Can You Speak a Foreign Language Well Without Studying Grammar?

Do you need grammar to speak?

Well, the quick answer is no.

In my opinion, I tend to agree with Stephen

Krashen that

grammar can be a hindrance, it can be a help.

It can explain things to us.

It can explain things that we have already experienced in the language.

It can show us examples of different patterns that we can then use.

However, if we try to remember the grammar, if we

try to second-guess ourselves,

then grammar becomes what Stephen Krashen calls the "affective filter."

It's something that emotionally we start to doubt whether what we would

normally retrieve as easy to use, or patterns that we're comfortable using.

And we do it on the fly while we're speaking.

And now we start to say, well, "Is this correct?" and we want to pass it

through this filter of grammar.

"Is this correct?"

And basically that inhibits us in our speaking.

It's like the proverbial centipede, you know, a hundred feet.

If it has to think about which foot to put forward, the left

foot or the right foot, pretty soon the centipede can't walk.

So grammar has its role.

Some people actually like grammar, so that's fine.

But if the goal is to speak well, some people think you need to focus on grammar

in order to speak well. I don't think so!

It gets back to the example of the chess player.

Someone who knows the rules is no match for someone who has

vast experience playing chess.

So the question then is, first of all, what is meant by speaking?

What do we... what happens when we speak? Before getting into the

question of what "speaking well" means,

let's just consider what speaking entails.

Speaking entails, as I mentioned in my last video, speaking entails planning.

We actually have to plan the utterance, what we're going to say.

And planning it draws on our memory.

And planning and memory come from the same part of our brain, and when we

speak, apparently, we begin by grabbing

easy to use words or structures that we're very comfortable with.

This is if we're speaking in a foreign language; I presume maybe in our own

languages we use those things that we're comfortable starting with.

That gives us time to plan the next thing we're going to say. And we also

reuse structures that we're comfortable using, that have worked for us before.

So there are three elements.

One is easy to use items.

The second is planned reuse, but the third one is, suppressing things that don't fit.

So that can be words that sound similar, but they're not appropriate words that

have a similar meaning, but are not exactly what we want in this context.

Or it could be patterns from our own language.

So I've noticed that Swedish people typically will say "It is many trees

in the forest" instead of "There are," because that's the pattern in Swedish.

German people will say, "I have been living in the United States since many

years," but in fact it's "for many years." Because in German, that's the pattern.

So when we're speaking, we need to pull from our memory words that

we are very comfortable using, the easy to use things to get started.

We then reuse structures that worked before, but we suppress words or

patterns that don't work. And that apparently when they measure what

happens in the brain, that's what we do.

So obviously we need a vast repertoire of

We need a lot of memory experience, words, patterns that work in the language.

So that's when we speak.

What do we mean by speaking?

Well at LingQ, I used to tutor English 15 years ago.

And at that time we kept statistics.

We had sort of types of errors that people made. Because at that time, I thought it

would be useful to point out to a learner,

"You had X percent was singular/ plural, X percent was wrong tense,

X percent was something else."

And for each language, we had these categories.

Well, overwhelmingly—and I even did correct some people in French—

overwhelmingly, the biggest problem was incorrect word usage.

In other words, it wasn't so much that it was grammatical mistakes,

it was that the words they used together are words that normally in

English we wouldn't use together.

And after all, when we say "speak well," we're not talking about some

theoretical, logical way that the language should be used.

Many of those sort of structures in other languages that interfere with us when

we're speaking a new language,

they're logically fine in their language:

double negatives, or "it is many trees in the forest."

It's fine logically, but that's just not how the language is used.

So the most common type of error is using words that don't belong together.

There is a term, "colocation," which talks about words that

are normally found together.

There are so many potential colocations.

I don't think it's worthwhile studying a list of colocations.

It's a matter more of being exposed to so much of the language that you naturally

feel that certain words belong together.

Another aspect of speaking well, and as I say, I'm going to leave

pronunciation out of the equation.

I might do a separate video on pronunciation.

I think you can speak the language very well and have

an obvious accent.

The two issues are different.

But if we say "speaking well," what do we mean by speaking well?

We mean using words with precision.

So if we talk about "language acquisition" and we have the verb "acquire."

Now there are many similar words.

I mean, there is the word "get," which is a very general and

therefore not a very precise word.

There is the word "obtain."

But we "obtain satisfaction."

