Don’t Bother Studying Grammar

Throw away the basics. Throw away everything you thought you knew about learning a language from school. All those mindless hours studying & pretending to care - throw it away. You won’t need it where we’re going.

Practice in Context vs Studying

Let’s be clear here: you will learn grammar. You just won’t be mind-numbingly stuffing into your tired little brain like I used to do. Instead, you’ll learn grammar in context.

Input through Listening & Reading

That’s right. Just sit back & immerse yourself in the language. Either stick your toes in the shallow end & ease in sentence by sentence or take a dive & swim in the deep end. Let go of right & wrong - they don’t exist here. Your success - your fluency - is crafted through a process of your own, unlike any other.

Try the tips & tricks. Try the best strategies & habits. Just try & keep trying. See yourself as a fluent speaker in the not so distant future. See this version of yourself & hold onto this image. Keep it in a safe place in your mind. Hold it as a high intention & don’t let it go. Your efforts to learn & your belief that you can are enough to lead you along your path to fluency.

You’ll learn grammar naturally through listening & reading without even realizing it’s happening. It’ll come out in your speaking & writing imperfectly perfect as you learn from your mistakes, guiding you into grammar lessons you could never have planned. The unplanned grammar lesson works because:

You’re ready to understand this concept at this specific time. You’ve already seen the concept in practice, tried to use it and are naturally curious about it. That natural curiosity guides you to the appropriate explanation, resource, lesson. Then you absorb the information easily because you desire to know it.

Whereas, traditional drill & kill grammar approaches consume much more time & effort, are downright boring and overall less effective because of their rigidity.

You conjugate verbs for hours, writing them over & over & over again, reading them out loud, you even make sentences with them and study those too. Then you try to have a conversation & the first thing you think about is stem changes & tenses. You’ve learned more grammar than you have the ability to use so you either are slow to respond or revert back to your native language.

Those hours of learning are better spent practicing listening & reading even when you can’t say at the end of the study session exactly what you’ve learned. But it isn’t so important to be able to categorize every practice & effort into grammar or vocabulary, listening or speaking. What is important is how well you can apply what you’ve learned when you need it in a conversation.

Output through Speaking & Writing

Speaking is harder than listening. Writing is harder than reading. But that’s okay, because we can do hard things when we believe we can. We’ve chosen the learn grammar without studying approach, and now we find ourselves learning it when we produce sentences in our target language.

We imitate what we’ve heard & read - but it’s not quite the same. The words and phrases work their way through our brains and come in entirely new utterances of the sentences we create. All the foreign sounds our minds have been absorbing gradually come into focus as we begin speaking & writing - full of mistakes - on our path to fluency.

Sometimes we’re able to communicate clearly and others we’re not quite sure how, but we keep trying - we keep improving through relentless practice. We get curious about our mistakes and start investigating why we’re making them & how to correct them - we learn grammar on the way.

Imagine you’re telling your friend about what you did today (in your target language), and you use the wrong verb tense or - even better embarrass yourself with a false cognate! She chuckles and asks for clarification. You try to explain using other words you know - unsuccessfully - then resort to looking up word you actually need. You struggle through the conversation and put it to rest. Then later, you remember this painful speaking moment & decide to look up the word again. You find a page full of different ways to use it. One of the those ways looks really interesting, so naturally, you click on it. You read it, then find some other related language topic that comes to mind as your doing this. Before you know it, you’ve been reading about language usage for half an hour. Who knew you could lose track of time learning grammar!

You may even find that learning through immersion spurs a desire to study grammar. After all, it’s not the studying of grammar itself that is ineffective, it’s (1) the desire and motivation behind studying - it’s not as effective when you’re drilling it into your brain mindlessly and (2) the ratio of fluency practice listening, speaking, reading, and writing to studying - grammar role is to enhance your ability to communicate, not to be the foundation.

Bonus Grammar Tips

If you’re taking a college course, and you have to learn primarily with a grammar first approach, dedicate time during your breaks fluency practicing with speaking, listening, reading, writing in a way that you enjoy learning.
If you’re not taking a course, create your own language learning routines and habits that get you excited to practice consistently. Take your time & have fun.
Use apps like Duolingo - there’s tons of language specific apps out there, find one you like and be consistent about using it. I’ve completed Duolingo for 2 languages so far (Spanish & French). It’s my go to app for learning basic fluency.
Work with a tutor. Especially, if you have been practicing on your own for a while and want to fluency practice speaking. A conversation tutor can help you start speaking & identify mistakes and areas of improvement for you to focus on.
Writing. Write anything you can in your target language. Make a journal, use a workbook, copy sentences from a YouTube video & translate them. Find a way that’s fun - or at least not miserable - and be consistent about practicing. Writing is especially valuable fluency practice because you can see your mistakes & progress.
Get creative & experiment! Try different strategies you find & even ones you make up. There’s are no rules to how you learn grammar.