college Spanish classes learning conjugations (which is most of what I remember from those classes, although they must have had other parts) and almost completely unable to communicate. No one says, "Hablo, hablas, habla, hablamos..." outside of those classes. In my case, I learned much more from just picking it up first in NYC kitchens and then in Spain. Of course I had the backbone of all those conjugations, but I made no effort to learn all those irregular preterites, but I quickly picked them up. I have no problem with material that I wasn't taught such as post verbal NPs after unaccusative verbs (llegó el elefante), and so on. I didn't get that from class. The problem is going from those kinds of experiences and then becoming dogmatic about it and saying that explicit grammar instruction is useless. Something similar can be said for phonics. A phonics only approach also had plenty of failures. This isn't the first, "the kids don't know how to read" panic in the US. There's a reason the "whole language" and later Calkins' writing process style approaches took off. Again (and I had her as a professor) dogma took over led by a charismatic figure. BTW, a similar issue happened in high school and college composition. No explicit grammar became the byword, with the happy result that English teachers no longer had to take linguistics. Isn't that convenient for the literature faculty?

[@Lawfair]

I remember my middle school English teacher trying to teach sentence diagramming, and giving up. I don't remember diagramming sentences in elementary school, but I have saved school work that clearly shows I did. I am well into my 40's.

[@alexandriatempest]

I'm a geriatric millennial and I did sentence diagrams in elementary school, I finally really understood it, and then didn't get to do it until 7th grade, where we had one lesson over it and it never came up again. I was so pissed off. Finally I could do the fun thing, but they didn't let me. When I found out there was a college course in Uni that did grammar and sentence diagrams, I jumped on that quick! It was the best class in college

[@JRBWare1942]

I have a question for you. Do you remember when you started using the term "Uni"? I learned this term as part of the German language about 45 years ago. I've only been hearing people use it in English in the last five years or so, and only in KZbin videos. I've never heard any English speaker say it in real life.

[@unvergebeneid]

Alex I thought we'd _talked_ about this! It's "elder millennial", not "geriatric millennial". If you insist on keeping to use "geriatric", you make those of us who are more insecure about our age really look bad! ;D

[@bobboberson8297]

@@JRBWare1942 it's a uk/aussie english thing afaik. if you mainly consume american media you won't hear it

[@rushyscoper1651]

the thing with grammar that even if u learned its u wont auto-compute the rules in real life at the end of the day u gonna have to transfer that from common fact knowledge to a language knowledge. more so ppl truly learn grammar in a natural way and only than do they discover something they already know, but now that ruleset is more clear specially at edge cases.

[@lilcrowlet1802]

8:50 as far as the diagramming is concerned: in the Netherlands (at least at pre-university high-school education and I think pre-higher vocational education), we did do what we called 'zinsontleden' (sentence dissecting)! And no, pretty much no-one enjoyed it, and most people may never use that skill ever again. Also, I am 24

[@Whizzer]

Very useful, however, when learning new languages, especially highly inflected ones, and languages with a different word order.

[@lilcrowlet1802]

@@Whizzer Absolutely! not everyone appreciates that particular utility sadly lol (and it doesn't make the process itself any less tedious)

[@user-nm3ug3zq1y]

My takeaway: Vocabulary, phrases, expressions and maybe smaller syntactic details probably just come to you with sufficient immersion plus some practical use. However, the basic grammar of a language is a relatively small, coherent system that can and should be studied - however not so much by reading long-winded explanations, but rather by practicing the grammatical patterns after a *concise* description of the rule (which would require fitting material).

[@JemRochelle]

I feel like, yes grammar does matter, but you also shouldn't get so caught up in thinking the grammar has to be perfect that it holds you back from speaking.

[@calpurniabruchi5742]

In college I spent 3 months in Italy, I came back speaking away! They said I could skip 2 beginner courses and move into a more advanced level. Oops, came time to graduate, I needed those 2 courses for the Major in Italian. The Department head said I could take a grammar test in place of, then I could graduate. I nearly #$% my pants, because I really didn't know grammar that a test would ask! I did somehow pass, because it was multiple choice. I know it now, because I went on to get my Masters and I had to learn it to teach it for my Teaching Assistantship. I have no idea what my point is here but I felt great about my speaking abilities!

[@JRBWare1942]

@@calpurniabruchi5742 I was already fairly decent at speaking German when I spent a month in Austria. I couldn't understand a word anybody said there. The dialect was so different from standard German that it didn't even sound like German to me. It sounded more like everybody there was speaking a Slavic language.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

To answer that question another question: Are there people out there that are illiterate, either in both their native language and the target language, or only in the target language (different writing systems) that, therefore, didn't study grammar (they could maybe by watching videos but that's not the case) that can speak fluently with close to native or even near-native level syntax, at least for speaking purposes? Yeas, there are. You go to Thailand and you find an illiterate migrant worker, working in construction, that came from Myanmar, whose native language is Burmese, living in Thailand for about, let's say, 5 years, that can speak almost perfect Tai, plus Hindi, Nepalese, and can get his way around with Vietnamese and English. So the answer is: You ODN'T NEED to study grammar. You can, but you don't need to. I never bothered with grammar in English. I never had and English teacher in my whole life! I never had any language teacher, for that matter. First because I couldn't pay for one. an then because I learned I didn't need one.

[@GraemeMarkNI]

I came here to say this. You have to be OK with saying “how we did that” as well as learning how to say that properly. Like Taylor said, he was doing something incorrectly in Chinese for 10 years, but then eventually corrected it.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@GraemeMarkNI He uses Rosteta Stone as example of "input learning." Only DUOLINGO has a worse reputationin hte so called "Input community". He has ZERO idea about what Comprehensible Input is, because he thinks FREAKING ROSETTA STONE is this. no single person that proposes input will EVER suggest Roseta Stone. This whole channel is about straw man fallacy. Starting with picking up a thing you wrote on the fly to say "oh you made a mistake'. He's PAID to do what he does here.

