How to Learn a Foreign Language (6 page)

C
an grammar be fun? Well, almost… At least interesting.

We all remember sitting through tedious sessions of English grammar in school. It seemed almost impossible for that to be interesting, right? But learning the grammar of a foreign language is different. The grammar is really the skeleton of the language. A language, after all, consists of basically two things.

You never really needed to study English grammar to learn how to talk. You already knew the grammar when you started talking. But how did you learn grammar? Not out of any book, that's for sure. And your parents probably never really taught you much actual grammar, either. You learned grammar by
hearing it used
all around you all day long.

Let's talk a little bit about how small children learn their own language. It's important because it tells us something about how every one of us learned our first language. That will give you a few ideas about how to to go about learning a foreign language.

There are great debates among language specialists about how children learn a language. For a while a lot of experts thought that children spoke only by repeating specific things that they had heard. This theory suggested, in effect, that kids learn to speak by being little tape recorders. In theory they would hear a phrase, and then at some later time they would spew that same sentence forth again under different circumstances.

But if you think about it for one minute—or if you have ever spent much time around your own child or a little brother or sister—you would know that this theory is not quite right. Even a child of two knows some grammar rules—unconsciously. Have you ever heard a young child say something like, “I
singed
a song.”? Has he ever heard anyone utter such a phrase? No, never, simply because no native speaker of English over five years old would ever say such a thing.

Then why did the child say it? Because he had already heard enough sentences in his short life to have figured out a few grammar rules on his own. He figured out that if you are using the past tense—the term we use in grammar to describe something that has already happened—that you put a “-ed” on the end of the word. What that child had not been around long enough to know was that some verbs are “irregular”, that is, they don't quite follow the rules. The child had heard sentences like “I walked the dog”, or “I slammed the door”, or “It rained a lot yesterday”, so he assumed you would do the same thing with “I singed a song.”

Another example: A young child might say, “My cat caught three mouses.” Now, that child has never heard anyone say “mouses.” But he has absorbed the grammar rule that when you've got more than one of something you put an “-s” on the end. So he's applying a rule that nobody ever told him about.

Actually, the way a child learns his first language is a fairly good method. In fact, if you're a small child, there is probably no better way to learn a language than that way. And it's virtually painless. But alas, it's not so practical for us to learn a language that way now.

Why not? First of all, it takes about four or five years of around-the-clock study for a child to learn to speak the grammar correctly. You don't have time for this type of total immersion learning. We've all got much better things to do with our time. Second, for an adult, it is rather a pain to learn a language by listening to thousands upon thousands of sentences and then trying to figure out the grammar rules by example. There must be easier ways.

There are. As grown-ups, we can take advantage of our brains and our power of logic. We can learn the grammar in a more organized way than the child does. For example, after hearing one or two examples of sentences in a foreign language someone can tell us, “OK, when you have a sentence like this in the present tense and you want to make it past tense, all you do is ……………………” (depending on the language).

Let's go back to the old tape recorder again. I've already mentioned that you should never leave home without it. You should spend a lot of time listening to tapes and memorizing sentences and phrases.

Now you should see why tape recorders are so important.
Listening to the tape recorder is the adult equivalent (only in a less haphazard way) of being the child and listening to adults chattering around you all day long.
It puts patterns of language into your head in an organized way so that they become second nature. When these patterns have become etched in your mind, you can learn how to play around with them, to make variations on the patterns.

If you ever had to learn a foreign language “the old-fashioned way,” you might recall that you had to learn long lists of verb endings—as mere rules and without any conversational drill. (A screaming bore and not
necessarily all that useful.) An up-to-date language course will let you learn a few hunks of pattern sentences at a time—learning them cold. Then you can learn something about the grammatical rules. These rules let you “manipulate” the grammar (a word linguists love to use—it just means play around with the grammar to change the meaning of the words you have learned.)

Learning the grammar is a bit like driving a car or learning how to use any other complex machine. It might be fine for you to know how to steer a car down the road in third gear if somebody shows you how. But nobody can really consider that he knows how to drive a car until he has learned to “manipulate” all parts of the car. You will want to know how to use the brakes and the other gears and a lot of other important things before you really feel comfortable in the car.

It's the same with a language. You can learn a lot of words and sentences, but until you know how to use these words in lots of different ways and change them all around, you can't really consider that you know the language very well. You don't really know how to “drive” the language yet.

We all tend to think of grammar as meaning how to speak “correctly.” But grammar rules are
not
basically designed to make people speak correctly. They are designed to help people
get their meaning across
accurately and clearly. They are meant to be shortcuts, or operating rules, that help you put together the words. They save you the hassle of having to painfully decide for yourself how you make a word plural or how to say that you “did” something instead of “are doing” something.

If a foreigner were learning English, for example, he would have to learn how to use various forms of the English verb. He would study sentences like “I
go
to London. I
went
to London.
Did
you
go
to London?
He would have gone
to London.
Were
they
going
to London? When
will
she go to London? You
have gone
to London.” Believe me, after you get done with that type
of practicing you are positively carsick. But you will have learned a lot about the verb “to go” and how to use it.

