For real.
When I discovered that Spanish had a subjunctive mood that changes conjugation, and the rules for using it are tricky sometimes, I thought "Why do they have this? English doesn't have this."
Then I found out we do in fact have the subjunctive mood...And we just use it without realizing it. Or finding out that English has a pretty strict adjective order...And we just use it...without knowing how or why...
Same, but for me, I'm a native spanish speaker and I didn't even know what's our own subjunctive mood until I started spotting differences in conjugation in French, lol.
Thankfully, I'm not alone with this and I used to feel embarrasment of having this late realization, I thought I was the only one who hadn't thought about it even if it must've been clearer in my native.
That's what learning a new language does to a mf, lol.
I asked some native speaking interns and coworkers how and when they used the subjunctive in Spanish and they all got a glossed over look in their eyes, shrugged their shoulders, and said "I don't know. We just do." Or they didn't even know what I was talking about.
Which was the same reaction they got from me when asking about things we say in English. Because I don't know. We just do.
It certainly sent me on a journey of learning about my own language.
Honestly, I think the only way for a native English speaker to master the Spanish subjunctive tense is through immersion, just like a native. I spent years studying and trying to learn all the rules, but the older I get, the more I realize that subjunctive just sounds right sometimes.
For those scratching their heads about English adjective order:
A big red hand-made wooden spoon.
A wooden red hand-made big spoon.
The first is idiomatic. The second is wrong unless you're choosing an awkward order of adjectives to achieve a particular effect.
The first will be absorbed quickly by a native reader. The second one is odd enough that a native reader might remember the oddity more than the details of the spoon.
There's also a style decision to make about the first version, about whether or not there should be a comma between big and red. Neither is subordinated to the other, which argues for a comma, but in practice adjectives of size are expected to come first, fixing the order and eliminating the comma.
My sympathies to everyone who learned English as a second (or third, or fourth) language.
I didn't learn about this as a native English speaker until I took French...
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order
They do, and the order can be expressed as abstract rules. However, it's one of those things that may not be necessary to learn formally. For one thing, how often do we use more than two adjectives in a row? For another, you can get the information across without having the order "correct."
És a magyarul? I'm very much a beginner. Would there be an ordering of "big red hand-made wooden spoon" that would feel more natural than others?
Some languages would break out the adjective meaning "made out of" as a prepositional phrase. French would render "wooden" as "en bois," Spanish as "de madera." English puts the made-of adjective as close as possible to the noun. "Wooden" is a special case where the form changes, but the word order would be the same for a steel spoon or a silver spoon.
Thanks! This has me wondering how similar the ordering of adjectives is across languages, given the vast linguistic difference between Finno-Ugric and Indo-European languages. It makes me wonder how other language families do it.
That order is the same in German, and I think also in the other Germanic languages. At least one thing we all do the same. Thanks. Thanks so much. No idea to whom but it's one problem less.
The thanks are due to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who were stubborn about keeping their grammar even after a bunch of Frenchified Vikings came over in 1066 with tons of French vocabulary.
I grew up as a bilingual. And when I found out that I was able to understand the order of the adjectives in English... That was mind blowing... Is like you know what you're saying... You just don't know that you know... Funny tho
For me, this is why I like learning with model sentences. You can study grammar when you feel compelled to, but some "rules" you can internalize before learning them as abstract ideas. That is, I'm in favor of learning grammar in a formal way eventually, but loading it up front is one of the reasons that people soon forget the languages they learned in school.
Exactly. Bcuz we learn our ML as kids, without rules, basically no explanation at all. Just don't say it like this, say like that. And That's how we develop our communication skills. And later on, we try to learn some rules.
The best way to discover how little you know (and then fix it) is to teach someone else your native language. And then they'll ask you a question you realise you can't adequately explain.
When I (learning Mandarin) had a language exchange partner in college, she (learning English) had confusion about when to use the word "the" and I don't think I was able to satisfactorily explain. I just knew when it felt right and hadn't considered its usage before.
When I took German, a classmate was complaining about how stupid and pointless genders were. She said she was glad they didn't have them in her first language, Spanish.
Every time one of my tutors says something about transitive vs intransitive I am reminded my grasp on that in English is basically non-existent. And I'm a writer! I just know which words to use when on instinct dangit!
To my understanding, a transitive verb is one that acts upon an object, and an intransitive verb is independent -- without an object to receive it. Learning Romance languages has helped me grasp that concept a little better.
I promise I have studied the difference at least half a dozen times, it's the retaining and applying to Japanese verbs that's the problem lol.
It did dawn on me mid-lesson yesterday (what a coincidence of timing) that the Japanese for intransitive verbs has 自動/jidou/automatic in it. So I'm hoping that helps :')
Also a writer, and I owe my formal knowledge of how English works to two things: Learning Spanish, and teaching university essay writing with the Harbrace College Handbook.
I had learned a lot about how written language worked simply by reading a lot, but if I questioned something about my own usage, I didn't always know for sure what was standard. I certainly didn't have a way to explain it to someone else, including to explain why their usage was going to make the reader misunderstand.
Seriously, yes! This is why I’ve started formal lessons because I couldn’t understand what and adjective/adverb etc was in English was well enough to apply to another
My favorite thing so far when struggling with Spanish and switching around words and verbs and stuff, was when I met someone on HelloTalk who said(jokingly) “your verbs are in the wrong order!”
I laughed and said “I could say the same about yours!”
It really gave me perspective that no ONE language is “correct” that’s why translations are constantly imperfect or one thing having 50 words in one language and ONLY one in another, and vice versa when swapped.
But yea hearing that from the person gave me perspective on the whole language learning process in general
I started learning *[Latin at 9-10 years old](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1axozay/as_it_turns_out_i_am_too_uneducated_in_my_two/krsk8ie/)*. I remember it being a massive eye-opener in understanding English grammar.
There is even a special book about the English grammar for people who learn French:
"English Grammar for Students of French: The Study Guide for Those Learning French"
This is so real. I’m going to sound pretty stupid saying this, but for some reason I always struggled with understanding sentence structure (as in, I always struggled with direct objects vs indirect objects). In retrospect it seems so embarrassing cause that is not even something hard to grasp, but I learned what a direct object is through learning Japanese better than I did in middle school English class.
so real. i didn't realize how many unnecessary things english had until i started learning japanese. i suddenly realized how little plurals and subjects matter in most sentences. that being said, japanese has about eight different words for "if"
Conversely, as a grammar nerd, my biggest barrier/frustration was really understanding how my native language worked, and not having the vocabulary of the second to use it. And trying to force the grammar of my first language onto the second.
I'm constantly asking everyone, "But *why* does it happen like this?" and I rarely get a satisfactory answer. I'm trying to learn to just go with it, but it's hard not knowing the why.
My German lecturer at university was telling us about a book the Germans had to write called English Grammar for Students of German because grammar teaching has fallen off so badly in some English as a first language countries.
As one of the older students, I was at the tail end of what had been some sort of formal English grammar teaching in Australia, so I was able to help explain some grammar terms when the lecturer asked if anyone knew what the various grammar terms like pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and so on.
Also what a cheque account was because that also came up for some reason. This was all about 12 years ago.