[@alexandriatempest]

I'm starting to use comprehensible input to start out and get a feel for the language. I'm just trying to figure out a good way for me to grind out words and phrases. I find that at a certain point I'll get curious about what is going on in a sentence I'm hearing, versus what I think it should do, and then when I study the grammar, it makes more sense to me. It's my current iteration of scaffolding

[@emtilt]

I think that another reason for the popularity and partial-success of the "input only" products is that it can be varying degrees of effective/efficient for various L1/L2 language pairs. You need very little explicit grammar instruction when going from one Italo-Romance language to another, or even English to French/Spanish (with notable obvious exceptions that learners struggle with -- and thus often simply avoid -- like, as you mentioned, the subjunctive). The result is that people make generalization errors about the method, asserting it works equally well in all contexts. This is further compounded by differing goals among learners, both in terms of efficiency and ultimate skill level. If I simply want to be able to understand some Spanish around me, I have no doubt that, e.g., Dreaming Spanish could get me there in a non-terrible amount of time on its own. But to become fully functional in a language, and also do it on a timescale that is practical for a typical adult, and also do it for a language not closely related to my own, I can't see how it'd be possible with a pure interpretation of that method. I also think people who argue for "pure" input approaches forget how much grammar they already actually know from education, their own language, and cultural osmosis. I wonder how long, for example, it would take someone who has truly and honestly never encountered even the slightest concept of grammatical gender (or choose your other favorite grammatical feature that doesn't exist in all languages) existing to infer its existence and function from pure input.

[@paijwa]

Literally children do this. Of course adults can do it too. It just takes a really long time listening to a language that virtually no one will have the patience to do unless they know it works. When you hear a grammatical structure 10 million times you will remember that words are said in that order. You don't have to understand WHY. Its when you start talking too early that you teach yourself bad grammar habits. But if you wait before doing that you will more intuitively know what's right. Its so frustrating because there's a method that works that will literally give you better pronunciation and understanding without even having to read a text book and you're still telling people who will find it painfully boring that they have to learn about grammar.

[@maciejstachowski183]

You can either learn grammar and have a formal framework that is then applicable to other languages letting you easily compare and contrast how different languages express what's effectively the same concepts, or painstakingly reverse engineer it from input. Sure, at some point you might gain enough intuition in a language to not have to apply grammatical rules and just be able to say what sounds right and have it be right most of the time, but this takes years, if not decades of immersion - and not just occasional input, but extensive use of the language. I don't think it's achievable for more than one, maybe two foreign languages.

[@majedal-baghl4917]

I think it's also easier for native-speaker teachers of L2 to be credentialed if they don't have to learn their L1 grammar thoroughly.

[@milanprolix2511]

@@paijwa I do not completely agree that children do this. Children do not learn set sentences but rather infer grammar from sentences they hear. This allows them to produce grammatically correct new sentences they have never heard before, but it sometimes goes wrong due to irregularities, ambiguities, syntax not being clear from sound only, etc. In these cases, adults correct children and although they do not usually explain the grammar rule, the feedback is based on the adults' own grammar knowledge. This specific feedback is missing in the "comprehensible input" only method.

[@philipwarner6724]

I'm dutch so I had to relisten to you saying the word 'kommaneuker' for a bit I'm more familliar with 'mierenneuker', similar idea but more broad.

[@Kate-vd3hl]

Ya I don't think he speaks any Dutch or at least he doesn't pronounce words like he does

[@Kate-vd3hl]

Still a great video

[@itu7680]

Young Adult over here, and I diagrammed sentences in German (where I grew up) in elementary, just like my siblings currently; surprisingly I don't recall ever doing it in English lessons, but I have in Latin

[@Exilum]

In the end, it's really easy to say you learned a language without learning grammar, but your starting position changes everything. My English grammar was already quite good by virtue of speaking French, which is relatively close, while my Japanese grammar is way more partial and far from mastery. I don't intend to spend much time on grammar, but I also don't intend to say you don't need to, my learning goals are just so long term that I'll eventually get it done bit by bit. My way is not optimal and neither is it good practice.

[@jsmxwll]

i was born during Reagan's first term in office. yep, we diagramed sentences in elementary school. when i was trying to help friends figure out what was wrong with their English i would diagram out their sentences because that almost always made what was off obvious for early learners. i usually look up grammar for the language i am interested in. i find knowing the landscape of the grammar gives me a sort of peg to hang the things i'm learning on. grammar is one peg, vocabulary is another. once i've got enough pegs i can usually produce something intelligible. i find that having looked up the grammar to start with, i can more easily reference it when i am confused reading something. the less confusion and frustration i have when actually working with the language, the more likely i am to keep working with the language. i've been at this long enough that i know what traps i usually fall into and plan accordingly.

[@marycooch7075]

I'm 65 and from the UK. I remember a few lessons on parsing when I was around 11 - is that similar to what you mean? But my greatest understanding -and gratitude - came in the four years I did Latin at high school - literally one of the most useful things I learned as a child (that and learning to type with all my fingers on an old typewriter!) The understanding it gave me helped with my native language English and with German and subsequently Russian

[@scv1]

good to see you back. either you were away for a bit or youtube pulled you from my algo. i dig keepin up with the languagejones'.

[@languagejones]

I missed a week or two, but I'm back!

[@silverharloe]

to your informal poll: 54 and yes. While I had a child's intuitive understanding of English grammar, I didn't know the English grammar well enough to explain it to other people until I studied Latin (the first time) in high school. (I'm 75% confident that Latin was the third language in your "first page from a textbook" examples). I probably still couldn't explain English grammar because I'm a terrible teacher, but I could correctly red ink a paper with probably valid suggestions for repairs. I knew about putting "ing" on verbs, but not the nuances of why or when like the difference between a progressive tense and a participle. I had no idea what a gerund was until I took Latin.

[@jtfritchie]

I had some mandatory sentence diagramming in middle school (late 1970s) but it was the exception and not the rule. It was a feature of the program that I was in.

