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As every mechanism, organization, skill, etc. has a system, languages also have one; grammar. I would call grammar as the skeleton of the languages which makes them to stand on a structure. This structure is generally complicated. Despite being stable at some points, like some parts of the spine, it also allows them to move when they need to and to be flexible when they want to reach out for other societies. One of the functions of grammar is to make it easy for individuals to understand, learn and stabilize the language well in their minds. Yet still it is mostly considered as “difficult” to be dealt with. In my opinion the learner makes a good difference when it comes to the learning process. Among many aspects of who learns grammar, I would like to write about learner`s mother tongue, learner`s ability and learner`s age. One variable that determines the process to learn grammar is the learner`s mother tongue. The more different it is from the language one wants to learn, the more difficult to take the grammar into one`s mind. I, for example, first learned Turkish growing up. English came along. I was lucky with the alphabet because apart from ‘x’, ‘q’, ‘w’, we have the same letters along with a couple of extra ones. Yet, I was not lucky with the sentence structure because what we have in Turkish is quite different than Subject + Verb + Object order. The second one is the learner`s ability. With this, I mean the ability for Mathematics. Grammar is formed as formulas and different combinations of the same rule most of the times. Just like in Maths. Quite often I have seen my peers doing well in Maths and grammar test because they would just grasp the formula written by the teacher on the board. And the last thing is age. I think grammar in both mother tongue and in a foreign language is learned a lot more consciously by late teenage years and onwards than as in childhood. Somehow I was able to differentiate the parts of the grammar in Both Turkish and English as I grew older. And I was also more patient with learning about grammar; how it works, where it ends. Yet when I go back to my 5th grade –which is the farthest memory I can remember about me and grammar- I recall doing greater in a speaking practice than in reading a page of grammar explanation and doing the grammar exercises related to the topic. Overall, grammar, when I was learning it, was considered as something to be taught separately with worksheets and long formulas written on the board. I feel like, I have not learned it that way. I have learned it by using it. There are, sure, some people –especially the English teachers I encountered when I was a student who would say it is a must to learn grammar. Yet, I am of the opinion that learning grammar shouldn’t be a thing when language learning is considered. It should be presented in such a secret way that even the adults can acquire it. It should come along with the skills that are tried to be developed in a learner.
