[ffuxlpff]

Your command and understanding of the grammar of your native language puts a hard limit to how well you can learn other languages. This has not been stressed enough and schools have all but given up trying to teach children grammar because as natives they more or less get along without it.

[eszed]

On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language. I mean, I used standard English intuitively, but couldn't have told you any of the technical terms. I agree with modern educators that explicit grammar instruction beyond a very, very basic level should not be a high priority. Exposure to and guided close reading of complex texts sharpens grammatical intuition, right alongside all of the other benefits of an advanced reading level. Knowing deep grammar does not so automatically improve textual interpretation.

This is speculation, but I wonder if the period of emphasizing explicit grammatical instruction wasn't an accidental interregnum. That is to say, back in the days when Latin and/or Greek were part of the ordinary curriculum students learned grammar much as I did, as a "natural" excelerant to interpreting a foreign tongue. Once those languages were dropped educators noticed students couldn't do grammar analysis anymore, and so tried teaching it directly, without fully considering when and why it might be useful. I don't know how well the dates line up, but it would be interesting to look into.

[AnonymousPlanet]

> On the other hand, I only learned (my native) English grammar by studying another language.

This is one of the reasons why Latin is tought. You learn transferring a gramatically hard language into your own, having to learn the ins and out of your own language's grammar. No grammatically complex situation in your own language can fluster you afterwards.

[eszed]

Agree. That's how / why students best learn grammar: for / through a practical purpose. (Deciding the practicality of Latin must remain an exercise for the reader.)

[Tomte]

I learned (an academic expression of) German grammar at university, in computational linguistics. There was a class „Syntax I“, and it had us break down phrases and sentences in a graphs, a (constituent) C structure and a (functional) F structure.

Best class I ever had!

[eszed]

Yeah, I loved my university-level grammar class, which I took as a requirement for a TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages) certification. But I was able to speak and read and write at an extremely advanced level long before that. In fact - though I got a private kick out of breaking down sentences, and it certainly was a help teaching second-language speakers - I don't think it helped my own ability to express myself in English in any way. Grammar's fun for nerds, and useful for adult language acquisition, but not worth the time it takes to teach to the general population.

[HPsquared]

I too enjoy mentally putting parentheses around parts of speech.

[AnonymousPlanet]

You'd probably like the way Thomas Mann uses language then (not parentheses but subordinate clauses, or nebensatz).

[davidgh]

This. When I first started learning Russian, we immediately jumped into basic grammar rules. After two weeks of incredible frustration, I realized I did not have sufficient mastery of English grammar to be able to establish a framework for understanding Russian grammar. I often say that my first two months of learning Russian were spent learning English and it is not a joke.

[culebron21]

Interesting. We had a lot of grammar parsing of Russian since the 2nd grade of school. Especially we analyzed parts of speech and constituents. For the latter, we'd underline words in sentences in different ways.

It's so widespread that today if you want to play word guessing with gestures, and you have several words, you just imitate that underline style, and everybody understands it. (Just remembered, we also did a lot of word analysis, marking up prefix, root, suffixes and ending, and everyone knows this markup too.)

[tguvot]

in all countries where i lived, schools where I studied, there was heavy investment in grammar. (no, i didn't study in usa).

I won't really agree that mastering grammar of native language limits on how well you can learn other languages. Maybe it matters in the way how it taught in college, when you are older and approach to learning language is "more structured". But when I learned Georgian at age of 6 and Hebrew at 12 (through very deep immersion. Teachers spoke only Hebrew), English at 14 (I had 5 months of private lessons following by dial-up connection to mostly english internet), it didn't matter. At least not for me.

There was also this interesting phenomena, that immigrant when they went to local school, their scores in hebrew grammar classes were usually higher than those of native speakers.