I believe the first step of learning the structure of the Korean language is to learn Hangul. That way I can properly learn the pronunciation of words, which can be difficult to accomplish when referring to romanization because of the variation in spellings that can alter the pronunciation slightly. As for grammatical structure, I think I’ll have to abide by textbooks and online lesson videos. I haven’t heard of ‘reference grammar’ so I looked this up: apparently, it is designed to teach someone specific details about the language, whereas ‘pedagogical grammar,’ the type of grammar teaching I’m used to, is designed to teach someone how to use a language. In textbooks, pedagogical grammar is organized in a way such that it’s easy for the learner to use and has shorter chapters that contain brief grammatical explanations, whereas reference grammar has more detailed and technical explanations with examples of every point it mentions. Overall, pedagogical grammar is open for learners of all levels while reference grammar is written for people who see language as a universal phenomenon and want to assimilate the target language into its pre-existing template for human language.
For my purposes, I don’t think reference grammar is my primary concern right now. I’m aiming for practicality: I want to learn the most useful parts of the language first so that I can communicate in that language. The fancy stuff is on standby until I've accomplished this primary goal. Also, learning about idiosyncrasies of the languages is meaningless if I don’t know how to use the basic stuff first. Besides, I have a feeling that these ‘specific details’ that reference grammar teaches will involve a lot of "why this grammatical structure came about" and other explanations about the technicalities of the language that I'm sure will help me understand the grammar better but won’t really apply until I’m more advanced.
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