According to the article “How to investigate language structure” we have three main levels of inquiry: semantics, grammar, and medium of linguistics transmission. The questions is whether one should start learning a language having those three things in mind. The answer is probably yes, but then questions arise in terms of how and in what order. I believe that one first needs to identify the language itself. I am learning German, thus I need to know that German belongs to the Indo-European language family. That already reveals that the language has four or five noun cases, that verbs are marked for person, and that it uses articles. Furthermore, I need to investigate how the language is behaving in terms of regularity, whether it has a big vocabulary and if it uses idioms or not. It is important to know if the grammar matters a lot in order to be understood. Knowledge can be acquired from books, but an important aspect is also listening. This is especially important if we want to learn the informal phrases or slang, since informal phrases tend to be more used in conversations. Moreover, we need to know which alphabet the language is using and we need to make sure that we know how to pronounce every letter individually, but also when it appears in words and sentences. Using a reference grammar to study a language can be useful if we are interested in understanding how the language works. It gives us a universal understanding of languages in general. This can be useful for people who speak multiple languages, because they can compare and relate the language they are learning to those they already speak. Although, in my opinion pedagogical grammar is more useful for every learner, because one is more exposed to examples, which is more practical.
Comments