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Comment by jruohonen | Hacker News Reader

"Professor Dagmar Divjak explained: “Your knowledge about your first language is largely implicit, i.e., learning your mother tongue did not require you to sit and study, and using it does not require much, if any, thought. This also means that you will find it hard to pin down what exactly is right or wrong about a sentence and, even worse, explain why that is so, especially if you’ve not had formal language training."

I beg to disagree. Maybe this explanation is English-specific, i.e. many languages have a much stricter grammar that children learn for a decade or so?

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I'm a linguist, let me try to explain. It's true that in some cultures, especially very economically developed ones, it's common for adults like parents or schoolteachers to teach kids "language". But this is more about familiarizing them with spelling, literature, writing style, and prescriptive norms (e.g. don't split your infinitives), which are all from a linguist's perspective on the periphery of "language" in the narrow sense, which consists just of core grammar. And when it comes to this sense of "language", kids learn it all pretty much with no explicit instruction: the order that adjectives go in, how to form relative clauses, etc.

Consider these sentences:

1. The angry man complained to the manager.

2. The angry about his food man complained to his manager.

3. The man angry about his food complained to the manager.

I won't get into the details of everything that's going on here, but (3) is much "better" than (2), and kids naturally learn that you need to move "angry" or any other adjective to the other side of its noun when it gets a prepositional phrase complement. No parent is ever telling their kid (except a linguist parent, maybe, since they love making their kids subjects), "Remember, Jon, when the adjective has a _complement_, it needs to come _after_ the noun rather than before it."

Interestingly enough (to me, anyway) is the second example is approaching the grammar of Japanese, and it's taken me so long to become comfortable with it, and in many ways that was an emotional or attitudinal change within me of acceptance.

It's making me wonder if language learning ability might be linked to this grammar-annoyance effect, that those who can be more accepting of (for them, internally or naturally) "wrong" grammar in other contexts (i.e. other languages) will learn quicker than those who stubbornly refuse to drop the innate grammar rules they know even when the context changes and they're no longer correct.

I agree that “learning your mother tongue did not require you to sit and study” is an exaggeration – my schooling included years of sitting and studying grammar during the English class for native speakers, and I probably learned to speak better as a result.

However, I think at least a significant subset of grammar is only learned implicitly, never taught in school. The classic example of this is adjective order (https://www.grammarly.com/blog/adjective-order/): native English speakers know that “the nice orange cat” sounds better than “the orange nice cat”, but most can’t explain why.

> I beg to disagree. Maybe this explanation is English-specific, i.e. many languages have a much stricter grammar that children learn for a decade or so?

Divjak sounds like a slavic last name. English probably wasn’t their first language.

That said, in Slovenia we get about a decade of formal grammar training for our native language because it’s so complicated. But we learn it descriptively more than prescriptively. Yes it helps you write and speak formal Slovenian but we are always thought that “When in doubt, do what feels right and you’ll probably get it right”.

When learning a second language, you’re learning grammar so you can use the rules instead of the gut feel you don’t yet have.

edit: looks like she did undergrad in Poland so likely intimately familiar with non-english first languages

I was taught some English grammar in American schools, but not nearly as much time was spent on formal grammar in my English classes as in foreign language classes. Certainly not a decade.

Children are compelled to learn but adults are not compelled to apply the learning. Many adults will tell you, 'nothing I learned in school/college/etc. was really valuable'. What they mean is, 'I don't apply it.'

Grammar is a powerful, mature abstraction that applies widely and well. When I miscommunicate, I think about why and how to prevent it. Often the problem has already been solved in English grammar.

English can be your first language and your second language.

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