Learning English grammar is tough. In fact, it’s disgusting. It’s gross and “ewww” a lot of the time. It’s just ugly and nasty. There is nothing good about English grammar because it’s just too complicated and hard. But we have to learn it, so here’s 4 of our tips on how to learn English grammar.
1. Don’t Focus on Rules, Focus on Use
Rules aren’t always accurate. They are not how we SHOULD ALWAYS use English, but how we GENERALLY DO use English. Natives bend and break the rules every day, but still communicate effectively. That makes things trickier for non-natives but does take some of the stress off.
You don’t have to obey all rules 100% of the time to get your point across, and if you are listening to a native break a rule, you’ll probably get confused. Instead of sitting there confused, watch what happens in the situation. What effect came about because of the language used? Remember what happened so you can imitate it later.
Here’s an example I’ve seen before: a non-native is really confused when a native tells a story using the present tense. The man says things like, “Here I am, swimming in the ocean, when a gray fin pops up out of the water! I’m like, ‘Ahhhhh! What the?!?’ and immediately I’m swimming as fast as I can to the boat!” The non-native uses grammar rules and comes to a conclusion, “The man is lying. He is not in the ocean and he is not swimming. He is, in fact, standing in the parking lot in front of me. Either that, or his English is just terrible.”
Well, the native isn’t lying, and his English is pretty good. The rule is the problem here. You can use present tense to talk about things in the past if you want to tell a story and you want the people listening to feel like it is happening now. It’s simply about style.
A non-native might get frustrated or think that natives can’t speak their own language, but they actually are amazing at English not because they always obey the rules but because they know how and when they can break the rules to communicate better than the rules allow. All that matters is the end result.
What can we learn from this? Learn grammar by imitation and how natives use the language in real life. If you only focus on rules, you will miss a lot. They help at the beginning of your language journey to give you structure and guidelines, but they are not the end goal.
2. Don’t Only do Grammar Exercises, Have Conversations
Grammar exercises are easy because it’s usually obvious what the right answer is without thinking, because the unit you are in is about X and Y. I know the answer is X or Y! This isn’t always bad, and it’s a good starting point until you get the form down, but never taking that and applying it in real life is a big mistake. Go out and use the point you learned, take notes of it in your reading, watching, and talking. Learn the grammar out in the wild, not just in a textbook. Textbooks are usually good starting points, but they are never good finish lines. Ever.
You simply have to use the grammar in real life for it to stick. That’s why I always use a realistic activity where my students get to use the grammar they need to improve on. I have an activity that my oldest students know of where I put this in action: the skiing scene.
I have a cartoon picture of a skiing slope with around 100 people all doing different things all at the same time. It’s a very busy illustration, which is why I love it.
I use it to help student’s practice conditionals, specifically the 3rd conditional (sentences like, “If I hadn’t gotten sick, I wouldn’t have missed the exam.”). I tell them that they are looking at what happened yesterday, and they should talk about how the people could have done things differently and what would have happened then.
After this, in later lessons, we put it to practice by talking about their personal lives. Have you ever made a mistake? What could you have done differently? This is real life grammar that has meaning.
3. Don’t Learn Grammar Points Alone, Learn them Together
Grammar is not meant to be used alone. In fact, it’s impossible to use grammar without vocabulary and punctuation/pronunciation, and if there is no context to use it in, there is no meaning to the grammar, so we have to use context, too. We need to learn grammar with other things, not on it’s own.
Learn Grammar with the Context
Take this sentence for example: “It was a mistake.” We could focus on the grammar point past simple verbs. We could read a number of similar sentences using other past simple verbs, and complete some exercises where we fill in the blanks with the past simple verb. Ok. Now do you understand it? Do you know when to use it?
The sentence above, “It was a mistake,” could be used to mean different things, and if you go by grammar rule without context, when you get in the context that requires that grammar, will you be ready?
This sentence could come up in this situation: you read a book with a friend and there is a sentence in the book. Your friend points at it and says, “It was a mistake.” Does that mean the character in the book made a mistake (for example, “John told Sue about the surprise party.”) or the writer made a mistake (for example, “John tolled Sue about the surprise party.”)? Your grammar lessons probably didn’t teach you which one it is.
To give you the answer, it must be the character that made a mistake, because if the mistake is in the book, you should say use “is” since the mistake is continuing and uncorrected. It exists now, while the character’s mistake is over and not happening now. But you might think that it referred to the writer’s mistake which was typing it a long time ago because a grammar lesson will say “an action that finished in the past”, and the action of making a mistake did happen in the past.
Learn Grammar with Vocabulary
Vocabulary makes a difference in grammar, too. “I didn’t like…” could have two different grammatical meanings depending on the words following. If you finish with “…the movie.” then you simply didn’t like the movie. But if you finish with “…cowboy movies.” then you are saying more than that. You are usually saying that you didn’t like cowboy movies in the past, but you do like them now.
We can add another point to this, which is memorization. You can memorize the form and meaning of grammar structures better with vocabulary than with tables and charts and formulas. If you memorize the sentence, “It’s rainy, so I need an umbrella.” then you will easily be able to replicate the structure elsewhere, such as “It’s expensive, so I need more money.” or “It’s broken, so I need a new one.”
It’s much harder to remember something like “subject + being verb + adj. + , + so + subject + need + object.” And if you have to memorize 50 formulas like that, you’ll never succeed, and you’ll never be able to use a formula like that while talking to someone, because it’s too slow!
Learn Grammar with other Grammar
English also has a lot of variety. You can use “will”, “be+going” and present tense all to talk about the future. We can mix them up and use them together. In many situations, we could get away with using any of the three. Here, we should study all three of them at the same time to distinguish the slight differences and when they can’t be used interchangeably. If you study them each individually, you’d be confused because you’d think, “I thought X was used to talk about the future.”
All that to say, learning grammar must be done in context, with vocabulary, compared to other grammar structures, and not on it’s own. Otherwise, you’ll really struggle.
4. Don’t Learn through Translation, Learn in English
We are all guilty of this: “Oh! This translates to XYZ grammar in my language, it must have the same meaning!” Well, the fact is, it’s rare for grammar to translate to the same meaning 100% of the time.
In Chinese, the grammar particle 吧 (pronounced “buh”) is often translated as “Let’s” as in “Let’s go bowling.” It’s not that simple, though, because the same particle is used regardless of who is talking and who the suggestion is for. It could be used to make a suggestion for someone else which would translate to something like, “How about you go bowling?”
The problem with translating grammar deepens when you learn that this same grammar word has other meanings, too. If you agree to something, though you don’t really want to, you can use the same word, 吧, in a sentence like, “OK, I’ll try again tomorrow.” where it translates best to “OK”. It’s also used to form information checking questions such as “…, right?” or “…, I take it?”
If we learned this word from a grammar translation method, we would really struggle to understand all of its meanings. But, if we learned it through how it is used and encountering it many different times in many contexts, our brains would naturally form its own conclusions about what it means.
Those are 4 tips on how to learn English grammar based on mistakes and successes I’ve learned from teaching and learning new languages. I hope this helps you get out there and start getting it done more effectively so you can grow your English better! Now do the exercises below, and then go out and try to use what you’ve practiced!💪