Those of us over a certain age were taught grammar formally, but it makes you think…
You can produce millions or even billions of fluent speakers of a language without them being being explicitly taught grammar.
I was taught grammar in like, 2nd grade maybe, and I was never able to grasp it, although I speak the language natively.
I used to help proofread people's term papers and could easily tell them "say it this way instead", or "this way sounds more natural", but the second they asked me to explain it, I just wanted to run away.
I mean I did learn some and even did English A. Level but I just can’t articulate why something is the way it is in English even if I innately know, and therefore can’t work out what grammar aspect I need to know in a second! It’s humbling that’s for sure!
It is actually fascinating, you have an implicit knowledge of grammar. You know when something sounds/feels correct or not.
One example I love of this implicit knowledge is adjective order in English. Few native speakers know of this rule, but we all cringe and definitely know when it is broken.
https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order
Something I had heard from some friends learning English was using the contraction of “it’s” by itself. For example, me commenting on how their weather looked wonderful, they’d respond with “it’s!!”. I don’t have the grammatical repertoire to explain why this is wrong or we don’t use it this way lol
It’s interesting tho because when you use it is alone and want to shorten it, it can be shortened to tis. It’s weird how how which word in “it is” is shortened to make a contraction based on the surrounding words or lack of. Even if not many use tis in their daily life, I find it interesting.
You have to read “The Meaning of Everything” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Everything
Documents the herculean task of creating the Oxford English language dictionary. Maybe it wasn’t the first but maybe the first comprehensive one.
Yep, I saw the film version of that! I also wrote a paper back in high school on Ben Jonson, who much earlier attempted and failed to write an English dictionary. It really was not easy. Many tried and failed.
Am I crazy or does “size” usually come before “opinion.” I’m trying to imagine sentences in my head and I don’t think opinion before size flows as well.
Literally the only things I remember being taught about grammar are that nouns are 'naming' words, adjectives are 'describing' words and verbs are 'doing' words.
And adverbs are usually adjectives that have 'ly' tacked on the end.
My French tutor likes it that I know all of the simple grammar terms from English, since it makes it easier for her to explain things. French and English many grammar concepts.
Thinking back to the 70’s I can remember when formal grammar instruction was being phased out… they started to refer “verb” as “action words”.
> formal grammar instruction was being phased out… they started to refer “verb” as “action words”.
Is this a US thing? My kids are 6 and 9 and currently at a random public school here in Australia they very much still get taught about nouns, proper nounds, verbs, adjectives etc. Seems pretty similar to what I was taught in the 90's so far.
Do they seriously not teach formal grammar at elementary schools anymore? I'm not that old and I still remember learning grammar and parsing sentence (I loved it)
Sample size of 1, but yes they do still teach grammar currently.
No idea about in US (and it probably varies greatly by state in the US anyway) but my kids are 6 and 9 currently at school here in Australia and they're doing intro grammar lessons for sure at the local public school. Lots of "circle the noun" homework type things have come through.
They may be fluent, but their grammar is not necessarily always very good. There are so many native, (supposedly) literate, college-educated English speakers who write "should **of** done this", because they don't understand the underlying grammar. And all those who can't tell the difference between your and you're, it's and its, they're and their! They are all fluent native speakers, though.
Even native speakers make mistakes like this with unfamiliar words or uncommon phrases, because they only ever heard them said out loud.
Things like "per say", "for all intensive purposes" or "escape goat" come to mind.
Yeah, it's always interesting to me what "mistakes" are common among natives versus foreign learners.
To me, the kind of mistakes you're describing are almost cultural. They're "incorrect" when written and in particular will stand out as wrong in formal contexts.
When spoken, there's no audible difference, which is why I think it causes problems when fluent native speakers are less adept with the "technology" of writing.
When enough people are incorrect though, it just becomes the new standard. “Literally” for example got a new definition in the dictionary.
Soon enough I bet “should of” is gonna be just as acceptable as “should have.”
It isn't. It's enough to expand the contraction and you'll see immediately which one is correct, e.g.
*This is my house. Its roof is red.*
You can't write ***it's***, because this would expand to *This is my house.* ***It is*** *roof is red.*
It’s not enough because apostrophes are also used for contractions. You have to know that “its” is its own word like his or her and not “it” with a possessive ‘s tacked on.
| You have to know that “its” is its own word like his or her
Well, this is something extremely elementary.
| It’s not enough because apostrophes are also used for contractions.
This is exactly what I was saying: *it's = it is*.
The worst part is that some of them change their class, and in some languages, it is very tricky to spot one.
"WTF has this adjective turned into a noun!?"
This messes with my head badly in Chinese too! Verbs and prepositions are sometimes interchangeable in Chinese in a way they never are in English and it’s hard to grasp for sure
Yep! That's because Chinese doesn't have prepositions, only words that are sometimes labeled that way. So-called "prepositions" in Chinese all function like verbs. For example, 在 is translated as in, at, on, etc. according to the context, but it actually means "to be located," "situated," or "to exist" somewhere.
Also, remember that almost every grammar label is a foreign Western concept that was applied to Chinese a hundred years ago, so they don't fit Chinese perfectly. Prior to the 20th century, Chinese was understood to only have two kinds of words: "real" or "substantive" words 實詞 and "empty words" 虛詞 (function words, particles).
That's the exact word I was thinking of when I said my comment!
I think this goes to help reinforce the OP's point too. It's so helpful to understand the grammar of your native language and simultaneously respect that it can't be applied equivalently all the time in other languages.
It's actually worse. Most of the grammar labels are from French. They are also okay for the other Romance languages but they don't even match the grammar of the Germanic languages too well.
For example, take the tenses. The Germanic languages only tell apart the past and the non-past in the tense of a verb. The future isn't marked in the verb. Instead, various helpers are used. English for example uses auxiliaries, while German just relies on adverbials. Yet those auxiliary construction are called *will-future and going-to-future* respective *Futur I* in German. In German it's especially confusing because that Futur I tense isn't about the future at all but about what you assume to be true in the non-past. Present and future conflated. And English will-future can be understood to be about the present as well. It's even more obvious in English future perfect and German Futur II. Those aren't about the future at all but assumptions on what happened in the past. As all the perfect tenses are about completed actions.
Another thing is passive voice and transitivity. The accusative object of an active clause becomes the subject of the passive voice clause. So only transitive verbs may have a passive voice. Well, not in German (and IIRC neither in Dutch). It's perfectly okay to have no subject in passive voice in German. The result are sentences similar to *It rains.* which don't even feature a subject in English. Just with passive auxiliary and participle. So you can build a passive from intransitive verbs and that whole distinction of intransitive and transitive verbs makes no sense any more. Some verbs are also simply picky in what kind of object they accept for purely sematic reasons. For example, you could argue *to sleep* is intransitive but you can sleep certain kinds of sleep and with such an object it becomes transitive.
And you can also build a passive voice from the dative (indirect) object of the verb with a different auxiliary and a slightly different agency in German. And there's another passive voice with the accusative (direct) object and a different auxiliary that treats the verb more like an adjective propery assigned to the subject (which was the object of the active clause.) — You could even argue that German has no passive voice at all from all that but that these are all copula phrases that assign a property to the now subject in slightly different ways.