[@alyssaskier2656]

I learned to diagram sentences in junior high, circa 1990, along with a basic overview of the parts of speech and the notion of editorial style. And I *loved* it. It definitely helped me in French class. It probably benefitted from the teacher being fantastic.

[@carolinejames7257]

I'm in my 60s, Australian, and never did diagrammed sentences, as far as I can recall.

[@lmeeken]

Im an American, 41 years old, and we diagrammed sentences together on the board in elementary school. (By which I mean we had the subject, predicate/verb, and object labeled on the board, and might have done worksheets where we did the same individually.)

[@polymloth]

A similar word in Finnish is pilkunviilaaja, directly translated as “comma filer”, and it refers to someone who is obsessed with correct punctuation, or sometimes more broadly, to a grammatical perfectionist.

[@coaster1235]

well there’s also pilkunnussija, which might be an even closer translation

[@unvergebeneid]

Even if it was possible to learn a language without ever cracking open a book, doesn't everyone who's ever learned a language have some experience along the lines of: you observe a certain language use in native speakers but you just can't figure out how it works exactly. You keep hearing it again and again though and it really bothers you! Then you ask or read up on the rule and it just makes your life sooo much easier to have a definitive answer to the puzzle instead of having to figure it out yourself, still being unsure and in the end landing on a grammar rule anyways, just one you had to painstakingly deduce yourself. This must be a fairly universal experience, right?

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

it IS possible. It's the NATURAL way. To answer that question another question: Are there people out there that are illiterate, either in both their native language and the target language, or only in the target language (different writing systems) that, therefore, didn't study grammar (they could maybe by watching videos but that's not the case) that can speak fluently with close to native or even near-native level syntax, at least for speaking purposes? Yeas, there are. You go to Thailand and you find an illiterate migrant worker, working in construction, that came from Myanmar, whose native language is Burmese, living in Thailand for about, let's say, 5 years, that can speak almost perfect Thai, plus Hindi, Nepalese, and can get his way around with Vietnamese and English. So the answer is: You DON'T NEED to study grammar. You can, but you don't need to. I never bothered with grammar in English. I never had and English teacher in my whole life! I never had any language teacher, for that matter. First because I couldn't pay for one. and then because I learned I didn't need one. and for you example. Are there Americans who learned Japanese to a high level without studyIng grammar? the answer is also yeas. The fonder of AJATT, Khatzumoto. Linguistics sometimes looks like mainstream, orthodox liberal Economics these days. It refuses to look at the REALITY as a true s science should do. What the observed phenomena tells us?

[@CaroAbebe]

@unvergebeneid I feel that while there are a host of things you can figure out in your target language, certain things do escape our understanding for too long to be comfortable. I like figuring things out, but yes, it can definitely reduce the state of puzzlement to have the explanation right away. Once you’ve noticed that there is a question, you’re ready for the answer, and you don’t need to waste time on formulating theories, discarding them, formulating new ones etc.

[@CaroAbebe]

@@JohnnyLynnLee It’s NATURAL only for children. Most people cannot reach a very good language level without bothering with a language’s grammar; particularly not when it comes to a C1 or C2 level, meaning you can confidently and correctly understand and use the language in whichever social, private or professional context with all its nuances. Just because you’re a prodigy doesn’t mean we all are.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@CaroAbebe That's not true. The MAJORITY of people learn that way. Maybe not in North America and Europe (why this nonsense here has a lot of resonance with English speakers) But only Indonesia, for instance, has 172 languages. Everybody speaks 3 or 4. Including ones they learned as adults when they had to move to other part of the country (or neighboring country) for work. Mos people speaking English on the internet as non natives learned that way. Khatzumoto, founder of the AJATT system, lenatned AND DOCUMENTED him learning Japanese this way. I jsut watched today on the channel Mark Abbott Official "How I learned to speak Thai fluently" Does he talks about grammar? dude speaks Thai on Thai TV!. at from Matt VS Japan, like Katzumoto, could fool natives he was a native without showing his face.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@CaroAbebe And A I AM the guy he's talking about in this video. dude got so mad he was exposed he made a video just for me. I'm flattered. Never saw an English teacher or an English textbook in my WOLE life until I got a job as an English teacher. I had to learn a bunch of things I DIDNT KNOW. To be able to teach. Not tp b able to learn. And Im' no exception!

[@juulian1306]

In Austria we have the term "i-Tüpferl-Reiter". Literally: Someone who will complain about a missing dot on an i. It's used for annoying pedants in general though and not only those of the orthographic variety.

[@vincenzo02tii]

As a hopeless academic and a grammar nerd, I appreciate the applicability of this argument across all fields. The "grammar doesn't matter group" for language learners is equivalent to the "music theory doesn't matter group" to musicians. (@ 10:17: "without learning grammar, you won't be able to fully improvise"!)

[@Alec72HD]

Nobody can use (explicit knowledge of) grammar to speak or understand a language. Language is a unique ability different from other skills. Let's not compare it to UNRELATED subjects.

[@jmcwill2002]

Grammar nerd here. I haven't found the "immersion" method of most language apps to be effective for me. I learn a bunch of vocab with little idea of how to use it. It seems that an integrated system would be better, at least for me. Also, yes I was diagramming sentences in school...many years ago lol

[@cheeseitup1971]

Early 20s, no, although I was aware of the concept to some extent from my parents. After the content that School House Rock covers, I can hardly remember any dedicated grammar lessons. We did semicolons and something about identifying in/dependent clauses, but only in the context of applying a rule for comma usage. It wasn't until high school Latin that we got vocabulary like "noun phrase", "indirect object", and "relative pronoun" to help analyze English. I remember a friend who immigrated from China in 5th grade or so benefitted from that a lot.

[@KimDammers]

1) Ethnographic research shows that kids DO have guidance in L1 learning. 2) Having bought a Rosetta Stone (RS) package (for Korean), worked with it, become frustrated with it (e.g., I was able, after numerous repetitions, to get correct answers without having much of an idea what was being said), been told by a college-educated native speaker that the formulations were often wrong, and been denied the money-back guarantee that had come with the package; I ask You what are the good things about RS?

