Do NOT Study Grammar

That distracts the learner from the main goal, which is to get

lots of exposure to the language.

Steve Kaufmann here and today I want to talk about grammar,

how important is grammar?

And I'm going to talk about grammar in the context of all of the details of

languages that we learned in school.

How effective is it to teach these details if the ultimate goal is

to become fluent in a language?

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By the way, you'll notice that I have my LingQ t-shirt on.

I just happened to find that in the closet when I was getting dressed this morning.

Um, at any rate, so, you know, details, one of the things that struck me in

Manfred Spitzer's book, and I often refer to it, is the, when he explains that the

brain, our brains and all the brains, the process of learning is the same.

There are no people with brains that learn better this way or that way,

our brains learn the same, the same way we have our likes and dislikes.

But the process of learning is the same and the brains are better...

our brains are better at forming patterns, recognizing patterns and

not so good at retaining detail.

So that, uh, the details that we learn that we keep somewhere in our

short-term memory, we lose them.

But over time, the brain starts to recognize that pattern.

And that's very much in my view, the process

by which we learn languages.

So, you know, if you sort of spell out like grammar, grammar

basically describes usage.

So since languages evolve over time, sounds in languages evolve over time, uh,

you know, usage patterns evolve over time.

So the grammar which describes the usage will evolve over time.

So how useful is it to attempt to teach people how the language, what the rules

of usage are before the learner has had enough experience with the language?

I think it's not that useful.

And, at least in our school system in Canada, where they teach French,

they teach grammar, they teach grammar because it's something they

can easily test the learners on.

And some learners got eight out of 10 and some got six out of 10.

So learner A with eight out of 10 is better than learner B with six out of 10,

but that doesn't necessarily mean that at the end of the day learner A is going