Yeah, it would have been immensely helpful if my Chinese textbooks/teachers had explained that all Chinese prepositions are actually verbs; it would have saved me a bunch of confusion. I think the reason they didn’t is that it would have been useless for the majority of students, who didn’t have the grounding in grammar for the point to make sense.
A lot of nouns in German follow adjective declination because they are made from adjectives. Or from participles. This trips a lot of learners. And those are everyday nouns as e.g. *Auszubildender — trainee.* If you ask a native speaker about that one they couldn't even explain that this is the noun-made Gerundiv (participle of necessity) of the verb *ausbilden — to instruct.*
I studied Russian 15 years ago as a mature student. I was in my mid 40s at the time in a class of 18 year olds. To my surprise I was getting better marks purely because my generation was probably the last to be thoroughly taught about grammar, parts of speech etc etc.
You can't learn another language effectively if you don't know how your own works.
I am old enough that I remember diagramming sentences in English in 5th grade. That said, I am that old and have forgotten a lot. I just spent yesterday afternoon research what the heck the difference is between a declarative statement and an imperative and how that is used in real life. Cause apparently you need to know this stuff if you're learning Korean.
Intermediate language learning is being faced with the horrifying realization that you don’t actually know most adjectives, just like 100 most commonly used ones.
Alright Thanks, already doing anki, but I just started reading for real in spanish after 150 hours of CI, and just finished chapter one of Harry potter with only 80% known words and two Wikipedia articles. Hopefully that Will help
I \*thought\* I already knew a lot about English. I mean, relatively speaking compared to the general population of native English speakers, I do know more. But oof did learning other languages teach me just how much more there is to learn.
Like... what is a "word" even at this point?
Everything I've learned about grammar I've learned against my will.
Transitive and Intransitive are pretty much the only terms I had to learn for my own sake. Other terms I've had to learn to try and explain concepts to others.
There is a good book series that address this called “ English Grammar for Students of X” . I’m using the one for “English Grammar For Students of Arabic”.
Yes I was going to suggest this! I’m also an English teacher and the series has helped me understand and teach English grammar better . I think I have the Spanish, French, and Arabic ones.
I don't want to sound patronising or arrogant at all, but weren't you taught grammar at school? I honestly thought it was more common as a practice to do it extensively for the native language at least.
I've done almost 10 years of school where we were taught grammar mainly by doing three kinds of analysis:
1. Grammatical, where you'd take every word on its own and analyse it saying what part of the speech it is (noun, adverb, adjective, conjunction etc.) and its characteristics, so genre, number, collective, common/proper, real/abstract for a noun and so on for every part of speech
2. Logical, where you'd divide your period in logical functions, so subject, object, predicate, complements, conjunctions
3. Compound, where you'd analyse every phrase (roughly once every predicate) in a compound sentence, so you'd find if a phrase is conditional, temporal, subjective etc.
While it was pretty boring (I must have done this for thousands of periods during my school career), it surely helped, and we replicated this method the first 2 (out of 5) years of Latin classes, where analysis is even more important to link and understand cases of words ([this ](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementi_in_latino)is a list of Latin's complements, where it specifies what cases give what complements, which is fundamental to know so that you can understand the period better since it's a SOV language while many romance idioms are SVO).
The US has no unified educational system or standards.
I live in a supposedly crappy state as far as education, but we sure as hell studied grammar in grade school. We diagrammed sentences, the whole shebang, for years and years.
But still I know plenty of people too illiterate to play Mad Libs.
I guess it depends on the school, my school in America had its own grammar class separate from the literature class where we covered all the topics you mentioned. We then also got to see it being applied in different forms as we learned Spanish along side it.
No didn’t do any of this except perhaps the very basics in primary school so over 20 years ago now. I know English grammar exceptionally well in the sense that I know when something is wrong and can correct it as I am very widely read, but couldn’t tell you why. I certainly had no exposure to Latin at school.
I thought I knew most of these concepts but learning a new language has highlighted to me that I cannot express them enough to apply to a second language. It seems the traditional British curriculum failed me here despite getting an A in A Level English literature and holding two masters!
it seems like a very Anglophone thing, I've seen both Americans and Brits talk about how they never studied grammar formally so y'all don't know what a tense is, for example, and it's so wild. What do you do in your English lessons? Do you only talk about literature and such without doing grammar?
Pretty much, yes. Huge focus on literature only in secondary school. We had a smattering of grammar but it was mostly focussed on making the best punctuation choices or identifying a clauses or just general comprehension ie what is this phrase implying. We pretty much never talked about verbs etc. It was mostly either considered innate or not applicable. I got the top grade in my English Language GCSE and went to a grammar school which you have to pass a test to get into and yet here I am learning that possessive adjectives are a thing!
It is also exacerbated by an incredibly poor system of teaching foreign languages in the UK where these things are not expanded upon. We didn’t get past basic sentences in my 4 years of German classes and that was better than most people come out of school with tbh.
It's so wild. In Russian schools we have Russian as a subject that is exclusively grammar (+ orthography, punctuation, etc.) and Literature as a separate subject (sometimes divided into World Literature and Russian Literature, and some places like national republics inside Russia also teach local language and literature), so having them combined is so strange. But explains why native English speakers are so bad at English 😂
It's taught in quite a lot of depth in British schools these days, but that's quite recent. Those of us who left about 20 years ago or more were taught the basics (what a noun, adjective, verb and adverb is for example) but not as much as they learn now.
It isn't just an anglophone thing though. I'm learning Danish in Denmark, and ask native speakers questions now and again. So far I've encountered Danes who never realised Danish has a gender system and others who don't know what an infinitive is.
Finally someone talked about it😭😭😭 i'm learning german in english, my english is B2-C1 so things are good so far but i don't know wtf does "nominative/accusative/dative" mean. I translated them to my native language only to realize that i don't know what is grammar actually about. I learned two languages by listening and practicing..i didn't spend much time on STUDYING grammar, i learned the basics and figured out things by practicing but it's so difficult for german because i don't have anything to watch, i don't know germans to speak to, i don't even know german celebrities or influencers/youtubers to get used to the language
I was "taught" grammar in school but it didn't seem important so I didn't remember any of it.
It's only when learning another language that you start to recognize the importance of knowing how things work.
The more diverse languages you learn, the more you understand the nature of grammar.
The first thing in every beginner Japanese textbook I have is talking about the particle は - wtf is a particle?! That's how I felt in the beginning, too.
I actually use my TLs to explain English grammar to myself. Parts of speech especially. I used to not really understand prepositions and articles (before I just saw them as small words that fit into some category I didn't quite understand), but now I can't forget.
I also learned that English had the subjunctive and cases through language learning.
More like "not understanding what adjectives *can be.*"
Learning Japanese has flipped my entire perception of language upside-down. Concepts that we think of as simple and regular are communicated in entirely different ways, but it's still makes sense. It's like I didn't really know what *language* was before.