[@KimDammers]

Oh, I'm American -- 80 y.o.

[@JRBWare1942]

From what I've seen of Rosetta Stone (which admittedly isn't much), I wasn't impressed by it.

[@Meldon44]

Mid-thirties and I learned to diagram sentences...... and LOVED it! One of my favorite things! Probably helped that i was homeschooled and my mom loved grammar. Of course, I'm hardly a good example of a normal person. When i was a kid, I also loved phonetics and IPA, I read all the fore-matter of our Webster dictionary, and I may or may not have spent a lot of time studying the grammar and etymology of Tolkien's language Quenta. 😅

[@tearlach61]

"not supported for adult learners" The problem is most adult learners don't really have the time to fully immerse themselves in a language. When I started attending French school in Quebec, I was immersed from the time I left home until I returned later in the evening. I was doing 10 12 hours a day of solid French. How many adults can do that? But I learned a ton of grammar through that process. Things I saw tediously explained in a sampling of French grammar I was looking at years later had become second nature to me. For me, immersion is how you get there. But the question is how much immersion? Grammar instruction has a place. But its place is providing structure to what one is already experiencing in an immersion experience. Few adults can devote the time I had to devote to my childhood immersion experience. I feel that with a similar amount of immersion a similar outcome would be achieved, even for adults. But few adults have that kind of time. I think that grammar can leverage your immersion efforts. One thing that immersion did for me was totally abandoning translating in your head. The brain can't work that fast except for short periods of time max. Better to just let meaning form directly from your new language. Then you avoid the trap of translating from your primary language and in the process coming up with something garbled. I have seen many language learners fall into that trap. There was a time and it persists to this day that when I hear something stated in French and if I want to translate it into English, I have to really stop and think about it, how would you say that in English. It's like the language live in two separate rooms in my head.

[@casperdewith]

Krashen does not say that grammar study is useless, but only that it has limited effect; he estimates at most 5 % in adults¹. So periodically referring back to a grammar (9:56) is in line with Krashen’s ideas of language learning.

[@casperdewith]

¹ _Stephen Krashen on Second Language Acquisition at Pagoda Academy in Busan Part 1_ at 6:32, kzbin.info/www/bejne/qZnKg4FpZ9qVl8k

[@Alec72HD]

Indeed, any beginner who is attempting to learn a large chunk of L2 grammar will be wasting their time. The reason is that learning L2 grammar in your NATIVE language doesn't do much. The only grammar studying method that works is to learn the same way as native school children learn. Learn L2 grammar only using L2 in the process.

[@johngreiner3879]

For me, learning grammar patterns is more fun than memorizing lots of seemingly random vocabulary. (Although learning etymology definitely helps for the vocab.) Diagramming sentences in the 70's was mostly straight-forward for me. So I became a computer scientist focusing on programming languages and computational theory, plus a major in cognitive and computational linguistics, who took French grammar and phonetics classes for fun. In short, I like patterns. Syntax and semantics forever!

[@ryanfleming9158]

Agreed. Did diagrammatic in school.took French and Latin. Worked as a software developer ...doing degree in linguistics and studying algonquian languages 11:15 for

[@ryanfleming9158]

BTW...like these videos a lot❤

[@five-toedslothbear4051]

I am 61, and I definitely diagrammed sentences in what we called grammar school. I mean it said elementary school over the door but that’s what we called it. And I used my mother‘s college English textbook as a reference. And I’m not sure the diagramming sentences actually made me a better writer. It took a very special teacher to show me how to write a coherent paper, and I am still Facebook friends with her.

[@peteymax]

I learnt Irish in primary and secondary school and it was very formal, focused on grammar and literature. I am now following Irish language KZbinrs to improve my modern vocabulary. I studied Spanish independently and have a wide vocabulary and a keen ear for native speakers having used comprehensible input. I decided that I would never advance in either language without a mix of input grammar and structure so I now attend a really fun, grammar light Spanish class. For me the mix of class, KZbin and attempting to communicate have helped. I really enjoyed your video about the subjunctive. Speaking of Dutch words, maybe the word you used could be translated to Spanish as tiquismiquis (fusspot) or in Hiberno-English as gobshite (mouth of you know what). I had Dutch neighbours when I was a child in Ireland and they taught me to say Klootzak and Godverdomme which I still like to use when I need to curse in private. When I curse out loud I use Spanish or a few German words I know in case I offend anyone 😅 Sláinte a chara.

[@JRBWare1942]

When I was growing up in America, I had a neighbor who was an immigrant from Ireland. His mother would come to visit him every summer, and of a summer's evening, she would always sit on his front porch. My father tried to goad me into going up to her and saying, " 'Tis a moonlight night tonight," but making all the i's short i's and pronouncing the gh's like the ch in Scottish "loch." My father insisted that that sentence was Irish Gaelic. My father really was full of it. Fortunately, I never had the courage to do it--and thus spared myself embarrassment.

[@peteymax]

@ funny!

[@JRBWare1942]

@@peteymax I'm glad someone appreciates my jokes!

[@reilandeubank]

I definitely had to break down and point out the various parts of sentences in elementary and middle school. Currently 21, went to school in Texas/Ohio.

[@eugenegeppert6281]

I'm 76 and I diagrammed sentences on the blackboard in grammar school.

[@walterallen4069]

I am 65, also diagrammed sentences, and loved it.

[@ArtemHahauz-nm7bk]

The title, here, more sounds like a retorical question. Thanks. Greetings from Ukraine. I appreciate these kinds of insightful videos so much.

[@johnfitzgerald7618]

I was in elementary school in Canada in the 1950s. We spent hours parsing sentences by diagramming them. A great workout for the ruler and the coloured pencils. I have no idea whether it helped us learn English.

