Grammar as The Soul of The English Language
Learning a new language can be many things: memorizing new words, understanding foreign movies and foreign music, meeting foreigners, playing fun games, enrich our unique culture, exercising our brains, or getting a new job, but overall learning a new language is structuring our thoughts in a new different form. Speaking a new language means thinking about our communication with new structures. Those structures are called language grammar. Thus grammar is the soul of the language.
This post was written by our TEFL certification graduate Luis A. Please note that this blog post might not necessarily represent the beliefs or opinions of ITTT.
What's it like learning a foreign language
When a student begins to study a new foreign language, they will realize that speaking a new language is replacing the words in a sentence of his/her native language for the same terms of the foreign language. Language is composed of thousands of words, and the structures in which we place those words are the grammar. I believe that understanding those structures is more important than memorizing hundreds of words. Learning grammar is not a memory skill but a constant brain exercise because, in every sentence and every thought we make, we have to be structuring the words correctly. I believe that grammar and its structures are the real language, not just memorizing its thousands of words.
At the moment when a language learner is capable of understanding grammar, he/she has done it! After 15 years of learning and speaking English, sometimes I still have to review some grammar rules to make my English more solid. Grammar is like the trunk of a tree, so it must be strong and straight; the vocabulary is like the leaves of that tree, they must be placed in a specific part of the branches of the tree, we can't put the trunk on the plates, but we can put the leaves on the trunk.
Communication
In those 15 years of living in a cosmopolitan environment, I have spoken with people from many countries and listened to many accents. I can tell that the foreigners who better talk to English are not those with better pronunciation, or those whose native language is closer to English but better understand grammar because they structure the language very well, it becomes easier to understand them and talk to them.
Sometimes, when we form a sentence, we can have the right structure of the sentence, but we don't know the word for a noun or a verb. We replace it with a name in our native language. The listener will understand our message correctly. That's because we use correct grammar, so our sentence's soul is right, then we can communicate in that foreign language. As an English language teacher, I believe that my core mission is to make students master grammar. For me, doing grammar exercises is even fun.
What is Grammar
Grammar is composed of hundreds of rules and formulas for producing language. Learning grammar will train our brains continuously, it will always push us to make some brain effort, it will challenge our ability of fluent, logical operations, and when we master it, it will open a lot of doors of opportunities for us in many senses: socializing with people from other countries, reading books that are not translated into our native languages, studying in foreign schools, getting a job, etc.
Learning grammar can be very challenging sometimes. It's like the mathematics of the language. The first lesson that a language student must take must be reading the very basics of grammar. I would emphasize that part of the language before going on pronunciation, writing, or speaking. That's why I have chosen this subject in the art of learning a new language because grammar is the soul of a language.
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