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Comment by gary17the | Hacker News Reader

> This is a false dichotomy. Focusing on grammar is not the opposite.

I don't follow you. I did not claim that focusing on grammar was a literal opposite of anything. I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar".

In order to translate a randomly generated (thus never seen before, non-memorized) sentence from one language to another you have to understand the grammar in order to create a valid combination of words for your translation.

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You don't have to consciously and rationally understand the grammar - you didn't when first learning to speak your first language!

Stephen Krashen is a pretty good researcher on this - the summary is that exposure to the language for time (e.g. 500 hours of content you just about understand) is the critical factor. This is training non-conscious parts of your brain's neural network.

Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone. But it isn't necessary, or the critical process.

A very interesting point, I stand corrected. When I think about it, my brain usually does strongly prefer to consciously create a set of "rules" about a knowledge base rather than unconsciously memorize a set of ready-made samples. But that might be just me.

> Some people like understanding the grammar and structure of a language consciously, and it can help as a mnemonic aid for anyone.

Also, if you're looking for entertaining reading in your target language, grammar books are going to be interesting to you. The goal during language learning is to find interesting content that you understand, and your target language's grammar is a known hobby of yours.

Good luck learning Finnish without understanding the grammar.

I feel like it's the opposite. Most people who speak languages with complex grammar natively can not clearly explain the grammar to you, because they use the correct grammar intuitively, and they have learned to do so by having a ton of input in that language.

This is a bad example because it's probably more wordy/complex than it needs to be but I couldn't begin to name the various grammar being used in: "I would not have gone to Paris except that a friend decided to give me a free ticket."

Good luck getting a 3 year old Finnish person lecturing you on Finnish grammar - Even though the kid can easily ask for a ice cream in both past, present, and future.

Weirdly enough, a 3 year old kid is not the same as an adult. The same learning methods do not necessarily apply.

> I claimed that in my case "repetitive learning by example" turned out to be less boring than "repetitive learning by memorizing grammar"

In this claim you implicitly say that you are focusing on "learning by memorizing grammar" if you do not are focusing on "learning by example" - hence the dichotomy, that is false.

The parent commenter never talked about grammar.

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