We "acquire a language."

We "get fed up."

In other words, there are so many examples of how the accurate way to use a given

word and one that is natural. Because our goal is to be natural in the language.

Now, what is natural in Quebec may not be natural in France, in

so far as French is concerned.

What is natural in Scotland may not be natural in Australia. But there

is a natural form of the language.

That is valuable to us because those are the people we want to communicate with.

And in order to become a good speaker, and therefore to speak naturally and to speak

well, you have to have a large vocabulary.

You have to be able to use words precisely, and you have to be able to

use words that naturally belong together.

And even if you create a sentence which is

logical grammatically, but the wrong words are used,

I don't consider that speaking well.

So the grammar, these rules and reading up on the rules, there's

nothing wrong with doing that.

It's possible that if you read a grammar book, and I would recommend reading a

grammar book in the target language, and if this grammar book has lots of examples,

that can help provide you with this

inventory of phrasing that you can draw on when you're planning your utterance. But

ultimately you have to develop a natural reflex so that when you go through this

process of planning your utterance, that you have a natural ability to bring out

easy to use words, structures that work, and you suppress those things that don't work.

So you won't be surprised to hear that

I think that input is the key

to speaking well. Bbut input and output are intricately connected.

So just as when we speak, we're drawing from our memory and we're

planning what to say and we're trying to anticipate what we're going to

use. When we are listening or reading,

we are also active.

We are also anticipating what's going to come at us.

That has been proven in the studies they do, the ERP

studies of the brain and so forth.

So the two activities are interrelated, but it still boils down to spending

enough time reading and listening that you develop this ability

to produce the language. And

reading and listening are a little different.

First of all, when you are speaking, of course you're practicing speaking,

of course you are listening to what the other person has to say, and of

course, that's a valuable thing to do.

And as you develop a stronger and stronger base in the language, you

want to speak as much as you can, as often as you can without worrying

about how you do, because you will gradually improve if you keep speaking.

However, when it comes to the input activities, reading and listening

are a little different. Listening,

and especially if you're listening to something that grabs you, like an audio

book, a story that creates sort of an emotional connection to the language.

It can also happen in reading, but reading is a little bit different.

There's the sound of the language.

Again, as we grow older, the different parts of our brain apparently

become more and more interconnected.

The myelin coating speeds up the connections with different parts

of the brain, and so your emotions, your empathy, your feelings,

all of these become more closely connected with the sort of purely, you know,

thinking or reasoning part of your brain.

And so when we are learning a language and we want to acquire these words, then it's

important that we connect emotionally with what we're listening to and reading.

That's why it's so important to choose things of interest

to you to listen to or read.

It's also true, apparently, that when we are reading,

in our brain, it's as if we were speaking to ourselves.

So reading is also a form of output, a form of speaking.

So that's just to say that all of these activities are interconnected.

So even if you don't have the opportunity to speak the language

where you're living, getting engaged with input activities can help you

improve your ability to speak.

And it is certainly true that in our own languages, the people

who speak the best are the people who have read the most widely.

So reading is very important in order to improve your ability, eventually, to speak.

Now, some of you may say, "Yeah, but I... how can I listen when

I don't understand anything?

How can I read when I have so few words?"

So obviously you have to gradually build up your ability to read.

I think the goal should be to read a paper book. Again,

there's some research that suggests that we learn better from

paper books than from digital

materials: tablets or or computer screens.

But you can't get to a paper book until you have a sufficient vocabulary.

And of course, that's why we developed—

you're not surprised again to hear me say, but that's why I developed—

LingQ. Because I had these books at home in Spanish and German, full

of words that I didn't understand.

And so I couldn't enjoy reading them.

But I wanted to get to where I can enjoy reading a paper book.

And that's why had LingQ. We can start with "Mini Stories."

You can go through material

in sentence view. There's so many different ways that you can gradually

build up, in a somewhat intensive way,

your ability to eventually read extensively. And if you can eventually

read novels and serious books or books on subject of interest to you, extensively.

Buy paper [books], always have a book with you, and you read widely in the

language that you're learning.

You will become a good speaker of that language and you won't need to remember,

or try to remember, rules of grammar in order to speak well. Because you will

automatically, as you retrieve the words you want to use and the structures you want

to use, and you suppress structures that you don't want, or the words that you

don't want to use. You're going to become a better and better speaker of the language.