The Need For Grammar

Learning Grammar

In natural acquisition theory, grammar is not learned but acquired by long term observation of the language patterns. That means you hear your native language only used according to certain rules, which together make up the grammar. Accordingly you use it the same way. Grammar governs the composition of words from roots, and sentences from words in a language.

When learning a second language, there is often much stress on the notion to acquire it artificially. Bits of grammar will be combined with new words and a short text where both the new words and the grammar are applied. This is an unnatural way of language acquisition for the brain and as such difficult and time consuming. When you absorb a lot of a foreign language passively by reading and listening the process of language acquisition would be more natural, but slow, however when immediately informed of the meaning of new words and sentences, the process will be both natural and fast, hence our Bermuda Word method was developed.

Grammatical Components

The following are grammatical components of language of which nouns, verbs and adjectives and adverbs are the most commonly known. For example, take the sentence "She quickly eats a lot of her french fries that were on my plate before." It contains below components. 

Nouns and verbs can be inflected to change the tense, mood, voice, aspect, person, number, gender and case. For verbs this is also called conjugation, and for nouns, adjectives and pronouns it is called declension. For example "I eat, he eats" where the verb is inflected (conjugated) to show that I or he is eating. For the English language inflection is pretty limited. For nouns goes the same in English, but for example Hungarian has up to 36 declensions according to some grammar books. Mostly this is just the adposition changed into a suffix so ultimately not complex at all, for example "In Amsterdam" becomes "Amszterdamban" where "ban" conveys "in".

Grammar Helps

When learning a foreign language, it is good to note that it will have similar grammatical components as your native language's grammar has. You will know that you can encounter a word and then encounter another word and see that they have the same root, but a different inflection. For example as in "eat" and "eats" or even "eating", but also less obvious shared roots as in "strong" and "strength".

Understanding of grammar helps you recognize roots (See our article on roots and language learning) and learn new words more easily. However as stated before, grammar is "the logic acquired when observing a language" and trying to learn the grammar before you have acquired the language is like placing the horse behind the carriage. How do you acquire the language you ask? Well, as you can read on our website, by reading and listening. Any grammar lessons taken after that will be an "Aha-Erlebnis" instead of a painful exercise.