The fact is that a huge list of words is not much good
if you don't know how all the words go together.
You might be able to blurt out enough words in some crude way that will get across your basic needs. But your goal here is not to sound like a caveman—”Me go London.” “Give food.” You hope actually to be able to talk like a reasonably educated person. That means knowing how the words go together—or what we call the grammar.

When you learn the grammar you are getting “inside” the language. You are starting to figure out how people of that country actually use their mental processes to express themselves. The grammar is really the key to this new world you are entering. It describes the set of building blocks that is unique in every language. It is the “secret code”—the concepts in which Frenchmen or Russians or Arabs or Burmese think.

Pay close attention to this part of the process. You will be surprised—maybe fascinated—at the
distinctions
that other languages take great care to spell out, which in English
we
don't care so much about. Or at the distinctions in English which we seem to care about expressing but which another language doesn't. Let me give you some examples:

Speakers of Russian, French, Turkish and many other languages
change the endings of the verb
to indicate whether it is “I” who am talking about myself (so-called “first person”), or if I am addressing “you” (“second person”), or if I am talking about some third person—“he” or “she.” So a Russian would use these endings in a verb in the present tense:

A Turk would do it this way:

But if you use the word “I”,” you”, or “he”, what need is there to have to put an extra “ending” on the end of the verb? Good question. In English we don't do it that way any more. (Old English did.) But in Russian, or Turkish, you
have to do it that way
because that's the way the language works. The ending on the verb
has to indicate who it is that is talking.
If you put the wrong ending on the verb you will completely confuse your listener because the wrong ending might mean “I vomit” instead of “you vomit”—a distinction in which you might have an interest. (And the verbs in a great number of other languages you're likely to study work that way too.)

But hold on. Even in English we did make one change. We suddenly put an “-s” on the end of the “he” form. We can say “I know, you know”, but “he knows”. Why? Because that's the way English works. The third person form always has to have an “-s” ending. Furthermore, it's not correct without it. Sure, you could understand it without the “-s” on the end—“he go”. But that's not the way the language works. And it sounds like Tarzan.

Actually there is a reason why most languages—even Old English—put endings on verbs to denote “person”. The point was that the actual verb—without the pronouns “I”, “you”, or “he” or whatever—could be used by
itself.
In Russian today you can use just the one word “
znayete
” and it's clear that you mean “you know” without actually using a second word “
vy
”
meaning “you”. Before dismissing verb endings as “un-English” and impossible to master, take a look at Shakespeare or even at the Bible. You'll find lots of phrases like “thou knowest” and “whither goeth John.” These don't give us a problem there, so we shouldn't be bothered by verb endings in foreign languages. Our own language simplified itself many hundreds of years ago so it doesn't draw those distinctions anymore, except in the “he” “she” “it” form where it keeps the ancient “-s” ending.

But then from the point of view of some other languages, English is fussy where they are not: In Chinese they say “one book, two book, many book”, while in English we have to put an “-s” on the end of each word to show it is plural: “one book”, but “two books, many books”. The Chinese asks, “Why do you need to put an “-s” on the end of the word when the words “two” and “many” already clearly indicate that there is more than one book anyway?” The Chinese would be right—from his point of view. But you have to remember that languages are never intrinsically logical. And each speaker of a language thinks the way that
other people
speak their language is illogical, complicated or unnecessary.

Both Arabic and Hebrew have different words for “you” (to a man), and “you” (to a woman), in addition to a difference in verb ending. An English speaker would say, “That's completely unnecessary. One word “you” does perfectly well for both.” Who's right?

The Turks have just
one
word for “he”, “she”, and “it”. They look at English and say, “Why do you have three different words for these things when one word does perfectly well for all of them?”. Japanese and Javanese (Indonesia) regularly distinguish between levels of politeness by the verb they use.

The fact is, you can't really spend time arguing about such matters. That's just the way they are. But it is interesting to see how thought processes differ from language to language—and country to country. That's what languages are all about. And that's why language
study teaches us so much about foreign cultures, and about our own language as well. Things that we take for granted as “natural” turn out not to be natural at all, but simply the way that we do things.

1. Grammar is the skeletal structure that links words together and gives them full meaning.

2. Correct grammar is not so much designed to create elegant speech as it is to make clear what the relationship is among words. This is why we have to learn it.

3. Each language makes its own sharp distinctions. You need to be ready to: a) learn new distinctions that we don't make in English, and b) ignore the distinctions we make in English that are not there in the foreign language.

A
n the last chapter we talked about what grammar is, and how—even as small children—we can know it without having to study it. We saw that each person feels his own language says things the “natural” way. We also talked a little about word endings—especially on verbs. In this chapter we're going to take a longer look at endings: specifically at how some languages put different endings on
nouns.

One key difference between English and many other languages is that some others fuss a lot with the ends of nouns. In English, whether you've ever realized it or not, we rely largely on
word order
to convey meaning. “The dog bites the cat” and “The cat bites the dog” have very different meanings. So what? Everyone knows that if you change the word order you change the meaning.