[@JRBWare1942]

Assuming you're an Anglophone, you already knew English before you ever started school. Learning English grammar would only help you analyze consciously what you already knew unconsciously.

[@johnfitzgerald7618]

@JRBWare1942 I am unaware of any research that demonstrated the utility of the methods used to teach English in the 1950s. I doubt that adequate records were even kept. We were constantly taking McCall-Crabbe reading tests, but I doubt their results were ever correlated with success at parsing. Then they could well have been correlated negatively. [two edits]

[@Cerg1998]

I can confidently say that when I worked in a school 5 years ago diagraming sentences was a thing, not only in elementary school either. I myself am 26 and I had diagraming tasks as part of certain excercises in my native language textbooks up until the very last classes in highschool. It was also present in the compulsory native language course in Uni.

[@JRBWare1942]

I have a couple questions for you. First, are you a native English speaker? Second, do you remember when you started using the term "Uni"? I learned this term as part of the German language about 45 years ago. I've only been hearing people use it in English in the last five years or so, and only in KZbin videos. I've never heard any English speaker say it in real life.

[@Cerg1998]

@JRBWare1942 1. No 2. I first found it in my textbook around 2016 in my freshman year. The textbook was an edited ~2008 reprint of something first published at least pre 1991, as an older copy of the audio tracks I had with it referred to several countries and cities that were renamed by December of that year. It sounded really weird, so I delved deep into KZbin, and found one person who happened to be A. a native speaker B. only slightly older than me and C. Spoke with the same accent that I was trained to use. She used "Uni" several times throughout her videos, so I concluded that it was okay to use without looking or sounding weird in case posh British is what you're going for. The videos were also a few years old. 3. My L3 is German, so it might affect my choice of words, if only subconsciously.

[@maxf3336]

4:00 You should definitely make a video comparing adult learners to child learners. I’d be interested to see what the science says on which aspects of language learning each group excels at.

[@thorthewolf8801]

I dont see why there would be any inherit difference other than the fact that adults simply dont have that much time on their hands.

[@maxf3336]

@ That’s the preconception I have but at the timestamp I linked in the video he mentioned there was no evidence that avoiding grammar study worked for “adult learners” (implying the situation was different for child learners). He’s definitely looked at crazier hypotheses (learning languages while sleeping) that have had some surprising conclusions, so this seems like something he could at least try to tackle.

[@CaroAbebe]

What makes a language interesting to me is precisely how it works. In my most recent language I’ve been following your idea of reading up on the grammar first. I may not understand everything yet, but it does give me a framework and helps me recognise peculiarities I might have taken ages to even notice, or which I wouldn’t have been able to figure out for a long time, if at all.

[@Twisted_Logic]

I'm in my early 30's and definitely diagrammed sentences. It was actually an exercise I really enjoyed

[@Lorch95]

I have found that tying grammar learning to immersion works very well for me. In addition to passively consuming things in my target language I always choose one piece of media that I go through sentence by sentence and look up grammar until i understand every sentence. I then rewatch it many times to reinforce what i have learned.

[@RonaldBradycptgmpy]

Another good video is always. I noticed throughout the video you use the phrase " and definitely not for adults" I was wondering, in terms of the scholarship what the key differences are. My thinking is usually that it's a combination of lack of dedicated time compared to the enormous amounts of time children spend in a language, fear of making mistakes, and a lack of patient language partners in the same way that children have them. But my personal thinking is that it doesn't have much to do with an inherent quality of being an adult in and of itself, but because I don't have access to journals, I usually just have to survive on abstracts. So I've been curious, maybe a video idea or if there is already a video, if someone could drop one in the comments for me I would appreciate it. I, similarly to you, tend to look at an overview of the grammar and then learn mostly in context, referring back to that grammar. But the traditional grammar heavy first approach is something I generally avoid because my brain will hate me LOL. Yes, I did diagram sentences in school, I am in my early 40s and it definitely helped once I realized what we were doing, but at the time it felt like a waste of my time

[@betsyw4943]

There's a "critical window" for language learning, through about age 12. The young brain tends to be extremely adept at picking up language, even from very little input. Adult brains learn language less quickly/automatically. I learned this stuff 20 years ago in a cognitive science class, so I'd be interested to learn about updated findings!

[@JRBWare1942]

@@betsyw4943 I agree with what you say, but I was taught that the critical window didn't close until about age 16.

[@thorthewolf8801]

​@@betsyw4943I dont see why neuroplasticity being lower in adults would affect one manner of learning in a harsher way than another.

[@jan_kisan]

i love learning grammar of all the languages i encounter - but predominantly through input. yes, there's conscious effort here, but i still like to apply it to some interesting stuff i'm reading or listening to. mostly it's just noticing ways in which things work together and connecting them to the particular contexts and messages these ways were used for.

[@brianpeterson7028]

"I don't really plan on studying, because Spanish is one of those languages you can just learn on the street 🤡" *Proceeds to repeat basic key phrases and swear words all throughout the beaches and airports of Mexico with no self awareness*

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

To answer that question another question: Are there people out there that are illiterate, either in both their native language and the target language, or only in the target language (different writing systems) that, therefore, didn't study grammar (they could maybe by watching videos but that's not the case) that can speak fluently with close to native or even near-native level syntax, at least for speaking purposes? Yeas, there are. You go to Thailand and you find an illiterate migrant worker, working in construction, that came from Myanmar, whose native language is Burmese, living in Thailand for about, let's say, 5 years, that can speak almost perfect Thai, plus Hindi, Nepalese, and can get his way around with Vietnamese and English. So the answer is: You DON'T NEED to study grammar. You can, but you don't need to. I never bothered with grammar in English. I never had and English teacher in my whole life! I never had any language teacher, for that matter. First because I couldn't pay for one. and then because I learned I didn't need one. Linguistics sometimes looks like mainstream, orthodox liberal Economics these days. It refuses to look at the REALITY as a true s science should do. What the observed phenomena tells us?

