We are required to study languages in school but, “studying” is a bit of a misnomer when it comes to language acquisition. Most of us are led to believe that we are required to sit down with an extensive stack of textbooks filled with dense information needlessly sifting through the pages wanting to pull our hair out. I have nothing against textbooks, they can be a great tool in aiding your learning, but this imagery is quite far from the truth. We simply don’t learn effectively when confined to narrow grammatical structures and rely on a single source for information.

The Academic Experience

I am not opposed to learning languages through a more academic approach, but it must be stated that the people that learn languages this way tend to gravitate towards teaching rather than for everyday use. Logically speaking, where else will they use their knowledge distinguishing between transitive and intransitive verbs? If your goal is to become a teacher then more power to you but, for the majority of us, this is not an optimal way to learn.

Humans have migrated great distances and have been required to adapt to new cultures and languages. You can imagine they didn’t achieve their linguistic success through conjugation tables, so why do we do it now? Somewhere along the way, we lost that level of engagement we once had with language learning.

The Role of Grammar

Grammar is not an inherit evil; it is important in its own right. The problem is when we obfuscate its necessity with areas of language learning that far outweigh it. Areas such as:

• Immersive listening
• Immersive reading
• Cultural knowledge
• Vocabulary building
• Speaking and pronunciation
• Writing practice

All these things are more deserving of the majority of our time than us spending on grammar. In an ideal world, we should be spending 10-15% of our time understanding grammatical concepts in the language, but academia would have us believe it should account for 80-90%. Grammar gives us the bigger picture. It shows us how the puzzle should look when solved, but we need to spend time acquiring the pieces more than looking at the final product.

Comparing Conversations

I will take you through the dialogues of two different people who are both learning English and are visiting an English speaking country for the first time. They need to buy a charger for their phone from a clerk. Each has prioritized different things but they both have dedicated the same amount of time learning English. We will get a better understanding on what is more coherent and more foundational to improve off. It’s important to note that this is a contrived conversation just to showcase some of their projected weaknesses from their respective methods.

Conversation A

Imagine you are Learner A, studious, spent most of your time learning through text books and has prioritized learning English grammar more than anything else.

1	Learner A	Hello, excuse me.
2	Store Clerk	Hey, what can I do ya for?
3	Learner A	Uhh, can you repeat that?
4	Store Clerk	What can I do for you?
5	Learner A	Oh! I would like to buy… What is the name? Called… It is called-phone! You put it in a phone.
6	Store Clerk	Not sure I follow.
7	Learner A	Place in phone. It becomes full.
8	Store Clerk	Ahh, you need a phone charger. Right this way

Analysis A

Overall, good effort from Learner A. He clearly has decent knowledge of the language from his studying.

• Line 3: Had difficulty understanding a different question pattern and informal language.
• Line 4: Store clerk repeated in a slower pace, articulated more, and restructured his question to be more easily understood.
• Line 5: You can see the limitations on his vocabulary. He is struggling to recall the word “phone charger” since he has only learned vocabulary through vocab lists in his textbook.
• Line 7: Reverting to mistakes he normally wouldn’t make due to his inexperience in conversation. He is missing the subject, article and object pronoun. “You place it in a phone” is what he should have said. He still conjugates perfect fine.

Conversation B

Learner B is learning through a much more immersive approach. He watches shows and consumes lots of media in English. He doesn’t like learning grammar and avoids it at all costs.

1	Learner B	Hi, excuse me.
2	Store Clerk	Hey, what can I do ya for?
3	Learner B	I want buy phone charger.
4	Store Clerk	Sure, you can find ’em in aisle 8. Need me to come with ya?
5	Learner B	Nah, that’s okay. I’ll get the phone charger myself. Thank you.
6	Store Clerk	No worries. Take care.
7	Learner B	Bye

Analysis B

• Line 2: He has less issues understanding informal speech.
• Line 3: Learner A was more respectful using the conditional “would” and forgets to add “to” but you can see the difference in their ability to recall vocabulary.
• Line 4: Clerk is using more natural informal speech since Learner B has not shown any signs of not understanding.
• Line 5: Change of “No” to “Nah” and his frequent use of contractions shows Learner B is capable of speaking more like natives. He still struggles with using the object pronoun and relies on saying the full object “phone charger”

Overall Analysis

It is apparent that Learner A has a better grasp of word order and can construct more complicated sentences, but Learner B has far greater word recall, listening comprehension, and understanding of casual speech. Learner B has a better foundation that will encourage him to continue to improve but he has equally made mistakes as well. He makes rudimentary grammatical errors that is impeding his ability to reach an even more native-like level. The greater lesson is that, although Learner B is going to progress faster, there are elements in his approach that is missing. Check out my post on how to create a learning routine for more details.