Is it possible to improve English without grammar?
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Transcript:
Hello, I'm Dr. Julian Northbrook from https://doingenglish.com.
Is it possible to improve in English without grammar? Yes. And in fact, in most circumstances, not all, there are always exceptions, but in most circumstances, it is preferable. Most of the problems that people have trying to improve and speak well in English as a higher level learner is because of over reliance on grammar rules and studying them and trying to use them when actually, what they should be doing is changing the way that they learn and the way that they approach the speaking of English.
Almost everybody learning and then trying to improve in English as a second language were taught English at school. And in school, they were almost definitely taught English as, first and foremost, a system of grammar rules and then some vocabulary to plug into those rules. And they would have been expected to somehow take these very, very abstract rules, almost like mathematical equations, and somehow compute those in their head, combining them with words to create sentences that, of course, sounded awful and were probably incorrect and full of inaccuracies because it is a computationally or cognitively very, very difficult task to take these very abstract mathematical, equation-like rules and sort them all out in your head. I mean, there are some serious mental gymnastics going on in there to do that.
And your teacher would have likely punished you by telling you you were wrong. That's incorrect. And you built up some pretty weird ideas about how English should be used and how it should sound and what constitutes good English.
But the truth is is native speakers of a language, yourself in your first language included, are not primarily defaulting to grammar rules and words. We are not computing grammar rules in our head, combining them with words and constructing sentences step by step as we go.
Instead, what we actually do is store high frequency, statistically likely chunks of English in long-term memory and then just pull them out when we are speaking. No computation, no mathematical, equation-like processing happening. And that's how we speak so fluently and so naturally, and it is also why native speakers sound very, very natural and why non-native speakers, even if they've reached a stage of grammatical perfection, usually sound quite unnatural because we don't speak in language that is just grammatical.
We don't say things like, "Could you aid me in this task," even though it is grammatical. We say, "Could you help me with this?" We don't say, "Pleasant first half of the day to you," even though it is grammatical. We say, "Good morning."
Grammar doesn't explain naturalness. And that, again, is one of the big problems that even very advanced non-native speakers have is that because they are speaking in an overly precise, grammatical way, but ignoring what, in applied linguistics, is called native-like selection. That is the selection of high frequency, highly probable chunks of English. They sound stilted and awkward as a result.
Now, this is not to say that grammar rules are totally useless and that there isn't a time and place to use them and study them. There certainly is. But that time and place is when you are already fluent and already natural sounding in English. Just like you might study the grammar rules of your first language to deepen your knowledge and understanding of your first language, grammar rules in English can be very, very useful to deepen your knowledge of what you can already do.
But trying to go the other way round and study them first and then try to produce language from that is a recipe for disaster because it just doesn't really work in that kind of way.
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