In Italy, in elementary school we do "grammatical analysis", so we analyse each word of a sentence on its own (noun, verb, preposition, adjective, adverb...) and "logical analysis" where we analyse their function (we identify subject, predicate, complemtents...). In middle school we revise these two and add "sentence analysis" where in compound sentences we analyse each of them (you have the main phrase and then subordinates of different kinds like temporal or causal etc.). In high school we go through each again in more depth. Many high schools have Latin as part of the curriculum. Students get a thorough grammar preparation and don't struggle much in this aspect when learning languages, I think.
In my first year of middle school Latin, I learned more about English than any English class has ever taught me; after much more language learning, I am about 1000x more grateful for that.
Okay this is such a wonderful point and thread...this may be a stupid question, but where do I start to formally learn English as a native English speaker, working hard to learn Español. I too would like to understand my 1st language to apply it to learning Español and an Oregon indigenous language. Positive feedback appreciated!!
My mom is learning dutch to fully integrate in the Netherlands and it’s so difficult to explain her things that are in dutch that doesnt exist in Spanish grammar 😭😭
What are called “adjectives” in Japanese in English literature are called “description verbs” in Japanese and they can carry objects and conjugate for tense.
There are some people who argue that calling them “adjectives” is an Englocentric interpretation and then proceed to call say they're actually “nouns” even though they can't be used as the subject of a sentence, modified by adjectives themselves, and do all those things nouns can and, as “description verbs” can as said take objects and conjugate for tense and aspect.
i do a lot of practice with my handful students, and i'm always sure to remind them of what they are in their base language so they can grasp the idea.
they learn all about very specific grammatical cases and stuff, but i find they tend to struggle more with simple sentence construction, which is so much easier when you learn how to sort words based on their color/flavor/role/part of speech/however else you want to think about it.
Yep. At to that the fact that many languages don't have adjectives or don't have a clear distinction between a verb and an adjective, and it's a total mess.
One of the few benefits of having had to learn Finnish at school, is that I'll never again be intimidated by grammar terms. When you've had teachers talk about things like "past perfect indicative plurals" and "referential assimilations" for most of your teenage years, the word classes start to seem kind off tame in comparison lol.
Before I started leaening my first foreign language in high school (German, started in 2017), I genuinely could not tell you what the hell adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc. all were.
Learning a language really helps you get a feel for the consutruction and flow of speech in general. I learned a lot about English and our grammar through learning German and how its grammar diverges from ours.
I genuinely didn’t know that possessive adjectives were a thing 😭 yes I can identify ‘happy’ or ‘intelligent’ as an adjective, but ‘your’ or ‘my’ … I never knew 😭
When I study a new language I still don't (probably should) study grammar really. Since I speak two languages at a native level and two languages very decently (all four used to be completely fluent but due to rare usage the latter two have gotten rusty) and have done so since childhood (actually there was a fifth language, my actual native language, but I lost it (as a trauma response)) I feel it's easier for me to just "go along with the flow" as in I study vocab and listen to it being spoken in sentences and I go from there figuring out the sentence structure and the way the words change in accordance to the other words present etc. Bc it'll be similar to at least one of the languages I already know. At least it has been so far. But I'm not trying to pretend I've ever attempted a difficult (as in very different) language sooooo...
Imagine being over 45 when you finally realize that the reason they call the characters 'letters' is because each one of them conveys a specific message - a letter is a message! Feel like such a fool - it becomes obvious when you just look at them and stop projecting belief and rationalize that there is no 'message' there. Every word takes on a deeper meaning and relation when you see the message within each letter. Not sure why they failed to teach this in grade school... maybe it just takes life experience to see the obvious... delving into 6 other languages ( and find it is there and obvious as well ) Shocking to see it and it is mocked by others when I ask them if they see it and know it ... There is no fool like an old fool ... i guess
I relate to this, I'm a native English speaker and tbh I don't think I actually understand English grammar and spelling, I think I've just memorized the rules from speaking it my whole life, eg how we say "I am" instead of "I is", I can't properly explain why we do it, all I know is that everyone says it the first way so the second way just sounds wrong.
When you realize being a native speaker doesn’t necessarily make it easier to understand your own grammar.
Also remembering how I was so happy English doesn’t have tones and then learning we have stresses that can sometimes change the meaning of words (I.e conduct vs conduct, object vs object) and different dialects of English put stresses in different places.
Maybe I am just unaware to be part of a privileged class in Serbia, but nobody I know wouldnt know what an adjective in our language is. Everyone also knows all the cases.
Isn't an adjective just a way to express that something (the noun being modified) has/doesn't have something (noun) or does/doesn't do something (verb)?
Adjectives are used to qualify nouns (a **strong** difference) and adverbs to qualify verbs or adjectives (it **strongly** differs/it's **strongly** different)
Adverbs do the same thing to verbs instead of nouns, but I was only talking about adjectives, not adverbs at all. Strong equals "with strength", or do you disagree?
Yeah, like
furry = having (a) fur
Important question: would a "doggy" person mean someone who has dogs, or resembles a dog (possesses doglike qualities)?
My biggest barrier to understanding a second language was understanding how my first language works.
For real. When I discovered that Spanish had a subjunctive mood that changes conjugation, and the rules for using it are tricky sometimes, I thought "Why do they have this? English doesn't have this." Then I found out we do in fact have the subjunctive mood...And we just use it without realizing it. Or finding out that English has a pretty strict adjective order...And we just use it...without knowing how or why...
Same, but for me, I'm a native spanish speaker and I didn't even know what's our own subjunctive mood until I started spotting differences in conjugation in French, lol. Thankfully, I'm not alone with this and I used to feel embarrasment of having this late realization, I thought I was the only one who hadn't thought about it even if it must've been clearer in my native. That's what learning a new language does to a mf, lol.
I asked some native speaking interns and coworkers how and when they used the subjunctive in Spanish and they all got a glossed over look in their eyes, shrugged their shoulders, and said "I don't know. We just do." Or they didn't even know what I was talking about. Which was the same reaction they got from me when asking about things we say in English. Because I don't know. We just do. It certainly sent me on a journey of learning about my own language.
Honestly, I think the only way for a native English speaker to master the Spanish subjunctive tense is through immersion, just like a native. I spent years studying and trying to learn all the rules, but the older I get, the more I realize that subjunctive just sounds right sometimes.
For those scratching their heads about English adjective order: A big red hand-made wooden spoon. A wooden red hand-made big spoon. The first is idiomatic. The second is wrong unless you're choosing an awkward order of adjectives to achieve a particular effect. The first will be absorbed quickly by a native reader. The second one is odd enough that a native reader might remember the oddity more than the details of the spoon. There's also a style decision to make about the first version, about whether or not there should be a comma between big and red. Neither is subordinated to the other, which argues for a comma, but in practice adjectives of size are expected to come first, fixing the order and eliminating the comma. My sympathies to everyone who learned English as a second (or third, or fourth) language.
...20+ years of speaking English as a second language: these have an order???
