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Steps to take to ensure you speak quickly AND learn grammar well

| 26 comments | Category: learning languages

I’ve written about learning grammar in great detail before, but it’s worth mentioning again. This time I’ll attempt to give a concise summary of the steps I take in learning a language (skipping a lot of details obviously).

Grammar: from the start, in the middle or never?

The way I learn grammar has been very effective for me and something I’d highly recommend to people frustrated with all those damn tables clogging up their language learning studies, but who also have a technical mindset and need some structure to their language in the long term.

Some people can avoid grammar altogether, and that’s fine and a part of many approaches, especially those who claim to allow you to learn “as babies do”. Sounds great, but I genuinely feel that as adults we have a major advantage in that we can think logically about a language, and understanding grammar can help us progress quicker than trying to intuitively pick up the language passively. Incorporating a grammar rule that way will take a very long time, and require a huge amount of exposures.

Nothing wrong with taking your time, but I prefer (and require) speed and efficiency.

The other extreme and more academic solution of starting by intensively studying grammar is also a huge mistake in my view if your focus is to speak as soon as possible. This makes little sense if you aren’t studying for a grammar exam.

Without context and words, grammar has nothing to latch on to and all it may ever be is a list of tedious rules in your mind.

Getting forced to learn too much German grammar in school put me off the language entirely (DER/DIE/DAS tables are all that comes to mind; I found it all so tedious and cared so little that I ended up getting a C in my final exam which in retrospect was laughably easy) until I tried again with a much better approach almost 12 years later.

A middle approach to grammar

This is what I suggest instead of starting with intensive grammar study or avoiding it altogether:

  1. Learn as many phrases from a travel phrase book as you can, and learn as many words as you can (the pre-made decks for Anki used in SRS are currently my favourite for getting good starting vocab).
  2. Find natives immediately, even as shortly as a few hours or days after starting to learn (online through language learning sites, or set up in-person meetings) and use these phrases, and replace words occasionally. Try to invent new sentences and forget about being perfect. As they reply, try to understand individual words rather than the whole sentence, and extrapolate what they mean based on that. Ask them to repeat to be sure.
  3. In talking to people, the language will have context in your mind. You will also notice major issues you are having and can look those specifically up in a grammar book if you wish. Trust me, when you are actively looking for something specific it will stick in your mind! However, these are almost always overshadowed by lack of vocabulary; the real major issue when starting off and what you would learn between each spoken session, based on what you want to say. Generic courses don’t take your personal interests into account; learn what you generally talk about. Only learn what you need to learn. Go back and speak with mistakes. You know you are making mistakes, and the other person knows you are a learner. It turns out the world won’t end.
  4. After a few weeks of doing this intensively you will have a good basic familiarity and feel for the language. You’ll have learned enough words to express many things, but be well aware of how much you are “butchering” the language, from the many corrections you’ll have gotten and the difference in how natives speak to you. Laugh it off, since nobody really cares that much about your mistakes except you. However, with a bit of flow and now that you are knee-deep in the language, it’s time to intensively study that grammar! Get a good grammar book from your library/bookshop or search for explanations online and study them sparsely at first to get an OK overview of everything, and then go back to speak. Get some more practice and then come back and study the grammar in more detail and do exercises. Go back again and speak, now doing it so much better than before! Combine studying and speaking and you will be on your way to fluency quicker than ever.

That’s it.

By learning grammar after you have had a start speaking the language, it actually becomes interesting. The faceless tables and lists of irregular verbs become explanations of why your friend that you have been conversing with phrased things a certain way.

Grammar can be a waste of time when starting (unless you really do like to take your sweet time); it’s only purpose is to tidy up your mistakes so you speak properly; it does little to help in essential basic communication in many cases.

Perfectionism is what a grammar-focused approach is obsessed with. This is not useful when you have real goals with it; getting your point across is key. Conjugation, gender agreement and correct word order be damned. People will understand you as you speak initially, and be patient to help you. Be active in using what you’ve learned, while also being passive in reading and listening to native material.

As you read the rules now with some actual experience in living through the language in real conversations, lightbulbs are constantly lighting in your head as you study grammar and it all starts to make sense. Grammar actually becomes enjoyable.

Mistakes will only be burned into slow learners with no intent

Some argue that by speaking with mistakes from the start you will “fossilize” those mistakes into your head forever. This could happen if you learn slowly over many years, as the mistakes simply become a part of you.

That’s why slow approaches really require that you a) learn grammar from the start or b) not learn grammar, learn passively and never ever speak until your spider sense tingles in 16 years to tell you that you are finally “ready”. Apparently you’ll “know when it comes”.

But if you’ve been doing it for just a few weeks you can adjust how you speak. You are still moulding your language; it has not solidified into a malformed pot just yet!

The emotional impact of seeing why and how you have been speaking wrong burns it into your mind more powerfully than the few couple of times you may have used it incorrectly ever could. Perhaps you believe that you can’t teach an old dog new tricks, but you aren’t an old dog. Even if you are approaching 100 years old you can still look at learning a language with fresh eyes.

