11.27
You will waft through the thickest walls of grammar like a cartoon ghost and continue
your journey onward through the language. Every time you look backward that wall will
be lower, thinner, full of increasingly wider openings, and eventually it will disappear
entirely. Contrary to centuries of American superstition, you don’t have to conquer the
grammar to possess the language. Conquer the language and you’ll possess the grammar!
I’ve long entertained the fantasy of putting the old orthodox grammarians on trial
for war crimes, the specific charge being assassination of the fun that flows from gaining
command of another language. Their defense will predictably be “Bah, humbug. You
can’t immerse, converse, rehearse, or even play around with a foreign language without a
good foundation in the grammar!”
They’re right in insisting on the importance of grammar,tall ugg boots, but who says you’ve got to
have it first,ugg boots cheap, as some kind of brutal initiation? Where is it written that you must wrap
cold, wet blankets of grammar around your eagerness to learn another language until it
disappears? (Your eagerness, that is. The grammar never does.)
A six year old in America doesn’t know what the word grammar means, but he
knows to say “he does” and not “he do.” How does he know? “He do” just doesn’t sound
right.
That’s all! And that’s enough!
Years later he will be taught that the English verb in the third person singular of the
present tense adds an s or es to the infinitive form, which serves uninflected for all other
persons singular and plural.
You don’t have to know grammar to obey grammar. If you obey grammar from the
outset, when you turn around later and learn why you should say things the way you’re
already saying them, each grammatical rule will then become not an instrument of
abstract torture disconnected from anything you’ve experienced but rather an old friend
who now wants you to have his home address and private phone number.
When the grammatical rule come first, followed by its pitiful two or three examples
in the textbook, it seems to the student like an artificially confected bit of perversity
rolled down upon his head like a boulder.
When the grammatical rule comes after you’ve got some of the language in you, it
becomes a gift flashlight that makes you smile and say, “Now I understand why they say
it that way!”
So, you are right now and forevermore warned not to bridle or to question, “Why is
the word for ‘go’ in this French sentence vais and in the very next sentence aller?”
Simply embrace the faith that both sentences are correct and learn them like Catholic
children in strict parochial schools learn the Baltimore Catechism.
The more shaken you become by grammatical storms, the more tightly you must
hug the faith. I vow it will all become clear. And in this world. You won’t have to wait
for any other.
It’s easy to reason, “Who am I trying to kid? They’ll always know I’m a foreigner.
They’ll excuse my mistakes. So forget about all those rules. I just want to get by. Gimme
some words and phrases and get out of my way. As long as they understand!”
That’s an attitude to be resisted. When you learn another language, you will be
accepted as an honoured volunteer into the culture of another people. Do you want to be
accorded a low rank or a high rank? Learn the language properly,buy ugg boots, which means
(eventual) conquest of the grammar. Don’t be a buck private when, for a few minutes of
extra concentration, you can be a general.
Look at it this way. Grammar is not a marathon run in which, if you tire, falter, or
fall, you fail. Grammar is an edifice you must build on your property. But it doesn’t have
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