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I have been studying English since my primary school, over nineteen years. Before, I studied English at school, including primary school, middle school, high school and my university with traditional method. At that time, teachers focused on vocabulary and grammar. The tests were over and over. After graduating from my university, I went to an English training school to practice my oral English, mainly focusing on listening and speaking. From my English study experience, I found that learning grammar well is vital to learning a language. In other words, learning grammar is part of the foundation to learn a language, no matter what language it is. A language is the reflection of a civilization. It is a product of long-term accumulation and evolution. So it reflects people’s mind and logic. From generation to generation, people summarize the most useful rules. Then we get the grammar today. Even though it has been changing unceasingly, most of the grammar rules are stable. That’s why we can understand some historical articles and get the thoughts from ancient people. If there were no grammar rules, what would the world be? There would only be words. Could we communicate fluently with others? Could people get our idea efficiently? Apparently not. For example, there are three words: I , you and love. There are many combinations: I love you , You I love, or Love you I…, but what’s the real idea we want to let others know? Maybe “I love you”, maybe “You love me”. Now we know after a verb, there’s an object pronoun. A sentence should be subject + verb + object. Based on the existing rules, we know there is the only sentence with the three words – I love you. From this example, we see that words can’t pass the only information we want to express without grammar. However, based on grammar rules, we can make thousands of sentences with a certain meaning to communicate smoothly and efficiently. Thus, learning grammar well is one of the important basic things to learn a language well. I have been teaching adult students English for more than one and half years. From my teaching experience, I met some students who were proactive to talk with others in English, but when they started speaking, they couldn’t make many sentences without grammar errors. They used wrong tenses , some even couldn’t tell subject pronouns, object pronouns and possessive pronouns. Also some students couldn’t avoid their Chinese mind, so they kept translating. From my point of view, part of the reason is because they didn’t have enough vocabularies to express. The biggest reason is because they didn’t understand English grammar. Therefore, they can’t make complete right sentences. I know there were and are many bad study habits in their daily study life. The only thing I can do is to improve my teaching skills and gain more knowledge, then try my best to correct them and help them set up English mind. Especially for beginners, they should make sure they study the right thing at first and use the right method. Otherwise, they will meet the bottleneck soon when they want to express themselves with some longer sentences. In a word, grammar is the core thing of any language. If you want to learn a language, you have to learn the logic of the language and the grammar rules. It’s the foundation.