I’ve been using this approach in learning my languages, more recently with Dutch. After one month of speaking and studying vocabulary, over the last weekend I finally studied grammar. It was an incredible experience!

Everyone knows how much I hate studying and feel how worthless it can be when it’s your entire focus, but when used in the right context it feels like you are finally finding clues in a detective novel that you are already deeply involved in. As I read a rule, instead of looking at my watch while bored, I am saying to myself “So that’s why they say it like that!! Cool!”

Being given those clues right from the start would spoil the story. Avoiding them entirely will mean that parts of the story just won’t fit and make sense. Get into it the language learning story and then when the time is right, solve the mystery :)

As always, I’m curious to read your thoughts on this! Let us know in the comments below.

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  • Anonymous

    After two months of studying only German vocabulary (on lingQ), I now find studying grammar enjoyable. I can see its practical utility (Now that’s why they use this and not that). It sure beats the heck out of studying grammar without very well knowing what you’re going to use it for.

    Great advice!

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      After a few weeks in Berlin, I put my head in a detailed grammar book and all the tedious tables and lists of past participles that had bored me to death before were actually something cool then. Something that would help me express myself better with my friends. I’m very glad I had gotten some practice before looking at it that time :)

  • http://LifeByExperimentation.com Zane the Experimenter

    I think opponents of the “try and see” method claim that you are “solidifying” mistakes because they don’t understand the mental approach. I don’t start a new language ignorant of the fact that there are genders, I simply choose not to let this stop me from using a new word with the awareness that I might be saying it wrong. The same goes for pronunciation: try to use a new word which you have only read and you might say it “wrong.” In fact, you really simply _discovered_ a way _not_ to say the word (just like Mr. Franklin’s famous quote about light bulbs). It is far worse to keep seeing it written on paper, too afraid to try it, and end up mentally rehearsing it incorrectly.

    Related anecdote: a few days ago I tried to say “fac” in French. Apparently it sounded more like “the f-bomb.” Whoops.

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      Great point! Knowing that you are saying it wrong, but saying it that way anyway for now is very different to thinking that you may be right and sticking with it.

  • http://howtolearnrussian.wordpress.com/ JamesAE

    I comment and write about grammar quite a bit on my blog. I personally enjoy grammar and don’t see why people put off learning it. There is no need to remember everything. The majority of the rules can be simplified and still allow you to use them correctly. When you put your mind to it, grammar is very easy to get the hang of.

    I also don’t understand the need to study grammar years and years into learning. To be properly understood, you are going to have to learn it at some point in time, so why not now?

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      It depends on how it’s presented to you. As I said, I was put off grammar from the start by being given nothing but tedious tables for German. This is why I feel for people who aren’t generally passionate about learning languages, but still want/need to speak one, putting off grammar a *tiny* bit would actually make it more interesting. ;)

  • http://twitter.com/linguamiranda Miranda (杨艺言)

    Great post! After studying Mandarin Chinese for a few months and slowly edging into conversations with native speakers here in my state, I’m ready to start learning more of the grammar. My experiences with Romance languages has made it tricky at first, as I tend to revert to those grammar rules (which do not generally apply to Chinese). Your blog has helped push me to just get out there and speak, which, ironically, since I am an English and ESOL teacher, is something I tend to shy away from out of fear. Thanks for writing and sharing what you’ve learned!

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      Glad to hear it! Keep up the good work with Chinese :)

  • http://howlearnspanish.com/ Andrew

    I agree completely with your approach and this is roughly what I’ve also advocated, that you probably do need to learn some basic grammar but it should really be based on what you’ve found that you need based on actual experience trying to speak to people, e.g. you wanted to say “I was walking” and you can say “I walk”, “I am walking”, “I walked”, but you don’t know how to say “I was walking” and so now you know that you need to go look up that specific bit of grammar. That’s the way to do it.

    If I’m not mistaken…you didn’t used to advocate grammar and SRS this much, did you? Maybe I’m wrong but I seem to recall that you used to tell people to generally avoid grammar books altogether and “just speak”. If so, that’s great that you’re willing to modify your advice as you go along and learn what works and what doesn’t, and if not then apparently I’m confused, haha.

    Cheers,
    Andrew

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      I never discouraged use of SRS or studying grammar, but I *always* had more or less this approach outlined in this post (starting from my Spanish experience) in terms of grammar. I only discovered SRS a year ago though. I varied the approach somewhat and studied just grammar with Hungarian for the first 2 weeks and that was a mistake.

      Otherwise I have never very specifically outlined step by step how I learn a language outside of the Language Hacking Guide, so posts like this may indeed seem like news to some people. More news to come of course!

