Daily Dose of English 46
Grammar
Daily Dose of English 46
Intermediate
Hey everyone, my name is Ben and you're listening to a Daily Dose of English. This is a short, simple podcast that you can listen to every day to improve your English. You can find the transcripts for all episodes and more on benslanguagelab.com. I'm glad you could make it today. In this episode, we're going to be talking about grammar. Grammar and what it is, what it isn't, and how you should go about learning it for a foreign language. Because I've been thinking recently a lot about grammar, because I've been writing and creating video scripts to talk about this topic. And so I've just had grammar on the brain or grammar on the mind in the past couple of days, which means I've been thinking about it quite a lot. And the first main thing about grammar that is important to understand is that it is not something that is real in the sense that it exists if we didn't think about it. And so what I mean by that is we created the concept of grammar, humans did, linguists did, in order to explain things in the world, but there's no inherent true grammar that we necessarily use. And now that might be kind of hard to believe, but it does make sense in a lot of ways when you think about it. Because when we speak languages, we just use what is natural sounding to us. If you ask a native speaker why they said something a certain way, because they would answer you because that's what sounds correct. That's what feels right. Right. If you ask me, why is this called daily dose of English and not daily dose with English or a daily dose in English? I would be like, it is best with of. And then that description of that is what we call grammar. And so grammar is a lot like physics, if you've studied physics in school, which is in physics is an explanation of what happens in the world. However, if we didn't have that explanation, there would still be gravity and things would still work, right? You can't just ignore physics and then suddenly things float in the air. Same thing with grammar. You just use the stuff the way that it's used regardless of whether or not you learned it or you know the name for it or whatever. You just use what sounds natural if you've acquired that language sufficiently. And so that's the big thing that most people don't really realize because we're taught grammar in school. And especially if you're learning English, it's very, very likely that you learned a lot about English grammar and maybe can't even use it. Maybe you can do some conjugations or you can fill in blanks if you're given a worksheet. But you might not be able to use that grammar naturally in a way that maybe a native speaker can, like I can't. Not because you don't know it enough, or you know it almost too much in some ways, but because simply it doesn't feel correct to you to do. And that's how you actually want to learn grammar. You want to make things feel right so that you use them naturally because, not because of any rule or anything, just because it is better to do it like that. And that's what grammar is when we talk about it. And so there's a really big confusion, I think, especially in schools, that grammar is the language, that in order to learn a language, you have to study grammar. If you don't study grammar, you won't be able to speak that language, which isn't really true, right? You don't have to learn grammar to speak your native language, and yet you are able to speak that language. Yes, languages have formal grammars that are decided upon and written down in books, right? There's often a university or something that takes care of that thing for many languages. However, if you don't use that kind of grammar, that doesn't mean you're not a native speaker or you're not a fluent speaker of that language, right? That's just a set of formal rules that you can use in formal situations if you'd like. We learn in school, we learn formal grammar and writing and stuff like that, and we call those English classes for native speakers, where we learn about things like that. Oh, you should do this, not that. This is better than that. Try not to use the passive voice in this scenario. Things like that. And we talk a bit more about grammar, but that's not necessarily teaching us more of the language itself, but a version of the language. And yet, We're all still native speakers when we go into that class, which makes it a lot easier and more possible. However, a lot of learners of any language try the opposite approach. They start with grammar. They say, okay, I need to start with grammar because I don't know any grammar yet. So I'll start with it despite not understanding anything. And instead, you really should be doing the opposite. Yes, at a certain point, you're gonna wanna study grammar because it helps you to use it more formally and understand a bit more when to do things. And you can also be sure that you're not carrying over mistakes from your native language because our native languages do influence our language acquisition. But at the beginning, you kind of can ignore grammar as long as you're understanding. If it's getting in the way of understanding, that's a different thing. And it's good to look up kind of why. For example, if you get confused by sentences like, he told her that she had gone already or something like that, where like the grammar gets a little bit confusing because all of the words are really similar. Looking that sort of thing up and asking yourself, okay, why does this mean this thing? Can be helpful, but you don't need to learn about the present tense or the past tense. Right? Over time, that will become clear. You will realize that when native speakers use, uh, and they say, I wrote something, they're talking about something that already happened, right? You don't necessarily need to study that wrote is the past tense version of rights, um, or whatever the name of that past tense is or whatever, because that not won't necessarily help you. In the beginning, if the language is very different than yours, so like, for example, if you're a Mandarin speaker and you're learning English, then it can be helpful just because the language is so, so different. However, after some basics, right, like a couple of days of looking up things like that, then you should just be spending time with English in contexts where you understand it. Because that's when you're going to get used to these things. Going back to what grammar is and why we use it is because we need to speak in a way that is understandable and natural. And so we use what we've heard before, right? A really good example, I think, is the phrase salt and pepper. Salt and pepper are really common things to put on food. They're really common on tables. They're also common flavors for things, at least in the English-speaking world. However, you will almost always, always, always see salt and pepper and not pepper and salt. There's not really a reason for that. It's just what has been done and it sounds better. There's no grammatical rule saying that when we're saying the phrase salt and pepper, we have to say salt first. We just do that. It's just more natural that way. It's not a rule. Nobody's forcing you to say that. You're allowed to say pepper and salt, but it sounds less natural. It sounds weird. It's better to say salt and pepper. Add some salt and pepper to the dish. However you're using the phrase. And I think that's a really good example because that's not a rule. It's not written anywhere and yet everybody prefers it that way because we've heard it so many times. There might be some English speaking parts of the world that use it in the reverse, which I guess would be totally fine, right? That's the thing, it's not a rule. However, I'm nearly positive it's always salt and pepper, at least it is in the US and I assume Canada as well. But things like that show that there really aren't rules, they're just things that we're used to. And so you, if you want to learn good English grammar, you actually just need to get really used to the things that sound good. And that means spending hundreds, potentially, or really thousands of hours with English and understanding it and hearing what sounds good. Over time, your brain will pick up those patterns. Humans are really good at remembering patterns and knowing what sounds natural, right? When you see a face of somebody that you know, that you met like one time five years ago, you can often go, oh yeah, I met that person somewhere. I don't remember their name, I don't remember where it was, but I recognize their face. That's your brain doing pattern matching. And grammar is the exact same thing. We just use the patterns that sound good. For language acquisition, that takes a couple thousand hours at least. And so if you can't speak with perfect grammar, don't try to study more grammar. Spend more time with English. And so I hope that you enjoyed this episode and that I'll see you again tomorrow to spend more time with English every single day on a daily dose of English with Ben. See you then. Bye.
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