Learning Journal Post #12

[Jessica Elphick]

The opinion blog on the New York Times website, "A Picture of Language," emphasized grammar in a new light to me. I never heard of parsing before, but it sounds like a frustrating task to help one learn a language. Grammar in Korea is not very strong. It often feels like I'm just plugging words into any order. It is much less complex than the English language. I can understand how diagramming may help some people that prefer learning visually. I do not personally think I could benefit from it, but that is difficult to know until I try it myself. I'm surprised at how successful the book ended up being in this time period. I can't remember how I learned proper grammar as a child, but I know it took many years of practice. The simplification of the Korean language does not require such careful study to break down sentences into these diagrams. I think the best method of learning grammar is to stick to learning the rules and applying them rather than drawing diagrams.