[@brianpeterson7028]

@JohnnyLynnLee I see what you mean about not needing to pay for a teacher, but that's not what I was referring to. It's pretty easy to find free grammar content on the internet where someone in your first language can explain concepts about your target language. Fully and exclusively immersing yourself right away is a terrible idea, and I'm sure you at least read about English grammar in your native language at various points

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@brianpeterson7028 I AM the guy he's referring to in this video. He got so mad he made a video just for me. I'm flattered. And you do need to search for grammar explanations, occasionally, but ONLY when you FIND it being used (I can explain it in details). I've said it here thousands of time. But this guy here is PAID to attack the Comprehensible Input approach. Problem is he thinks he's he only linguist in the world but I'm planning on making a video with a Vietnamese and a Japanese linguists of mine to make a video response exposing how he uses fallacies in his videos. They have to find time. One of the things we are planning t do is thy going around Southeast Asia interviewing illiterate migrant workers that are polyglots. Because his arguments will only fly with a North American or European audience. In most parts of the world you have people speaking MANY languages (Only Indonesia has 172 languages, everybody speaks at least 3 or 4) many learned as adults, when, for instance, they move to other parts of the country, or to a neighboring country, for work. But HIS GUY here, act as if this is something "weird" do say, because it LOOKS weird for most people in the West. Not true fr the most part of the planet Earth. Plus he doesn't understand AT ALL what Comprehensible Input is. He says he was on "our team" because he used ROSETTA STONE of all thing. You can't find ONE ingle proponent of Input that won't tell you that Rosetta Stone is just garbage! Pimsleur and even POD 101 are way better than freaking Tosetta Stone if you are gonna sue anything. Bu he said he was a proponent f comprehensible Input citing something that loses only t Duolingo as the most hated.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@brianpeterson7028 If you wanna learn Japanese for instance, which I teach, two of the ANKI decks I'd suggest are for grammar! A little explanation, that you shouldn't obsess about, an example sentence. Many cards for the same points with different example sentences. One has a little over 5,000 cards, other over 6,000. Yeah, sure! You treat it like vocabulary. The point is not focusing on understanding the explanation. That's the key here! The point is understanding THE SENTENCE. and the explanation will help. But you are trying to understand the JAPANESE SENTENCE. That's why it's called COMPREHENSIBLE Input Hypothesis and not only "Input Hypothesis". You have to make the language COMPREHENSIBLE. What he does in this channel is just straw man fallacy all along.

[@JohnnyLynnLee]

@@brianpeterson7028 Of course if you do ONY immersion it's inefficient. But Krashen stresses over and over again that input should be both comprehensible and compelling. Not only "input".

[@MiltonJava]

going back and forth is helpful. You learn some grammar points then do a lot of reading, writing, listening, speaking and then you start to notice the grammar, then repeat, etc.

[@danielbedoni4844]

Of course it does, once it's the study of grammar which refines your language knowledge!

[@aSnailCyclopsNamedSteve]

Part 1 third time There is a clear distinction between grammar taught to natives and that taught to L2 students. The former is correcting the grammar learned by ear as a child. That is where commas come in. It is very intense and taught one way. For L2 students, the grammar taught is more basic and of a different nature. For many courses, it comprises the bulk of the instruction, e.g., 10-20 words plus the third declension. There is a third, unmentioned, method is for linguists and has all the rules, more than even the natives learn. I have such a book for Lithuanian. And then there is the other extreme, no grammar.

[@lilcrowlet1802]

before I see the video: I suspect that it is kind of true, vocab is more important in some ways, and immersion is perfect for improving vocab. But without even a little bit of grammar, none of the vocab you learn is going the make sense.

[@10ahm01]

You do learn some grammar from immersion alone though, but it might not be enough.

[@scottpage6674]

I learned to diagram sentences in the seventh grade, from a very eccentric teacher. That was back in the Johnson administration, and even then it was considered old school. I got the hang of it, but I don't remember much now. It never proved very useful, and it was no use helping me learn all the foreign languages I can speak (both of them). Good video.

[@Katy-sh3ru]

My son learnt to read at age 6 with no phonics instruction. He now has a reading ability a few years ahead of his age. I know many other home ed kids that also 'spontaneously' learnt to read.

[@littlered6340]

Early thirties (diagramed sentences) I really enjoyed learning English and I remember all of the studying I did as a child, so I do actually believe I was 'guided' as a kid and didn't just pick up the language. I enjoyed learning English because I enjoyed reading. Now that I'm learning Japanese, I am reading as my primary form of immersion.

[@thorthewolf8801]

"Not supported for adult learners" I have made this point in your other video, but I have to make it again. You said that since neuroplasticity is lower in adults than kids, that means they cant learn the same way. But if thats true, that should affect all manners of learning. My understanding of neuroplasticity is the brains ability to be plastic, to be molded, to change, that is to say, to take on new information. I dont see why this would affect certain learning manners differently.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

The production of new neurons is slower, but you are right, the neuroplasticity itself isn't affected that much. The biggest issue that adults actually have is time,or lack thereof.

[@thorthewolf8801]

​@@marikothecheetah9342Yes, but the question is how much do adults benefit from already understanding concepts from the world? You dont have to teach me not to put my hand in the electrical socket, or that sugar is sweet, which for a baby or kid you have to teach so to speak. Ultimately, I dont know the answer, but it would definitely be incorrect to say adults cant learn the same way as kids.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

@thorthewolf8801 sure they do! It's not like I have learned things as an adult. Like, ever. 😑

[@AarreLisakki-s5e]

@@marikothecheetah9342 most neuroplasticity afaik isn't about producing actual new neurons, but about adapting synaptic connections and their strengths. I think there was even a kerfuffle about whether its even happening in humans (rather than mice) outside of hippocampus or something like that; regardless, it should be a minor aspect of our ability to learn. But I do think our learning rate does go down with age. Hell, you'll slowly anneal the learning rate over time even in an artificial learning machine, why wouldn't have nature found the same advantageous as well? Esp. in an animal that used to have more static living conditions in their adulthood during its evolution, change not having been as significant over the course of a (typically shortened) single lifetime as perhaps in our recent past or present? In static-ish conditions you mostly want to finetune and master the kinds of skills you started acquiring earlier, rather than radically redecorate your mind's content, upsetting the precision you already found.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

