Hello, I'm Dr. Julian Northbrook from 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.
Right, that is enough for this video. Head over to doingenglish.com/emails and sign up for my free
daily English email tips. Still need to wordsmith the title of that. Every day at about 8:00 AM
Ireland time, an email from yours truly's going to hit your inbox, and it's going to be packed
with all kinds of tips, ideas, stories, and anecdotes for mastering the English language.
This is me, Dr. Julian Northbrook,
signing out from another video. I'll see you soon, guys. Bye bye.