Why do we hate grammar?

Grammar…

whether you hate it or love it, we all need it. So, it's best to understand it, or even better, make it your friend!

As a teenager, I asked my Dad to teach me how to drive. He is a very patient guy, so I was sure the lessons would go smoothly. However, there was one little problem: the gears. I can be a little methodical at times, and I wanted my father to give me explicit instructions on how to operate the car. What did he say? He told me to listen to the engine and learn to hear when it was asking me to shift gears. That was as far as we ever got with the driving lessons.

We went back and forth, me trying to convince my Dad that cars can’t express their needs. Him telling me I was being stubborn, which I was. Eventually, he was the bigger man and gave up with the “feel the car” nonsense and explained the functioning of a gear box to me. Like I said, he’s very patient and I’m lucky to have him.

Ten years later, I still can’t drive but I learned a valuable lesson that day: different people have different learning methods. For me in particular, having a structure to rely on mattered a lot.

When I moved to China, I obviously had to start cooking for myself a lot more. Growing up my Mum always made sure we could fend for ourselves, so I knew my way around the kitchen to the necessary degree of competence to not starve; but my repertoire was very limited and hence I got bored of it FAST.

To solve my food dilemma I looked up a few recipes and follow the instructions, chemistry teachers love saying “cooking is like science” and since I love science I thought “well this is gonna be fun and games, I’ll be eating yummy food in no time” … wrong again.

As it turned out, I was awful at following recipes. I got bored halfway through, got annoyed because I didn’t have half the ingredients or simply ended up with something that took me two hours to make but tasted like it took ten minutes. How was that possible? I was supposed to be a methodical person who learned better from clear instructions!?

Well, once again, I learned a great lesson: just because a method worked for you before, doesn’t mean it always will. In the end I figured I had better chances in the kitchen when I just threw together something of my own. Then with a basic understanding of how the ingredients work I would follow any recipes to improve upon my previous attempts. So here I was, “listening to the ingredients” my Dad would be proud, haha.

Let’s take a step back from my stories and see what we can learn from them. When my dad tried teaching me how to drive, he went for a hands on approach, more intuitive and less theoretical, but it didn’t work. I just couldn’t “hear” the engine. A few years later when faced with a new learning challenge, the opposite was true. I tried my methodical approach and it was a disaster. Those ingredients were for sure talking to me! Well then, what happened? Did I change my learning method in those years? Was my brain now wired differently? Do I no longer process information in the same way?

None of the above, what happened to me, and probably to most people who don’t get along with grammar, is that one learning method isn’t “the one for you” unlike what we have been told, you are not a “type of learner”. Let’s get this straight, different learning methods work for different people, YES. However, one learning method doesn’t always work for the same person under different circumstances, what is more, focusing on learning anything by using only one method, makes the task that much harder. How does that apply to learning grammar? Well for that, we need to answer a couple of questions:

You’re not dumb & grammar isn’t too hard.

What is grammar then?

Grammar is a tool, it’s an essential part of language, the instructions that tell us what to put where, when and how, so that the vocabulary we learn can be used to make meaningful sentences and express ideas.

Think about the way we speak, we speak in sentences or phrases. What if I told you to memorise every possible sentence in a new language? Is that possible? Would that make you fluent? Short answer: no. Why? For starters, you’d probably never finish memorising them and then every sentence you learned would only apply to a specific situation, and when taken out of context it would not make much sense.

There is usually a friend in every group that loves quoting movies, but it rarely ever works and when ti does it’s only if everyone listening knows what it’s meant to mean, because it doesn’t convey enough information on it’s own. The reason is that those “sentences/quotes” were thought out and said in a very specific context, by a specific speaker and to a specific listener. That’s why we learn words and then grammar tells us how we can arrange them ourselves to make original sentences, otherwise we’d all just be spatting random sentences that would rarely get us to where we need to be in terms of communication.

Once we put it that way, I think we can all agree the need for grammar in your language learning process is fairly evident. But worry not, I know I still haven’t solved the “it’s confusing and I hate it” side of the argument. Allow me to introduce my next analogy (I love analogies, blame my Mum. Actually, don’t blame my Mum, she’s the best, she taught me to use analogies)

Have you ever heard of Legos? (see, I got jokes too!) Anyways, I’ve loved playing with Legos since I was a kid. They usually come with a little instructions manual for you to build the cool model from the box that caused you to buy them in the first place. The Legos are the words and the manual is grammar. Imagine if when you were little I took the manual from you and instead gave you a long and complicated, word by word, book with written instructions of how to build the Lego models. Would you still enjoy doing it? The Danish giant would probably go out of business if they replaced their pretty, colourful, uncomplicated guides with the book I described. The money is in the presentation, there is a reason why chefs learn to plate their food.

Where teachers fail at presenting grammar at marketing. The people at Lego know how to make their instructions cool, fun and simple. Teachers, on the other hand, tend to try and force students to just memorise the structures, recite the exceptions and then test them on that. This is boring, ineffective and makes people hate grammar, so the good news is you don’t actually have a problem with grammar, you just have a problem with the way it has been presented to you in the past.

What can you do then? Go find the grammar rules of your target language and re-frame the way you are trying to learn them. Make them fun, cool and simple; whatever that means for you, remember what we talked about earlier, not all methods are created equal, some work for some circumstances and others for other things. Just try and try until one or more feel right and click.

Do you throw away instruction manuals?

In my country we have a joke, that a real Costarican believes themselves to be an expert mechanic, football coach and politician and that none of us has ever read an instruction manual! I don’t know how well this joke translates to your culture, but I am pretty certain that most of us, not just Costaricans, never read the instruction manuals.

Any time we buy a new item, specially tech related ones, we tend to throw away the manual together with the box it came in and never look at it. I get it, it’s boring and we just wanna enjoy our new purchase, but the problem is, sooner or later we will not know how to do something essential, like how to adjust the brightness of the new flat screen or how to change from HDMI to USB-c input.

That’s when we will need that manual that we didn’t bother keeping, let alone reading. And yes, of course you can just google it or find a tutorial on YouTube, but if you had read it, this wouldn’t have been a problem and you wouldn’t have to stop what you were doing to have to go learn this thing you had the chance to know upfront.

That is exactly how grammar works. One day, there you are, having your first full conversation with a new friend in your target language and then BAMM! you don’t remember how to say something. What to do then? Well if you don’t throw away the manual at the beginning, take a bit of time and read them and review them every now and again, when the time comes to show, you’ll have the tools you need to find a way out of that situation. Of course you will always forget how to say certain things, but if you are familiar with your toolbox, building a new sentences on the spot won’t be much of an issue.

Can you ride a bike?

When children learn how to ride a bike, they usually rely on their parents to hold them. If not, they will lose balance and the fun will end with taking a nose first dive onto the pavement. However, eventually they will have to try on their own. If they obsess over not falling and someone keeping them safe, they’ll never enjoy riding on two wheels on their own.

In a very similar manner, if you obsess over grammatical rules and are afraid of making mistakes and embarrassing yourself, you will never be able to ride on two wheels. Hence, while I do urge students to learn and give grammar some much needed love, obsessing is not in the cards. At some point, you will have to let go of the safety net of trying to speak perfectly and take a dive to the pavement of being corrected. When it happens, take it with humour, shake it off and get on your way!

Now that you know how to befriend grammar, go on, learn Spanish, English, Mandarin, Cantonese, French, Japanese, Italian… and make lots of friends, in lots of different languages and tell them about how silly you were, when you used to think it was your fault you didn’t like grammar!

Till the next one, thanks for reading!

By J. Eduardo Ramirez H. for LangTECH Academy.