@@AarreLisakki-s5e "most neuroplasticity afaik isn't about producing actual new neurons," - it's about replacing for example damaged neurons and throwing over the knowledge (in a very simplistic terms) to other neurons, including the new ones. Neuroplasticity means that brain will use new neurons with no issue, especially when brain exercises and is used to accomodate the new neurons that are produced daily. "But I do think our learning rate does go down with age." not by leaps and bounds, as it is believed. When was the last time when you saw an adult learning something new regularly? We take neuroplasticity in kids for granted but kids spend a lot of time acuqiring new knowledge and mentally stimulating brain. in adulthood people work, go home, watch TV, go to sleep and barely get any mental stimulation, no wonder their congitive abilities decline. That doesn't mean neuroplasticity decreases significantly, far from it, it's just people do not exercise their brain and do not stimulate the brain to be more flexible. Atrophy happens to brain as well, as any other muscle.

[@arc-sd8sk]

i took spanish in high school and college, and had grammar rules drilled into me for like 5-6 years, but I gave up learning the language after I graduated when I came back to it 10 years later to try to actually get conversational, knowing all those grammar rules really helped despite forgetting most of the vocab

[@ericsmith5919]

When someone says "People don't study their first language!" what I hear is "I have completely forgotten what I did in school between the ages of 5 and 18." (Also, the song "Why Can't the English?" from _My Fair Lady_ starts playing in my head.)

[@constantwin]

As the sort of language student who would've been in advanced placement classes if my school offered them, no, we really didn't cover much. We pulled out the grammar books a single digit number of times throughout my schooling. The only grammar concept we spent multiple classes on was pluralization and apostrophe usage, something many of them failed to grasp despite the additional attention. Happy that you got to go to a good school though.

[@sauerkrautlanguage]

i mean language learning predates schools by a couple thousand years so...

[@faithfuljohn]

It is kinda ridiculous... as if the fact that babies to children spending all day every day doing nothing but just learning their language (i.e. aborbing the language) isn't "learning". Actively listening IS learning. Nevermind the fact that adult are constantly correcting children language as they speak (i.e. teaching). If an adult spent all day every day for 2-3 years just learning a language, trying to talk to people, people correcting their language, there is no reason they also wouldn't be very fluent. Most of these 'critics' seem to think that just because children don't pick up a textbook that they're not actively learning. But most adult don't have time to do nothing but learn a language. So forgive me if I have a family and obligations and instead of spending months "absorbing" a language, someone can just tell me what the rule is supposed to be... and I'll learn it that way.

[@JRBWare1942]

@@faithfuljohn Some toddlers have adults who correct their grammar mistakes--and others don't. Both groups end up speaking their language correctly.

[@JRBWare1942]

@@sauerkrautlanguage Yes. Also, how many children embark upon their school careers by being mute and learning to speak only after they've started school?

[@RedHeadWolf117]

I remember learning about sentence structures in like 2nd or 3rd grade. I'm 32, from WA, USA. However, once I started really learning another language as an adult (not counting my highschool Spanish classes) I realized how little I really subjectively understood about grammar in my own native language. I'm thankful that I love patterns, it helps a lot.

[@bobboberson8297]

figuring out grammar is a weird thing because on one hand, I probably never would have figured out how は and が work without reading up on japanese grammar, but on the other hand textbooks and grammar guides barely helped me understand this grammar point and it was only countless hours of exposure to the language that got me to actually understand it. conversely there's grammar points I never looked up until one day a grammar point I couldn't understand was suddenly everywhere, and then once I did the look up the grammar points clicked pretty easily. immersing in the language -> looking up stuff you notice you don't understand -> repeat seems like by far the best way to learn a language.

[@marikothecheetah9342]

Yeah, I am sure you are an excellent user of what even Japanese find difficult to learn, by pure exposure to it. :/

[@bobboberson8297]

@@marikothecheetah9342 i literally claimed neither of those things, you're just making up reasons to be mad

[@marikothecheetah9342]

@@bobboberson8297 oh, and you are genius who knows how I feel. Man, not only better than a native, now even predicting somebody's mood online. Wrongly, but still.

[@bobboberson8297]

@@marikothecheetah9342 bait used to be believable

[@marikothecheetah9342]

@@bobboberson8297 if that helps you think what you want. I couldn't be bothered less.

[@jamiepianist]

I diagrammed sentences from 6th-8th grade and I am 18 turning 19. I think that practice helped me a lot to understand English grammar

[@renaissanceman419]

The last one was Latin

[@auldrick]

I'm 71. Yes, I diagrammed sentences. In 6th grade we learned grammar from a scholastic system (and btw, before that we learned phonics). I absolutely loved it, because it just made so much sense to me. It was also valuable background when I was learning Spanish and Latin grammar in high school.

[@alemannenmartini]

I am from Germany, and I diagrammed sentences in elementary school.

[@EvenRoyalsNeedToUrinate]

I'm also from Germany. Yes, they do things like that quite excessively in school and half the students even understand what they're doing. But ten years later..? What's the percentage of people able to do it :D

[@fintonmainz7845]

Part of my job in Germany was to help German scientists writing Scientific papers in English. They were obsessed with following certain stylistic rules which had been drummed into them in school. Not repeating a word, for example. They would write Hamburg. Then "The Hanseatic city" next "The north German metropolis" and so on. This was for densely worded scientific papers where it was vital to be clear what every word meant even if it meant repetitions. Then if they had to give a talk in English: they were terrified of the English "TH" sound. Instead of saying "ze" (which is more natural for German speakers) they would pause for about 4 seconds before SHOUTING THhhhhe. Teachers and their obsession with rules have a lot to answer for.

