![]() ![]() Can you really replicate that for two or three years? Remember too how motivated they are to be able to understand the world around them better and express their essential needs. ![]() Remember just how much exposure to their first language that children need in order to pick it up “naturally”. After all, many adult learners have already been put off explicit grammar rules from unpleasant experiences trying to learn foreign languages as schoolkids.īefore we say that learning German grammar doesn’t matter and we’re just going to acquire the language “naturally”, don’t forget two awkward truths.įirst, it’s a lot harder to learn a language “like a child” than you might think. That’s often a selling point for apps and courses that downplay grammar (or don’t teach it explicitly at all). These language patterns often vary in some ways according to region, social group, age.įor us as adult German learners, it’s attractive to attempt to learn naturally, like a child. They pick up the common patterns of the language naturally from context. Native speakers learn to speak their language without having studied the “grammar” (in the sense of explicit rules). We know that we need to master the system and the structural patterns that fluent speakers (mostly unconsciously) use but does paying attention to the explicit rules or prescriptive grammar help in this? Do I need to learn German grammar? That’s to say, German grammar as a set of explicit, fixed rules that govern the “standard language”. In contrast, the German grammar we often think of as learners (or teachers) is “prescriptive grammar”. Linguists are interested in how people use the system of German and how it’s changing over time (as all languages do). Think of it as the way words are arranged in a meaningful phrase (syntax) and how some words change form to express different meanings (morphology). Well, grammar is the system, the structural patterns of a language. First, what even is grammar, let alone German grammar? ![]()
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