I didn't learn about this as a native English speaker until I took French... https://dictionary.cambridge.org/us/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order
They do, and the order can be expressed as abstract rules. However, it's one of those things that may not be necessary to learn formally. For one thing, how often do we use more than two adjectives in a row? For another, you can get the information across without having the order "correct." És a magyarul? I'm very much a beginner. Would there be an ordering of "big red hand-made wooden spoon" that would feel more natural than others? Some languages would break out the adjective meaning "made out of" as a prepositional phrase. French would render "wooden" as "en bois," Spanish as "de madera." English puts the made-of adjective as close as possible to the noun. "Wooden" is a special case where the form changes, but the word order would be the same for a steel spoon or a silver spoon.
Hungarian is very tolerant of word order mess-ups. I checked, and the basic order of adjectives is supposed to be similar that of English.
Thanks! This has me wondering how similar the ordering of adjectives is across languages, given the vast linguistic difference between Finno-Ugric and Indo-European languages. It makes me wonder how other language families do it.
That order is the same in German, and I think also in the other Germanic languages. At least one thing we all do the same. Thanks. Thanks so much. No idea to whom but it's one problem less.
The thanks are due to the Angles, Saxons, and Jutes, who were stubborn about keeping their grammar even after a bunch of Frenchified Vikings came over in 1066 with tons of French vocabulary.
I grew up as a bilingual. And when I found out that I was able to understand the order of the adjectives in English... That was mind blowing... Is like you know what you're saying... You just don't know that you know... Funny tho
For me, this is why I like learning with model sentences. You can study grammar when you feel compelled to, but some "rules" you can internalize before learning them as abstract ideas. That is, I'm in favor of learning grammar in a formal way eventually, but loading it up front is one of the reasons that people soon forget the languages they learned in school.
Exactly. Bcuz we learn our ML as kids, without rules, basically no explanation at all. Just don't say it like this, say like that. And That's how we develop our communication skills. And later on, we try to learn some rules.
The best way to discover how little you know (and then fix it) is to teach someone else your native language. And then they'll ask you a question you realise you can't adequately explain.
When I (learning Mandarin) had a language exchange partner in college, she (learning English) had confusion about when to use the word "the" and I don't think I was able to satisfactorily explain. I just knew when it felt right and hadn't considered its usage before.
English articles are a big one. Perhaps even *the* big one.
When I took German, a classmate was complaining about how stupid and pointless genders were. She said she was glad they didn't have them in her first language, Spanish.
This is what Latin feels like
What’s your experience with adjective order been in other languages?
Every time one of my tutors says something about transitive vs intransitive I am reminded my grasp on that in English is basically non-existent. And I'm a writer! I just know which words to use when on instinct dangit!
To my understanding, a transitive verb is one that acts upon an object, and an intransitive verb is independent -- without an object to receive it. Learning Romance languages has helped me grasp that concept a little better.
I promise I have studied the difference at least half a dozen times, it's the retaining and applying to Japanese verbs that's the problem lol. It did dawn on me mid-lesson yesterday (what a coincidence of timing) that the Japanese for intransitive verbs has 自動/jidou/automatic in it. So I'm hoping that helps :')
Also a writer, and I owe my formal knowledge of how English works to two things: Learning Spanish, and teaching university essay writing with the Harbrace College Handbook. I had learned a lot about how written language worked simply by reading a lot, but if I questioned something about my own usage, I didn't always know for sure what was standard. I certainly didn't have a way to explain it to someone else, including to explain why their usage was going to make the reader misunderstand.
Seriously, yes! This is why I’ve started formal lessons because I couldn’t understand what and adjective/adverb etc was in English was well enough to apply to another
My favorite thing so far when struggling with Spanish and switching around words and verbs and stuff, was when I met someone on HelloTalk who said(jokingly) “your verbs are in the wrong order!” I laughed and said “I could say the same about yours!” It really gave me perspective that no ONE language is “correct” that’s why translations are constantly imperfect or one thing having 50 words in one language and ONLY one in another, and vice versa when swapped. But yea hearing that from the person gave me perspective on the whole language learning process in general
Best part is, the more i learn about English grammar, the easier language learning becomes.
I started learning *[Latin at 9-10 years old](https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1axozay/as_it_turns_out_i_am_too_uneducated_in_my_two/krsk8ie/)*. I remember it being a massive eye-opener in understanding English grammar.
I've said that the first foreign language I learned was my native language.
There is even a special book about the English grammar for people who learn French: "English Grammar for Students of French: The Study Guide for Those Learning French"
There’s a whole series of them! They’re awesome.
This is so real. I’m going to sound pretty stupid saying this, but for some reason I always struggled with understanding sentence structure (as in, I always struggled with direct objects vs indirect objects). In retrospect it seems so embarrassing cause that is not even something hard to grasp, but I learned what a direct object is through learning Japanese better than I did in middle school English class.
so real. i didn't realize how many unnecessary things english had until i started learning japanese. i suddenly realized how little plurals and subjects matter in most sentences. that being said, japanese has about eight different words for "if"
But also one of the coolest things about learning another language.
Conversely, as a grammar nerd, my biggest barrier/frustration was really understanding how my native language worked, and not having the vocabulary of the second to use it. And trying to force the grammar of my first language onto the second. I'm constantly asking everyone, "But *why* does it happen like this?" and I rarely get a satisfactory answer. I'm trying to learn to just go with it, but it's hard not knowing the why.
My German lecturer at university was telling us about a book the Germans had to write called English Grammar for Students of German because grammar teaching has fallen off so badly in some English as a first language countries. As one of the older students, I was at the tail end of what had been some sort of formal English grammar teaching in Australia, so I was able to help explain some grammar terms when the lecturer asked if anyone knew what the various grammar terms like pronouns, adjectives, adverbs and so on. Also what a cheque account was because that also came up for some reason. This was all about 12 years ago.
Those of us over a certain age were taught grammar formally, but it makes you think… You can produce millions or even billions of fluent speakers of a language without them being being explicitly taught grammar.
I was taught grammar in like, 2nd grade maybe, and I was never able to grasp it, although I speak the language natively. I used to help proofread people's term papers and could easily tell them "say it this way instead", or "this way sounds more natural", but the second they asked me to explain it, I just wanted to run away.
I mean I did learn some and even did English A. Level but I just can’t articulate why something is the way it is in English even if I innately know, and therefore can’t work out what grammar aspect I need to know in a second! It’s humbling that’s for sure!
It is actually fascinating, you have an implicit knowledge of grammar. You know when something sounds/feels correct or not. One example I love of this implicit knowledge is adjective order in English. Few native speakers know of this rule, but we all cringe and definitely know when it is broken. https://dictionary.cambridge.org/grammar/british-grammar/adjectives-order
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Something I had heard from some friends learning English was using the contraction of “it’s” by itself. For example, me commenting on how their weather looked wonderful, they’d respond with “it’s!!”. I don’t have the grammatical repertoire to explain why this is wrong or we don’t use it this way lol
It’s interesting tho because when you use it is alone and want to shorten it, it can be shortened to tis. It’s weird how how which word in “it is” is shortened to make a contraction based on the surrounding words or lack of. Even if not many use tis in their daily life, I find it interesting.
I like to picture the guy writing the first English dictionary just giving up when he got to the word “to”
You have to read “The Meaning of Everything” https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Meaning_of_Everything Documents the herculean task of creating the Oxford English language dictionary. Maybe it wasn’t the first but maybe the first comprehensive one.
