Do you need to study grammar? | The fastest way to learn English

hello and welcome to kangaroo english my name is christian and today is wednesday the best day of the week um now you may or may not know that i have a facebook group and the facebook group is a place where people can express themselves and they can also ask questions and i i answer those questions and um yesterday i was looking through the questions and there was just this one question right one sentence the question was do we need grammar do we need grammar i mean i mean it's it's a great question actually it's a kind of deep question and it takes us on this journey this journey from um from like the origin of language through the history of of of methods all the way to answering the question do you need to study grammar to be successful at learning a language so let's go on this journey okay um and i think we need to start with um a common kind of myth because there's a few myths in this video that i want to kind of destroy right um so the the first one is that some people think that some languages don't have grammar right and for some reason in the kind of anglo-saxon world you know so like you know britain australia america you know they like to say that chinese has no grammar you know mandarin has no grammar apparently it's a language without grammar um which of course is absolutely and totally not true language cannot exist without grammar um because you know when when people think about grammar and what grammar is you know they might think about something like this right the oxford modern english grammar it's kind of a really dense you know 200 300 pages of of description about you know the english language um you know they might think that this is grammar right or maybe the stuff that they find in their workbook um is grammar you know these kind of fill in the blanks or descriptions about constructions you know this this is grammar um i have to wash my hands after touching a workbook dirty thing i normally i would burn this but um i'm saving it for to use as an example in videos um but but but really let's let's answer the question what what grammar is so if if we look in some dictionaries like if we look in um the oxford dictionary that the definitions are quite kind of um kind of dense right the whole system and structure of a language syntax morphology including inflections uh and there's like five sub-definitions um merriam-webster is um the study of the classes of words they're inflections um again talks a lot about syntax inflections but i think that the cambridge dictionary nailed it nailed the definition this is the definition ready the way you combine words and change their form and position in the sentence or the rules of this right that's grammar so language can't exist without grammar because even the tiniest the tiniest change to a word or the order of words is grammar you know like in english for example you know we say i do like pizza i do like p i do like pizza this is a statement a declarative statement a fact of truth i you know i i do like pizza i love pizza if we want to turn that into a question we change the word order do i like pizza right so this this this kind of rule this system this way of combining words is grammar it's not particularly complicated but it's grammar other languages like for example mandarin you know they might not have verb conjugations for the future for example things like that but doesn't mean they don't have grammar they have other ways of um you know expressing these very important concepts of course that's how human language works and there's this kind of general balance right so it's not really true that all languages are equally complicated right or equally complex it's not really true but it's kind of true that you know that all languages are complex in some way that's different from another language like for example you know english is very simple in its verbs you know we only have three kind of conjugations three forms in total but it's complex for example in prepositions whereas spanish you know is super complex in the verb department there's like a hundred verb forms for for every verb you know but it might be really simple in conjugations for example so you know there's always this kind of balance between the way that languages are complicated so kind of one of the questions before we can answer the main question which is do you need to study grammar to learn a language we it would be good i think it would be good to ask where does grammar come from you know did it was there like cavemen one day and they sort of went oh and then someone went ooh and then and then it just became a language is that is that what happened basically yes okay so there's this amazing study from uh 2019 uh manuel bond gregor catchall and michael tomasello uh this is the paper okay young children spontaneously recreate core properties of language in a new modality big complicated name super simple idea okay so they wanted to know if children would spontaneously invent a new language so what they did was they put them in two separate rooms okay there's actually a diagram here of of what they did okay so they put them in two separate rooms with with webcams and they were having conversations over skype in the two separate rooms right and they had to play a game they had this little spinning wheel okay you can see the wheel in the picture they had a spinning wheel and so they'd spin the wheel and whatever the picture was they had to describe that picture to the other person and the other person had to guess the picture easy game right but the researchers were very sneaky very tricky and in the middle of this um in the middle of this game they cut the audio right so there was only there was only video so now they had to invent sign language right and this has happened before in the 90s there was a language that spontaneously appeared nicaraguan sign language okay but this is the first time that it's been studied in a laboratory and what they discovered and let me read from the from the um from the from the abstract okay here we show how young children because the children were between four and eight i think here we show how young children create new communication systems that exhibit core features of natural languages in less than 30 minutes less than 30 minutes spontaneous language creation incredible so you know some of the some of the the the pictures they had to describe were kind of easy right so they had to describe for example uh a bicycle and that's kind of easy because you can do the you know you can do the bicycle um or they have to describe a duck you know so you do the dark right right doug so so these were kind of easy but then the researchers also got them to do more abstract concepts and this is when things get really interesting okay so one of the pictures was actually a blank picture it was nothing so how do you describe nothing without words you know with a gesture how do you describe nothing so some of the children kind of did this or this like like nothing nothing to show nothing but one of the children had a colored shirt on with a white spot and so the the the the child is going look look at the white spot and and eventually the kid in the other room was like oh okay i get it why nothing ah perfect right but then of course what happened was the next time they repeat the gesture okay it's just this even if you don't have a white spot on your shirt because they share this symbol of communication i could be wearing a completely black shirt with no white spots i could be wearing i could be wearing nothing and i do this and because we share this symbol because we agreed before okay we agreed that that's what that means this gesture suddenly spontaneously we have an abstract gesture that means nothing nothing right the origin is some kid with a shirt with a white spot that's the origin but now it has become this shed symbol okay and this is this is how grammar emerges so that's a word meaning and then the researchers also got them to indicate quantity and size right so if you're doing one duck how do you do multiple ducks the children had