      Most of my posts have focused on encouraging people to just speak, because it seems like almost nobody else will! There are armies of people ready to tell you to learn grammar ;)

  • Anonymous

    Benny,
    Where’s the music? Another fun way to understand grammar is to look for the grammatical patterns in lyrical music in your target language with which you’re already familiar. That’s how I got the imperfect subjunctive to make sense to me in Spanish. I’d heard the song “Bésame Mucho” many times, but when the teacher explained that we had to use the imperfect subjunctive after the “como si” (as though) phrase, I recalled the verse, “Bésame mucho como si fuera esta noche la ultima vez” (Kiss me tonight as though tonight were the last” and the grammar explanation stuck. Combining grammar lessons with pleasant songs is highly effective because as I’ve said many times, music activates more parts of the brain the language. Music sticks. Grammar tables don’t. Language is music!

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      I’d encourage people to use music as much as possible, but to be honest it isn’t a huge aspect of my language learning. Rather than listen to a lot of local music, when the time comes I will indeed learn the music, but to sing it myself ;)

      I went to a Dutch sing-along a few weeks ago and rather than use it as an opportunity to learn vocabulary or grammar I was listening to the phonetics of the language based on the lyrics we were provided to help myself pronounce it better. And as discussed in other posts I try to be active in going to karaokes or even record a silly music video on Youtube in the language.

      But it’s true that there is a greater emotional impact in hearing things like the subjunctive etc. in songs you appreciate.

  • Dan_frost1

    Just a quick question when you are learning all the phrases, grammar etc do you write the information down? or do you just try and remember as much as possible without writing very much at all.

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      I don’t write down phrases. I do write down very particular grammar points that stand out for me as unique and worth reviewing. However, the very fact of simply writing them down solidifies them for me and I generally don’t review my notes much. In general I’m not a fan of writing, but I tend to have grammar notes for each language.

  • http://profiles.google.com/parnelandr Andrew Parnell

    Hey Benny,

    First time commenter long time reader… This is totally what I needed. Will give me a bit of direction in my Spanish! Much appreciated! I hope the multi-lingual chat with the Dutch students goes well!

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      Glad to have helped Andrew! Do make sure to leave more comments in future :) I’ll be sure to share on twitter/Facebook how the chat goes!

      Best of luck!

  • http://www.facebook.com/profile.php?id=100001897225670 Jack Chakerian

    Thats genius!!!! Phrases, people…..then grammar.
    I’m going to buy a phrasebook right now.

    • http://www.fluentin3months.com/ Benny the Irish polyglot

      Lonely planet are my favourite; they have the widest range of phrases, and the grammar review at the back is concise enough to flick through and get a good gist to keep you going until you get a more in-depth one later.

  • Eri

    I guess my old French teacher did it right then. Sure, we had lists of how to change a verb depending as who you were talking about or something like that (I don’t remember what exactly is was… I never paid much attention to the grammar haha…), but we never had those things on tests. And she never was randomly ‘how do you change this verb blah blah blah’, she would just talk to us in French as much as she could and try to get us to talk back and tell stories. We had quizzes on those things though… But on the tests is was pretty much just ‘translate this sentence, answer this question in French.’ We didn’t usually worry too much about grammar rules.
    So seeing grammar rules in Japanese has been confusing. However, the one they explain it in Japanese in Mangaland is much easier to understand because it’s for someone my age who doesn’t know what they’re doing haha… Except I didn’t know what things like ‘passive’ or ‘causative’ even meant. I don’t remember learning those things in school! I mean, one of my LA teachers mentioned ‘passive’ before, but never explained what it was… So I had to figure it out on my own. ‘Causative’ was pretty easy to figure out, but ‘passive’ I was like “WTH is this!” This is why you shouldn’t try learning grammar right off the bat in my experience. It’s just confusing. After learning a little bit and reading and see sentences, passive is finally starting to make sense. But I only read grammar explanations once now, I don’t try to remember it. And yet, I do end up remembering things that made sense to me most of the time.

    Wow, this got way longer than planned…

  • Paris

    Great article, not only about language learning, but about learning in general.

    I especially liked the part about intent and mass exposure to what you want to learn.

    Keep it up

  • http://yetanotherlanguage.blogspot.com/ Crno Srce

    Great summary of your “boot-strapping” techniques to get learners with zero knowledge started :-)

  • Anonymous

    I like the idea of a middle approach. I certainly agree with it. Much more of a discovery based learning approach and it seems that things stick so much better when we are discovering what we need at that moment rather than just getting it from a contextless and need-less textbook in which chapter 3 follows chapter 4.

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  • lina

    Thank u very much for ur perfect tips. my least grade in report cards was german but by these tips they will increase

  • Fiza the beginner

    hello sir i’m pefi from Indonesia and i have a problem on learning English Grammar, it seems pretty hard for me to understand the rules exactly especially on tenses. Sometimes, it’s really hard for me to put some tenses in the proper place when my English teacher gives me the English tenses quiz with the blank space on it and she asks me to fill the blank with the correct tenses. Could you help me to face this problem?
    Thank you

  • bob

    cool