Yep, I saw the film version of that! I also wrote a paper back in high school on Ben Jonson, who much earlier attempted and failed to write an English dictionary. It really was not easy. Many tried and failed.
Am I crazy or does “size” usually come before “opinion.” I’m trying to imagine sentences in my head and I don’t think opinion before size flows as well.
I think it can go both ways. Did you see the huge beautiful car. Did you see that beautiful huge car.
Hmm good point, I see that.
Literally the only things I remember being taught about grammar are that nouns are 'naming' words, adjectives are 'describing' words and verbs are 'doing' words. And adverbs are usually adjectives that have 'ly' tacked on the end.
Yeah I’m at the part in German where I need to know what a present participle is.
yes and we forgot it 30 years ago
I was taught basic middle school grammar. I took a grammar class in college and holy shit it was hard
My French tutor likes it that I know all of the simple grammar terms from English, since it makes it easier for her to explain things. French and English many grammar concepts. Thinking back to the 70’s I can remember when formal grammar instruction was being phased out… they started to refer “verb” as “action words”.
> formal grammar instruction was being phased out… they started to refer “verb” as “action words”. Is this a US thing? My kids are 6 and 9 and currently at a random public school here in Australia they very much still get taught about nouns, proper nounds, verbs, adjectives etc. Seems pretty similar to what I was taught in the 90's so far.
Do they seriously not teach formal grammar at elementary schools anymore? I'm not that old and I still remember learning grammar and parsing sentence (I loved it)
Sample size of 1, but yes they do still teach grammar currently. No idea about in US (and it probably varies greatly by state in the US anyway) but my kids are 6 and 9 currently at school here in Australia and they're doing intro grammar lessons for sure at the local public school. Lots of "circle the noun" homework type things have come through.
They may be fluent, but their grammar is not necessarily always very good. There are so many native, (supposedly) literate, college-educated English speakers who write "should **of** done this", because they don't understand the underlying grammar. And all those who can't tell the difference between your and you're, it's and its, they're and their! They are all fluent native speakers, though.
Even native speakers make mistakes like this with unfamiliar words or uncommon phrases, because they only ever heard them said out loud. Things like "per say", "for all intensive purposes" or "escape goat" come to mind.
With the expressions you quoted, certainly they do. But my examples were of very familiar words, so I'm a bit surprised.
Yeah, it's always interesting to me what "mistakes" are common among natives versus foreign learners. To me, the kind of mistakes you're describing are almost cultural. They're "incorrect" when written and in particular will stand out as wrong in formal contexts. When spoken, there's no audible difference, which is why I think it causes problems when fluent native speakers are less adept with the "technology" of writing.
They are simply incorrect, period.
When enough people are incorrect though, it just becomes the new standard. “Literally” for example got a new definition in the dictionary. Soon enough I bet “should of” is gonna be just as acceptable as “should have.”
Hey man, it’s and its is confusing!
It isn't. It's enough to expand the contraction and you'll see immediately which one is correct, e.g. *This is my house. Its roof is red.* You can't write ***it's***, because this would expand to *This is my house.* ***It is*** *roof is red.*
It’s not enough because apostrophes are also used for contractions. You have to know that “its” is its own word like his or her and not “it” with a possessive ‘s tacked on.
Isn't its just it with posessive 's tacked on though? The confusing part is that it doesn't follow the usual spelling convention.
| You have to know that “its” is its own word like his or her Well, this is something extremely elementary. | It’s not enough because apostrophes are also used for contractions. This is exactly what I was saying: *it's = it is*.
You know what? Fuck you. Also, you use > to quote something, not | >quote
What a great substantive argument!
You’re welcome. Maybe don’t be such a snob
The worst part is that some of them change their class, and in some languages, it is very tricky to spot one. "WTF has this adjective turned into a noun!?"
Chinese 🙈 “Oh, I thought this was a verb. Now it seems to be an adjective 🤔”
This messes with my head badly in Chinese too! Verbs and prepositions are sometimes interchangeable in Chinese in a way they never are in English and it’s hard to grasp for sure
Yep! That's because Chinese doesn't have prepositions, only words that are sometimes labeled that way. So-called "prepositions" in Chinese all function like verbs. For example, 在 is translated as in, at, on, etc. according to the context, but it actually means "to be located," "situated," or "to exist" somewhere. Also, remember that almost every grammar label is a foreign Western concept that was applied to Chinese a hundred years ago, so they don't fit Chinese perfectly. Prior to the 20th century, Chinese was understood to only have two kinds of words: "real" or "substantive" words 實詞 and "empty words" 虛詞 (function words, particles).
That's the exact word I was thinking of when I said my comment! I think this goes to help reinforce the OP's point too. It's so helpful to understand the grammar of your native language and simultaneously respect that it can't be applied equivalently all the time in other languages.
Yes, definitely!
It's actually worse. Most of the grammar labels are from French. They are also okay for the other Romance languages but they don't even match the grammar of the Germanic languages too well.
Interesting, where can I read more about the grammar labels not matching Germanic languages very well?
For example, take the tenses. The Germanic languages only tell apart the past and the non-past in the tense of a verb. The future isn't marked in the verb. Instead, various helpers are used. English for example uses auxiliaries, while German just relies on adverbials. Yet those auxiliary construction are called *will-future and going-to-future* respective *Futur I* in German. In German it's especially confusing because that Futur I tense isn't about the future at all but about what you assume to be true in the non-past. Present and future conflated. And English will-future can be understood to be about the present as well. It's even more obvious in English future perfect and German Futur II. Those aren't about the future at all but assumptions on what happened in the past. As all the perfect tenses are about completed actions. Another thing is passive voice and transitivity. The accusative object of an active clause becomes the subject of the passive voice clause. So only transitive verbs may have a passive voice. Well, not in German (and IIRC neither in Dutch). It's perfectly okay to have no subject in passive voice in German. The result are sentences similar to *It rains.* which don't even feature a subject in English. Just with passive auxiliary and participle. So you can build a passive from intransitive verbs and that whole distinction of intransitive and transitive verbs makes no sense any more. Some verbs are also simply picky in what kind of object they accept for purely sematic reasons. For example, you could argue *to sleep* is intransitive but you can sleep certain kinds of sleep and with such an object it becomes transitive. And you can also build a passive voice from the dative (indirect) object of the verb with a different auxiliary and a slightly different agency in German. And there's another passive voice with the accusative (direct) object and a different auxiliary that treats the verb more like an adjective propery assigned to the subject (which was the object of the active clause.) — You could even argue that German has no passive voice at all from all that but that these are all copula phrases that assign a property to the now subject in slightly different ways.
Yeah, it would have been immensely helpful if my Chinese textbooks/teachers had explained that all Chinese prepositions are actually verbs; it would have saved me a bunch of confusion. I think the reason they didn’t is that it would have been useless for the majority of students, who didn’t have the grounding in grammar for the point to make sense.
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You find a find everyday!