[@Nancy-sj7yg]

In seventh grade (1960s, California) we learned to diagram sentences. It was fun! I am currently at about a B2/C1 level in German, also reached a similar level in Italian. I do a lot of reading in my target languages, and have often stared at sentences where I understood all the words, but still had no idea of the meaning - that was because of grammar. Also, I started my German adventure with classes, and a lot of the grammar was taught by playing games. We learned adjective endings by playing a "Go-Fish" type of card game. Another grammar rule was taught with a game similar to "Chutes-and-Ladders." Grammar does not have to be boring!

[@aafrophonee]

"Maybe Joneses shouldn't make Kool-Aid jokes" 😮😂😂

[@AlexandreLuiz-ph8ns]

"Joneses"??

[@elizabethmartinez4086]

@@AlexandreLuiz-ph8nspeople with the same surname as mass murdering cult leader Jim Jones, who got his followers to drink cianide-laced coolaid.

[@azotic1]

I was diagramming sentences in seventh grade, which was in 1982. While I was enough of an outlier in my native language of English to have had a perfect verbal SAT score at age fourteen (which my school's vice-principal gently responded to by saying he hoped it would not be the most impressive thing I ever did), I recall, around that time, explicitly learning certain grammar features because I was taught them in school. A Latin teacher taught me about the proper use of "who" and "whom" in relation to Latin's cases, for example. Without the language context provided by a massive volume of reading, however, that lesson probably could have never stuck. I am now learning a second language, Icelandic, in my 50s, and that's given me a healthy dose of linguistic humility, since I speak at about the level of a seven-year-old. I can say certainly that both explicit grammar instruction and consuming content have made my speaking and writing more correct, though.

[@jmage322]

Does grammar nazi count?

[@MaryPearce-m2s]

Of course

[@sjm42]

Thank you for a very balanced discussion, again. I am actually really enjoying the bird app's subjunctive teaching in Italian, but I think that's in part because I recognise that it that is what it's doing, which I wouldn't have known without being familiar with at least rudimentary grammar terminology. Although the 'paraphrastics' put me in mind of Blackadder more than anything else. I was born before humans reached the Moon, and in my primary and secondary education here in Aotearoa I never once saw a single sentence diagram. I literally had no idea what sentence diagramming was until I went online around 2K and came across USns who seemed to do nothing but in THEIR English classes at school.

[@ponytail336]

It's like the only thing that matters, christ. Yes, exposure is absolutely necessary. Picking up Japanese, I first started with trying to construct a sentence (as it's not straightforward in Japanese from an English perspective), then talked to the green bird for a bit, and went back and forth with a textbook that talks about the grammar, and occasionally read manga. One source would sharped the other, reading the manga gave me grammar to look up, reading the book gave me new sentences to understand and read. Even revisiting very fundamental chapters latter helped me understand why so many sentences ended with なの even though I already understood the explanatory の, because sometimes you just ignore certain details because you haven't needed to think about them on an output standpoint and you just let things slide because you still understand what's being said. It's a wallbouncing of both grammar understanding and exposure to climb in a language.

[@josiahfillar6491]

I diagrammed sentences and I'm 42. Helped a ton when I started learning German in community college, the other students were pretty lost with the nominative, accusative, etc

[@be1tube]

This is why I hate Duolingo's removal of their grammar lessons. They used to have nice text at the beginning of each lesson explaining the grammar points being covered. Now it's just a list of example sentences demonstrating the point - nearly useless.

[@chickpease]

It's not useless -- gee, look at the examples, derive the points yourself? You absolutely can use inductive reasoning here.

[@be1tube]

@chickpease I tried that. Then I checked my guesses by asking an AI model. My guesses were frequently wrong. Maybe they are useful to some people, but not to people with brains like mine.

[@MrSleepyhead32]

​@chickpease Learning a language's grammar that is very different and sometimes languages similar to English are not easily understood just by getting it from Duolingo. Dutch is a language that has a lot of similarities and common ancestor to English, but word order can be quite different. Example: Als het avond is, wil ik met mijn gezin eten. Literal: When it evening is, want I with my family to eat. Example: Ik leer Nederlands zodat ik in maart met de Nederlanders kan praten. Literal: I learn Dutch so that I in March with the Dutch can talk. Duolingo's "grammar" in a couple of examples is not going to teach someone why the word order is the way it is. My sentences were quite simple. Dutch's Duolingo takes awhile to get to these word orders that significantly differ from English. Many of the simple sentences in Dutch have identical word order to English. But anything with many elements, subordinate clauses, separate verbs, etc. will be much different compared to English.

[@ms.fruitbat8883]

I'm 46 - my freshman English teacher made us diagram sentences. I remember her assigning sentences to diagram over freaking Christmas break. You just brought that memory back, arg! I hated diagramming sentences and never felt it helped me much with anything. Also, input is great - it helps, but there's a point at the beginning where it's going to be very difficult to even get enough context for what you're reading/hearing without some basic knowledge.

[@bubblybull2463]

Could it be that learning languages is like learning to play an instrument? Some people just need to practice again and again and some will need to know all the rules to be able to master it 🤷🏻‍♂️ Comes down to 1) your hearing and immitation habilities and 2) how mathematical VS artistic your mind is. Of course, everybody needs a bit (or a lot) of both ways, in the end, to reach fluency. All roads lead to Rome 🙌

[@debrucey]

As a music teacher I can tell you that the parallels are numerous

[@languagejones]

I like this. And of course, I need to know the scale, and visualize the whole pattern on an instrument to be able to sing it.

[@amy50711]

Thank goodness for common sense at last! Just as multiplication is a quick way to add, grammar gives you the skeleton of the language and means you can learn the contextual examples more quickly and effectively. For an adult with limited time in their life, grammar makes learning a new language so much easier. At 75, I really appreciate all the different ways to experience a language compared to when I learned my first foreign language at the age of 11. I'm now on my 6th foreign language and love using them when travelling abroad and interacting with native speakers wherever I encounter them. Ann 🎉🎉🎉