But for a lot of other languages this simply isn't so. They depend largely on
endings
on the words to make the meaning clear. In Russian, for example, it is quite possible to reverse the order of “dog bites cat” to “cat
bites dog” and still mean exactly the same thing: the cat got bitten. Why? Because in Russian the word order isn't all that important. In Russian you have to put an
ending
on the nouns to indicate which is the
subject
and which is the
object,
that is, who is the “biter”, and who is the “bitee”.

How? In Russian a large body of nouns end in “-a” when the word is the subject (or “biter”) of the sentence. That same noun changes its ending to “-u” when it becomes the object of the sentence (or the “bitee”). So the word
“koshka”
(cat) becomes
“koshku”
when it moves from “biter” to “bitee”. In the same way
“sobaka”
(dog) becomes
“sobaku”
when it becomes the one that gets bitten. So in Russian it really doesn't make much difference exactly what the word order is, the meaning is still the same. In Russian,
Sobaka kusayet koshku
and
Koshku kusayet sobaka
both mean “The dog bites the cat.” But in English word order makes the crucial difference about who gets bitten.

Of course, not all of you will be studying languages in which the word order is as unimportant as it is in Russian. But many languages in the world behave in the same way, preferring to use signals or codes, or endings—or whatever you want to call them—at the end of words to signal to you about who is doing what to whom. Other languages which do this to some extent or another include German, Latin, Greek, nearly all the Slavic languages (Polish, Czech, Serbian, etc.) Turkish, Persian and hundreds of other more obscure ones.

English, French and Spanish, have almost totally dropped these endings on nouns yet still cling on to them when it comes to pronouns—those little words that “stand in” for nouns. In English we make a distinction between most subject and object pronouns:

Subject Pronouns:
I you he she it we they

Object Pronouns:
me you him her it us them

Boy chases girl.

He chases her.

We don't say “He chases she.”

We've just talked about one kind of ending here, the ending used to denote the
subject
of the sentence as opposed to the direct
object.
But many languages have more than just that one kind of ending, or “case”. Another very common case is called the
genitive
case, or more commonly in English grammar, the
possessive
case. As you might guess, it is the ending that denotes possession.

We have an ending to denote possession in English, just as do most of the Germanic languages, Slavic languages, and many others in the Indo-European family (but not the Romance languages for some reason). In English the ending is “-'s” (apostrophe s). “The dog's bone” means “the bone of the dog.” In fact, “the bone of the dog” is the
only
way you can express it in Romance languages like French or Spanish. Many other languages that use the possessive case, however, prefer to put it the other way around, by saying “the bone dog's” which means, “the bone of the dog.”

In still other languages, endings tacked onto nouns take the place of separate English prepositions, such as “to” “from” and “at”. Turkish nouns provide a good example. Every noun in Turkish can have the following case endings attached to it.

From this you can see what the word “grammar” really means. In these examples it has nothing to do with “correct” speech. It has to do with getting the meaning right. If you use a wrong grammatical ending
here, you're not inelegant, you're plain not understood.
The grammar rules are designed to make the relationships among words clear.
That's why we have to pay close attention to the grammar rules of the foreign language we study.

The language you study may not have case endings on the nouns (French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, for example, don't), but most languages do use some of them. Be prepared for them and try to appreciate why it's so important to get them right.

All of this may be interesting, you say, but it also makes for a lot more work in learning these languages. You're right. But once again let's remember how different people see all these changes. We see German or Russian grammar forcing us into extra labor to demonstrate relationships among words which we English speakers express more simply.

But a Chinese thinks that
our
English grammar rules are a terrible nuisance. He sees us adding “-s” to make a word plural, or having different words for “he” “she” and “it”. And “he” changes to “him”, “she” changes to “her”. He complains that we change all our verbs around from “go” to “went” to “gone”, “goes”, “going”, and so on. Chinese has almost no endings. It just brings in new words to change meaning; perhaps the ultimate in streamlined language. Different strokes for different folks.

Drill, repetition of sentences, use of the material—all of these exercises will make a tremendous difference. It's no good just to learn a list like the one I showed you in Turkish. You've got to hear these endings, practice using them yourself in many different sentences and contexts. They've got to start feeling natural to you—almost second nature. Nothing can replace the tape recorder or classroom drill and conversation practice until you get these endings down cold. If you don't really understand them and feel comfortable with them, it's best not to go on until you do. It's like not digesting a meal properly. It only makes things worse if you go
on to eat more on top of an undigested hunk of grammar.

1. Grammar is essential because it tells us precisely what the relationship is among words.

2. Many languages, unlike ours, express grammatical relationships among words by means of word endings. For example, something on the end of the word changes to let us know whether the word is the subject or the object of the action.

3. Additional endings may be used on nouns to indicate possession, or location, or motion towards or from the noun.

4. Some languages go in for the use of endings on nouns more thoroughly than others. Russian loves them, German somewhat less, English, French and Chinese, scarcely at all.

5. Use of the wrong ending, that is, bad grammar, is simply confusing because it makes the relationships among the words unclear or it gives an unintended meaning.