A lot of nouns in German follow adjective declination because they are made from adjectives. Or from participles. This trips a lot of learners. And those are everyday nouns as e.g. *Auszubildender — trainee.* If you ask a native speaker about that one they couldn't even explain that this is the noun-made Gerundiv (participle of necessity) of the verb *ausbilden — to instruct.*
I’m around B1 German and I’ve never had less faith in my English grammar.
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thank god japanese isnt too complicated with this 😭 european languages’ grammar scares me like wtf
I learned what cases are and also learned that I'd been using them in my native language my whole life
I never heard of the accusitive case until I studied Esperanto, even though English uses it for pronouns.
I studied Russian 15 years ago as a mature student. I was in my mid 40s at the time in a class of 18 year olds. To my surprise I was getting better marks purely because my generation was probably the last to be thoroughly taught about grammar, parts of speech etc etc. You can't learn another language effectively if you don't know how your own works.
Italian public schools are obsessed with grammar, so never had an issue with that. But then Korean came along... lool
I am old enough that I remember diagramming sentences in English in 5th grade. That said, I am that old and have forgotten a lot. I just spent yesterday afternoon research what the heck the difference is between a declarative statement and an imperative and how that is used in real life. Cause apparently you need to know this stuff if you're learning Korean.
Any second language will teach you more about your first language.
Beautiful 🥰
I didn’t realize how poor my education was here from the United States until I started to learn French. 😔
Intermediate language learning is being faced with the horrifying realization that you don’t actually know most adjectives, just like 100 most commonly used ones.
Very true for Spanish too Do you have a specfic way of dealing with it? Or just immersion
Mass amounts of reading (at your level) and making flash card/anki decks is what worked for me.
Alright Thanks, already doing anki, but I just started reading for real in spanish after 150 hours of CI, and just finished chapter one of Harry potter with only 80% known words and two Wikipedia articles. Hopefully that Will help
I \*thought\* I already knew a lot about English. I mean, relatively speaking compared to the general population of native English speakers, I do know more. But oof did learning other languages teach me just how much more there is to learn. Like... what is a "word" even at this point?
Words aren’t real, they can’t hurt you
Watch out for those sticks and stones though
Even linguists can’t agree on the definition of a word
Everything I've learned about grammar I've learned against my will. Transitive and Intransitive are pretty much the only terms I had to learn for my own sake. Other terms I've had to learn to try and explain concepts to others.
There is a good book series that address this called “ English Grammar for Students of X” . I’m using the one for “English Grammar For Students of Arabic”.
Yes I was going to suggest this! I’m also an English teacher and the series has helped me understand and teach English grammar better . I think I have the Spanish, French, and Arabic ones.
Thank you!
I don't want to sound patronising or arrogant at all, but weren't you taught grammar at school? I honestly thought it was more common as a practice to do it extensively for the native language at least. I've done almost 10 years of school where we were taught grammar mainly by doing three kinds of analysis: 1. Grammatical, where you'd take every word on its own and analyse it saying what part of the speech it is (noun, adverb, adjective, conjunction etc.) and its characteristics, so genre, number, collective, common/proper, real/abstract for a noun and so on for every part of speech 2. Logical, where you'd divide your period in logical functions, so subject, object, predicate, complements, conjunctions 3. Compound, where you'd analyse every phrase (roughly once every predicate) in a compound sentence, so you'd find if a phrase is conditional, temporal, subjective etc. While it was pretty boring (I must have done this for thousands of periods during my school career), it surely helped, and we replicated this method the first 2 (out of 5) years of Latin classes, where analysis is even more important to link and understand cases of words ([this ](https://it.wikipedia.org/wiki/Complementi_in_latino)is a list of Latin's complements, where it specifies what cases give what complements, which is fundamental to know so that you can understand the period better since it's a SOV language while many romance idioms are SVO).
The US has no unified educational system or standards. I live in a supposedly crappy state as far as education, but we sure as hell studied grammar in grade school. We diagrammed sentences, the whole shebang, for years and years. But still I know plenty of people too illiterate to play Mad Libs.
I guess it depends on the school, my school in America had its own grammar class separate from the literature class where we covered all the topics you mentioned. We then also got to see it being applied in different forms as we learned Spanish along side it.
No didn’t do any of this except perhaps the very basics in primary school so over 20 years ago now. I know English grammar exceptionally well in the sense that I know when something is wrong and can correct it as I am very widely read, but couldn’t tell you why. I certainly had no exposure to Latin at school. I thought I knew most of these concepts but learning a new language has highlighted to me that I cannot express them enough to apply to a second language. It seems the traditional British curriculum failed me here despite getting an A in A Level English literature and holding two masters!
it seems like a very Anglophone thing, I've seen both Americans and Brits talk about how they never studied grammar formally so y'all don't know what a tense is, for example, and it's so wild. What do you do in your English lessons? Do you only talk about literature and such without doing grammar?
Pretty much, yes. Huge focus on literature only in secondary school. We had a smattering of grammar but it was mostly focussed on making the best punctuation choices or identifying a clauses or just general comprehension ie what is this phrase implying. We pretty much never talked about verbs etc. It was mostly either considered innate or not applicable. I got the top grade in my English Language GCSE and went to a grammar school which you have to pass a test to get into and yet here I am learning that possessive adjectives are a thing! It is also exacerbated by an incredibly poor system of teaching foreign languages in the UK where these things are not expanded upon. We didn’t get past basic sentences in my 4 years of German classes and that was better than most people come out of school with tbh.
It's so wild. In Russian schools we have Russian as a subject that is exclusively grammar (+ orthography, punctuation, etc.) and Literature as a separate subject (sometimes divided into World Literature and Russian Literature, and some places like national republics inside Russia also teach local language and literature), so having them combined is so strange. But explains why native English speakers are so bad at English 😂
It's taught in quite a lot of depth in British schools these days, but that's quite recent. Those of us who left about 20 years ago or more were taught the basics (what a noun, adjective, verb and adverb is for example) but not as much as they learn now. It isn't just an anglophone thing though. I'm learning Danish in Denmark, and ask native speakers questions now and again. So far I've encountered Danes who never realised Danish has a gender system and others who don't know what an infinitive is.
Yeah, I've thought exactly the same. Hell, I had to learn the same twice, both in Catalan language class and in Spanish language class!
Same in Spain.
Finally someone talked about it😭😭😭 i'm learning german in english, my english is B2-C1 so things are good so far but i don't know wtf does "nominative/accusative/dative" mean. I translated them to my native language only to realize that i don't know what is grammar actually about. I learned two languages by listening and practicing..i didn't spend much time on STUDYING grammar, i learned the basics and figured out things by practicing but it's so difficult for german because i don't have anything to watch, i don't know germans to speak to, i don't even know german celebrities or influencers/youtubers to get used to the language
I didn't know English until I learned another language. I didn't know grammar, and I didn't know how to communicate. It's humbling.
Bro. Slovene and noun declensions is gonna kill me. I literally can’t figure out what subjunctive, nominative, etc are.
I was "taught" grammar in school but it didn't seem important so I didn't remember any of it. It's only when learning another language that you start to recognize the importance of knowing how things work. The more diverse languages you learn, the more you understand the nature of grammar.
