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When I was in secondary school in England in the 1970s I was taught English grammar formally and thoroughly. We started with defining the "parts of speech" (what verbs, nouns, adverbs, prepositions, etc, are), went on to parse sentences, and then went forward from there. I do think it's a shame that grammar seems not to be taught any more, for two very good reasons:
1. You can't talk about language if you're not equipped with the vocabulary to do so.
2. It makes it much more difficult to learn a foreign language if you don't understand the grammar of your own language.
For many years I've been one of the moderators on the online forum which supports students for a distance-learning Latin course, and the thing which trips people up every year is not problems with Latin, but the fact that many of the young people on the course have never been taught English grammar, and hence just don't understand basic grammatical ideas. We get some people who don't understand what words like "noun" and "verb" mean.
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