Grammar teaching in schools

[jehane]

Lots of food for thought here. I won't do a massive multi-quote but certainly the point about native vs non-native speakers is a good one. I remember being taught some basic rules in French about word order (noun before adjective) though not to the extent of Andrew H.'s list.

The line between grammar and writing style seems to vary though - is it grammatically *wrong* to dangle a participle or is it just poor writing style? Is writing style taught in schools, and should it be? I was certainly never taught what an infinitive or participle was, let alone not to split or dangle one. And I had to ask Google about the gerund.

[crich70]

English is a hard language to learn I understand as there are so many 'borrowed' words in it as well as things like it's and its and you're and your etc. so it doesn't surprise me that grammar in English is also complex to learn.

[Andrew H.]

Originally Posted by crich70

English is a hard language to learn I understand as there are so many 'borrowed' words in it as well as things like it's and its and you're and your etc. so it doesn't surprise me that grammar in English is also complex to learn.

This is commonly believed among native English speakers, but it's not true. English is one of the easiest languages to learn, at least for speakers of other European languages (and probably the easiest European language to learn for speakers of other languages). As one of my 8th grade students said when I was teaching English in Germany, "English is easy - you just learn a couple of rules and then all you do is learn words."

Whereas even with a language like German (which is easier than Russian or Finnish or many other languages), to correctly say even simple sentences, you have to know the gender of the noun *and* whether it is the subject, direct object, or indirect object of the sentence, or if it is being possessed. You have to know the appropriate endings to use for the definite/indefinite article with each of these parts of speech, and if you use an adjective, it has to match, while using slightly different endings.

So in English, you might have the term "the black dog"; this term won't really change depending on its part of speech in a sentence.

In German, the black dog is "der schwarze Hund" if it is the subject of the sentence (Der schwarze Hund [sees the cat]).
But it's "den schwarzen Hund" if it is the direct object of the sentence ([The cat sees] den schwarzen Hund). And if you give something to the dog, it becomes "dem schwarzen Hund" - ([I threw the ball to] dem schwarzen Hund). Possessive becomes "des schwarzen Hundes".

But those are just the rules for the definite articles; there are different rules for indefinite articles, different rules again for nouns preceded by adjectives but no articles, and different rules again for plural, which also require knowing what case the noun is in.

German only has 4 cases; Latin and Russian both have 6, IIRC, and Finnish has some implausible number in the teens.

The problem with these rules for language learners is that you have to learn them at the very beginning of learning to speak; they aren't obscure rules that you can pick up later (like the subjunctive, say); you have to know the gender and case and proper endings of all the nouns in your sentence to even say the simplest sentence. While in English you can blithely say "Fred sees the black dog; the black dog sees Fred; Fred throws the ball to the black dog; Fred knows the name of the black dog. If you want the indefinite article, just change "the" to "a"; nothing else changes.

[Katsunami]

Andrew H: If I could, you'd get negative Karma for that post for the sole reason that you are reminding me of the one thing I CAN'T properly do in German. I can understand the language just fine when reading or listening to it, but the stuff you're describing is a mess when having to speak or write it.

[Ansileran]

We don't learn much English grammar at school, even as a foreign language. At least that's how it feels to me, but I might be biaised since I had to learn French, Latin, German, ancient Greek (do I need upper case for "ancient" here)... and Russian ^^

Of course, my English grammar still isn't perfect. I know I make many mistakes a native speaker probably wouldn't make (selecting the wrong past tense is a common one for me). In the sentence you gave, I would have said "The big ugly old French woman". It's funny because I wouldn't have made the same mistake if it had been "little" instead of "big". Can't say why, except that it would have felt wrong...

[Yapyap]

We spent a LOT of time on grammar - both Estonian grammar and the grammar of any foreign language we learned (for me it was Russian, English, German and Norwegian in school as far as foreign languages went). I'm not sure how things stand now but we had Estonian language as a separate subject from literature, and the ~4 hours of language a week, from the first week of school until the last, was more or less all grammar. With foreign languages there was a more or less equal emphasis on grammar and vocabulary.

And I do think it's made learning other languages easier for me, as it's easier to grasp the underlying concepts of other languages - the building blocks, the way different parts of sentences go together, the way thoughts are expressed. (Not that I don't make mistakes in any language I've learned - I do, and frequently so, but it's mostly because my brain is in a constant state of multi-lingual confusion.)

Originally Posted by Andrew H.

German only has 4 cases; Latin and Russian both have 6, IIRC, and Finnish has some implausible number in the teens.

Finnish has fifteen, I believe, although I think there has been some discussion on whether the accusative case should even be considered separate or not, as it's in practice covered by nominative and genitive - it's not a separate case in Estonian where nominative, genitive or partitive are used as appropriate. Estonian has 14 officially recognised cases, although one or two others are occasionally discussed by linguists as existing in reality but not recognised as such.

I've never considered English a particularly difficult language to learn - I think if you go down into it very deeply, into the grammar and the rules, it does get complex (as does almost any language I'm aware of), but it's IMHO a relatively easy language for foreigners to get fluent in on an everyday level of understanding, speaking and writing. German and Russian were both far more difficult for me.

[mbovenka]

Originally Posted by Ansileran

In the sentence you gave, I would have said "The big ugly old French woman". It's funny because I wouldn't have made the same mistake if it had been "little" instead of "big". Can't say why, except that it would have felt wrong...

Interesting. I feel the same way: 'big ugly', but 'ugly little'. Even now, 'ugly big' sounds clumsy to me.

I wonder why that is? It can't be the influence of my native (Dutch) grammar, because that uses the same order as English (and where the equivalent 'lelijke grote' sounds perfectly fine to me).

Weird.

[Ansileran]

It's a blend for me. In French, I would put "big" (or "little") before "ugly" because it's somewhat more objective, unless I really want to emphasize on "ugly" but that would be strange, forced...
I guess I'm mixing up French and English grammar...

[Billi]

Originally Posted by Yapyap

We spent a LOT of time on grammar - both Estonian grammar and the grammar of any foreign language we learned (for me it was Russian, English, German and Norwegian in school as far as foreign languages went). I'm not sure how things stand now but we had Estonian language as a separate subject from literature, and the ~4 hours of language a week, from the first week of school until the last, was more or less all grammar. With foreign languages there was a more or less equal emphasis on grammar and vocabulary.

That's comparable - though not exactly the same - how we have been taught German in Germany. The "German" lessons had been equally devided between literature, oral and written use of German and orthography/grammar and we'd got a mark/grade for every of the three parts and a summary mark.