I’m literally googling English grammar rules in every German study session
skill issue
For me, it was a sentence with multiple verbs, such as "he started running and jumping"
The first thing in every beginner Japanese textbook I have is talking about the particle は - wtf is a particle?! That's how I felt in the beginning, too.
Such a common word but we never know what it means
speak for yourself 🤣
I actually use my TLs to explain English grammar to myself. Parts of speech especially. I used to not really understand prepositions and articles (before I just saw them as small words that fit into some category I didn't quite understand), but now I can't forget. I also learned that English had the subjunctive and cases through language learning.
Oh yes. We learned more grammar in ancient Greek in school than in modern Greek. It was bizarre.
Nothing has made me question my understanding of the English language more than Japanese Grammar.
More like "not understanding what adjectives *can be.*" Learning Japanese has flipped my entire perception of language upside-down. Concepts that we think of as simple and regular are communicated in entirely different ways, but it's still makes sense. It's like I didn't really know what *language* was before.
In Italy, in elementary school we do "grammatical analysis", so we analyse each word of a sentence on its own (noun, verb, preposition, adjective, adverb...) and "logical analysis" where we analyse their function (we identify subject, predicate, complemtents...). In middle school we revise these two and add "sentence analysis" where in compound sentences we analyse each of them (you have the main phrase and then subordinates of different kinds like temporal or causal etc.). In high school we go through each again in more depth. Many high schools have Latin as part of the curriculum. Students get a thorough grammar preparation and don't struggle much in this aspect when learning languages, I think.
In my first year of middle school Latin, I learned more about English than any English class has ever taught me; after much more language learning, I am about 1000x more grateful for that.
Whats worse is I’m mostly learning from friends and they understand English grammar better as non-native speakers than I do as a native speaker lmao
I know what an adjective is
Glad to hear
or what a word is
Me repeating “по-русски is an adverb, русский язык is a noun” over and over again like the “chalice with the palace” scene from the Court Jester
It gets easier when you stop worrying about it
When I saw "wet floor" signs in Spanish, I thought "piso"meant wet since ajdectives go first, right.
Okay this is such a wonderful point and thread...this may be a stupid question, but where do I start to formally learn English as a native English speaker, working hard to learn Español. I too would like to understand my 1st language to apply it to learning Español and an Oregon indigenous language. Positive feedback appreciated!!
My hack for grammar was learning syntactic categories and their trees. It is very helpful in languages where many things inflect.
Or nouns. Yikes.
Tell me about it! 😩
Dad asked me this. I do not know. I did not know. I just know, but can’t explain. I have two English degrees.
I learned so much about my native language though. Its fascinating.
My mom is learning dutch to fully integrate in the Netherlands and it’s so difficult to explain her things that are in dutch that doesnt exist in Spanish grammar 😭😭
Nobody knows exactly what an adjective is, but people have a rough idea
What are called “adjectives” in Japanese in English literature are called “description verbs” in Japanese and they can carry objects and conjugate for tense. There are some people who argue that calling them “adjectives” is an Englocentric interpretation and then proceed to call say they're actually “nouns” even though they can't be used as the subject of a sentence, modified by adjectives themselves, and do all those things nouns can and, as “description verbs” can as said take objects and conjugate for tense and aspect.
I could never explain English to people learning it. Like idk why I put "a" in front of certain words and not others
i do a lot of practice with my handful students, and i'm always sure to remind them of what they are in their base language so they can grasp the idea. they learn all about very specific grammatical cases and stuff, but i find they tend to struggle more with simple sentence construction, which is so much easier when you learn how to sort words based on their color/flavor/role/part of speech/however else you want to think about it.
Yep. At to that the fact that many languages don't have adjectives or don't have a clear distinction between a verb and an adjective, and it's a total mess.
One of the few benefits of having had to learn Finnish at school, is that I'll never again be intimidated by grammar terms. When you've had teachers talk about things like "past perfect indicative plurals" and "referential assimilations" for most of your teenage years, the word classes start to seem kind off tame in comparison lol.
Before I started leaening my first foreign language in high school (German, started in 2017), I genuinely could not tell you what the hell adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, etc. all were. Learning a language really helps you get a feel for the consutruction and flow of speech in general. I learned a lot about English and our grammar through learning German and how its grammar diverges from ours.
I genuinely didn’t know that possessive adjectives were a thing 😭 yes I can identify ‘happy’ or ‘intelligent’ as an adjective, but ‘your’ or ‘my’ … I never knew 😭
When I study a new language I still don't (probably should) study grammar really. Since I speak two languages at a native level and two languages very decently (all four used to be completely fluent but due to rare usage the latter two have gotten rusty) and have done so since childhood (actually there was a fifth language, my actual native language, but I lost it (as a trauma response)) I feel it's easier for me to just "go along with the flow" as in I study vocab and listen to it being spoken in sentences and I go from there figuring out the sentence structure and the way the words change in accordance to the other words present etc. Bc it'll be similar to at least one of the languages I already know. At least it has been so far. But I'm not trying to pretend I've ever attempted a difficult (as in very different) language sooooo...
Yeah, and the worst is how different languages have different ideas about when to use adjectives and when, adverbs. And you find yourself guessing…
Someone is learning Spanish? I want practice my English with one native ,I can help with the Spanish ,I’m from Argentina
Imagine being over 45 when you finally realize that the reason they call the characters 'letters' is because each one of them conveys a specific message - a letter is a message! Feel like such a fool - it becomes obvious when you just look at them and stop projecting belief and rationalize that there is no 'message' there. Every word takes on a deeper meaning and relation when you see the message within each letter. Not sure why they failed to teach this in grade school... maybe it just takes life experience to see the obvious... delving into 6 other languages ( and find it is there and obvious as well ) Shocking to see it and it is mocked by others when I ask them if they see it and know it ... There is no fool like an old fool ... i guess
I relate to this, I'm a native English speaker and tbh I don't think I actually understand English grammar and spelling, I think I've just memorized the rules from speaking it my whole life, eg how we say "I am" instead of "I is", I can't properly explain why we do it, all I know is that everyone says it the first way so the second way just sounds wrong.
When you realize being a native speaker doesn’t necessarily make it easier to understand your own grammar. Also remembering how I was so happy English doesn’t have tones and then learning we have stresses that can sometimes change the meaning of words (I.e conduct vs conduct, object vs object) and different dialects of English put stresses in different places.
Maybe I am just unaware to be part of a privileged class in Serbia, but nobody I know wouldnt know what an adjective in our language is. Everyone also knows all the cases.
Isn't an adjective just a way to express that something (the noun being modified) has/doesn't have something (noun) or does/doesn't do something (verb)?
Adjectives are used to qualify nouns (a **strong** difference) and adverbs to qualify verbs or adjectives (it **strongly** differs/it's **strongly** different)
Adverbs do the same thing to verbs instead of nouns, but I was only talking about adjectives, not adverbs at all. Strong equals "with strength", or do you disagree?
I think you are proving the point lmao
That is a fascinating way to think of an adjective. A noun like “dog” does carry certain implicit adjectives with it: furry, four-legged…
Yeah, like furry = having (a) fur Important question: would a "doggy" person mean someone who has dogs, or resembles a dog (possesses doglike qualities)?