various techniques for for creating multiple ducks or multiple bicycles or showing the size of things big and small right they had they had systems that spontaneously appeared to describe these things right so this is this is really important research right but now now that we know how grammar emerges okay grammar emerges in communities between people that are communicating now we can start to answer the question is it necessary for you as a student to study grammar right and i want to talk a little bit about this this this other piece of research okay by shana poplak lydia gabriel jamas and natalie dion and nicole rosen okay which is called searching for standard french the construction of and mining of the oh boy here we go record historique de gramer du francais i apologize for my french pronunciation um now sharna pop plaque is an amazing researcher and academic i cannot tell you how much admiration i have for her work okay um you know her work is really careful and detailed and it has lots of data you know some research is like you know 20 kids here we're talking about her research normally involves thousands or millions of of data points right so it's it's great research and what they did was they looked at the history of french prescriptivism okay so maybe you know maybe you don't that the french language has this deep history that is kind of linked to the uh academy uh francais i think look at me francais i don't know i can't remember what it's called um so they there's basically this kind of group of french academics who who kind of decide what is right and what is wrong in french and they you know they basically dictate they prescribe what's correct and what's not this is kind of unique you know there are 7 000 languages in the world there are very few maybe a dozen that have this kind of system right and the the the the french academy right the the french academy are kind of respected by the french people um as far as i know i don't know if that's true universally but they're kind of respected so people listen to their their opinions about what's correct and what's not in french you know the the the french academy would have influence over for example what is printed by the french government what is printed in newspapers what's printed in um you know how people use french on the news for example so you know they have a lot of power to control language change in theory right in theory um and so what they did was they looked at the history of these prescription rules okay so i want to show you just one one graph here and this is super interesting graph okay so here you can see from all the way from 1500 until 1999 and the the top line that the black line at the top shows how often they they give a rule about excluding the conditional from the protesis so basically it's it's a rule right that the the french academy are giving that they're like don't do this and you can see that you know it's risen it's gone up from 40 percent in 1500 to 70 in 1999 so if you pick up a french grammar book 70 of those books are gonna say don't do this right and and well this is a secondary thing which is kind of interesting to me but but you can see as well the dotted line at the bottom over time is how they are basically qualifying the rule so basically they're giving a reason why not just saying don't do this they're saying don't do this because it makes you sound stupid or it makes you sound like a foreigner or um it could uh i don't know make you sound like you're uneducated right for example so so not only so they're giving the rule more often and they're also giving reasons more often so don't do it and don't do it because of this it's going up going up 70 of the books all right but then sharna and her team the legend they looked at what is actually happening in the reality of the french language you know not what is it the grammar books but what it what are people actually using and well guess what here's the graph and as you can see it's risen from 13 in the 19th century to 78 in the 21st century so so the the the french academy are prescribing this rule right they're saying don't do this and yet the people are doing the exact opposite okay the you the the increase is astronomically increasing okay that was a terrible sentence um and this is this is the conclusion this is the abstract from the paper listen as a result grammar and usage are evolving independently this is just an example okay everywhere they looked they found the same thing there's no relationship between this okay this and the reality of what people are doing so to answer the question can you learn a language without studying grammar the first thing i want to say is absolutely yes how do i know because this and this have only existed for let's say a hundred years right and and what when i say a hundred years i mean existed in you know in mass education because remember that you know mass compulsory education is a very very very very new thing right um 500 years ago you know a majority of people had no education of any kind this is very very new if language has existed for a million years this is like a tiny tiny tiny tiny fraction of a second of existence of this so jeez um how did people learn languages for all those millions of years for a million years how did people learn languages if they didn't have grammar books hmm they learnt them through contact you know through usage through conversations through necessity buying things selling things uh you know moving to a safer place escaping danger um you know the historical record shows that that this is not necessary to learn a language okay but having said that having said that um you know learning a language only let's say only through you know watching television and having conversations you know that's not the most efficient way to learn a language okay we have you know this this might not reflect what people are doing but it gives you a really solid foundation right and you know the ideal thing is to is to take advantage of these resources you know people who are learning english are lucky because they have access to some of the best descriptions of of of any language that have ever been written you know um if you want to go and learn uh you know a small language that's spoken by somebody in the amazon it's very very difficult because there's no there's no information about how the language works and there's no way to practice with practice activities you know so studying explicitly studying grammar and explicitly studying you know constructions and vocabulary that's a necessary thing right no i shouldn't say necessary it's an efficient way to study a language you want to do some of that right but you don't want to do 100 of that you want to do maybe you know 25 explicit study 75 other things language usage you know reading conversation repetition of practice same things you know practicing the things you already know fluency development and so from this tiny question about do we need grammar we've kind of taken a little tour you know through language evolution and the history of grammar and especially french grammar and now we arrive at the answer which is um a little bit of this and a little reminds me of the chicken dance a little bit of this and a little bit of that and yeah um it's wednesday come on um i hope that you i hope that you enjoyed this video um and i hope that now you feel more ready to accept but also reject the truth about the importance of of grammar study i'm christian this is kangaroo english and i'll see you in class [Music] you

Channel: Canguro English

Views: 85,986

Keywords: canguro english, kangaroo english, canguru english, learning english, learn english, english teacher, english grammar, grammar, linguistics, do you need to study grammar, dont study grammar, learn english without grammar, never study grammar, is grammar, is grammar important, is grammar important for spoken english, is grammar important to learn english, is grammar necessary to learn a language, is grammar necessary, how to study grammar english, how to study grammar well

Id: zr95zmULJKE

Length: 23min 0sec (1380 seconds)

Published: Wed Aug 19 2020