Learning Without Grammar

I would like to know how this actually works. I know some people swear off grammar, saying that they prefer to focus solely on input. But how does this work in practice?

Let’s say you sit down with an article in Russian that you want to read. You look at the first sentence, and only know a few of the words. Do you look up the words you don’t know? If you do look them up, assuming that you’re totally ignoring grammar, how do you deal with the fact that quite a few of the words actually won’t be in your dictionary – at least, not in the form you see them in the sentence? And, assuming you figure out what the base forms of the words are and find their translations, what do you do regarding the word endings? Do you just outright ignore them? Declensions are, after all, a part of grammar.

What about aspect in Russian? You look up the verb of the sentence, and see in the dictionary entry that it’s “perfective.” But that’s a part of grammar, too – so do you ignore it? Do you just run with the base meaning and ignore the fact that if it’s perfective, the meaning of the whole sentence has changed?

At the end of all of this, you’ll have the meanings of various words but possibly be unsure as to why they have different endings than those listed in your dictionary. If it’s a relatively simple sentence, you might be able to get a fuzzy idea as to what it means; if it’s not so simple, you may very well be at a total loss. And then, I assume, you move on to the next sentence and do it again?

Perhaps I just can’t fathom learning like this because I like to have answers to questions I have – and if those answers are readily at hand, I’m all for grabbing them sooner rather than later. That’s not to say I read one word of a sentence and then delve into a massive grammar book. But I don’t much see the point in scratching my head at different word endings for weeks or months on end when I can at least familiarize myself with the basics in an afternoon or two with some grammar explanations.

Am I missing something about the methodology of “input only, no grammar”? If so, could someone explain, please?

Posted in Grammar | 6 Comments

WordPress Encoding Woes

WordPress is starting to really, really annoy me with its text encoding quirks. I’m not sure why, but I’ll post something that has foreign characters in it, and more or less on its own, the foreign text – whether it is umlauts or Cyrillic – gets garbled into weird characters. I’ve tried changing the text encoding setting in WordPress to UTF-8, which doesn’t seem to help. If I change the text encoding in Firefox to UTF-8, though, the garbled text is fixed, and I see what I actually wrote.

Does anyone know how to go about fixing this permanently? Telling people to use a certain browser and set their text encoding to a particular setting isn’t exactly a “fix” in my book.

Posted in All Entries | 4 Comments

Grimm Grammar for German

The Texas Language Technology Center of the University of Texas has a very nice online grammar of German, Grimm Grammar.

A snippet from their about page:

Welcome to Grimm Grammar, an irreverent revival and shameless exploitation of 19th-century Grimm Fairy Tales for honorable pedagogical purposes.  Fortunately for you, Dear Reader, thirty-six characters from these fairy tales have returned to 21st century Germany (their precise location cannot be revealed for privacy reasons) to model all things grammatical … anything the most eager language learner may wish to know about the German language.

This online grammar reference was created for lower-division language courses at the University of Texas, but any beginning or intermediate learner of German may use it completely free of charge, as long as he or she is willing to take a trip to the imaginary world of Grimm Grammar … the characters of which are grumpy and gorgeous, scary and smarmy, witty and wicked!

If you’re getting started in German, check it out; you could probably skip the introductory German grammar book, and instead just wait until you need a copy Hammer’s.

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