Is this really how anyone learns languages?

[Anycrispsleft]

Our kids are back at school and I'm back learning German. I've been round this block a few times - I already speak it well enough to hold a conversation, watch TV, write a letter etc - I passed the B2 level a few years ago and I am probably about C1 level on a good day (and plan to sit the exam some time this year). But once again, cracking the books open, I'm asking myself is this really how anyone learns a language?

The first thing I had to learn about today was genitive attribute in nominal and verbal style sentences, and how they replace the subject in passive sentences, and the accusative supplement in active ones.

If that meant very little to you, take heart, because I've been learning German on and off for years and meant precious little to me either. It helped when I went on a German language learning forum and found out that "accusative supplement"/"Adjektivergänzung" actually means "object" like 99 percent of the time but 1 percent of the time something more complicated that I don't need to care about. This is a course for adult learners of German as a second language, it's not an academic course, and the level of grammar terminology you need to get your head round just seems too high to me. If this is the standard, and it is, I just wonder how it is supposed to work for people who come here to work, who don't necessarily have university qualifications or a formal knowledge of grammar (of their own language or of German) but who still want to be able to speak, eventually, like a native? Like I know people say "just immerse yourself in the culture", it's never worked that well for me, it helps passive understanding but to speak and write I need to sit down with an exercise book and practise. I did Duolingo and that was great, but it only goes to about B2 level and I've finished it ages ago. I guess I will crack on. At least I know what the modern fancy word is for an object now!

I have a degree in Spanish and also speak a bit of French, Italian and Portuguese.

I don't have any experience with German but have started a bit of Latin on Duolingo. I think learning is a bit of both - for example, if you see a phrase like Ego sum vir (I am a man) you absorb that Ego sum means "I am". You don't need to be formally taught that "sum" is the first person present tense of the verb to be. Or that if you want to say "you are a man" you would use another part of the verb.

Once you've seen something often enough it just looks wrong - someone writing "el chica" in Spanish is just as jarring as people writing "their is a boat on the see" in English.

I do get that you need a basic grammar understanding. But often you just pick up what's correct and what's incorrect based on experience and exposure, especially for grammatical concepts which don't match exactly with English.

@ichundich

I'm German but I have no idea what an Akkusativergänzung is 😁. In my experience (degree and professional career in modern languages) the best way to learn them is by immersing yourself in the culture. So ideally you should go and live there for a while. Also, whilst that's not possible, seek out local German groups, watch movies and read books / newspapers in German. My kids are growing up bilingual and I never practice grammar with them; they just pick up the correct forms by using the language every day.

That makes me feel a bit better! I got a bit of an explanation by going on a German kids' revision website for the 9th Klasse, so I wonder if it's just the fancy modern terminology (in the same way as they've managed to ruin English with fronted adverbials and all this sort of stuff!)

I do actually live in Germany but there's not a lot of opportunity for chatting in these lockdown times. I did go on the German equivalent of Mumsnet a few weeks ago and got into a bunfight, that was cool - someone had a go at me while simultaneously complimenting my German, so that was fun

Hopefully restrictions will be lifted soon, so it should become easier to meet people again. Have you thought of joining a local walking / photography / knitting / [replace with whatever interests you] club, where you would meet some like-minded people without the conversation being 'forced'? Intrigued to find out what the German equivalent of MN is!

When I lived in Germany I was told constantly not to worry about getting the grammar perfect because even Germans get it wrong all the time!

I remember trying to memorise when to use der/die/das/dem/den/des (already frustrating when your own language has one word for 'the'!) and friends told me not to stress because everyone gets it wrong sometimes and no one cares.

I am a teacher of Dutch as a foreign language in adult education. As my professor at university used to say: The best way to learn a language is in bed ;-)
Joking aside (though there is some truth in it) :

• According to the European Reference Chart, C1 is university level. It's the highest level any non-native speaker can ever get. It's definitely not for everyone! Only a tiny minority of adult learners ever reach this level. I would expect a very good understanding of grammar from my students. And if you want to study German you absolutely need a very high level of abstract grammatical understanding.
• I teach students that don't have a high level of education and that don't know any grammar. My students usually don't get a lot further than A2. Some don't even get that far. Some very smart ones get to B1 (usually only for speaking and listening, not for reading and writing). B2 and C1 is definitely out of reach for them. The higher the level, the more you need grammar. If you can't do the abstract grammatical thinking you get stuck at a certain point.
• I don't think you can get a B2 level by just practising with DuoLingo. To get to this level you also need to be able to read literature, give presentations, hold debates, write reports etc. I once tried DuoLingo to freshen up my French and the B2 level was just simple grammar en vocabulary exercises, definitely not what would be tested in an official exam.

The OP had already passed B2 and clearly has a good grasp of German grammar, just is slightly baffled by the very technical terminology she mentions.

As a fellow German learner, I am now looking up "genitive attribute in nominal and verbal sentences"...

What's the German equivalent of mumsnet? That sounds fun and would probably help with my pregnancy questions where the advice is totally different to the UK!

@dreamingbohemian

When I lived in Germany I was told constantly not to worry about getting the grammar perfect because even Germans get it wrong all the time!

I remember trying to memorise when to use der/die/das/dem/den/des (already frustrating when your own language has one word for 'the'!) and friends told me not to stress because everyone gets it wrong sometimes and no one cares.

Yes... and I’ve had the same from french speakers, including my french teacher. Interestingly, the last exam I did (B2), candidates actually get marks for correcting themselves. Which is just as well given how much I did.

@CandyLeBonBon

Yes but German grammar is horribly complicated. That said, native German speakers, much like native English speakers are often a bit more relaxed when speaking.

I see others have mentioned the "rule" about putting the verb to the end of the sentence. Lots of Germans don't do that and they stick the verb where they like when talking informally.

Anyway German is easy these days, just use German grammar with English vocabulary and you have perfect Denglish. Example on a Zoom call "unsere Speaker sind im Spotlight gepinnt" (I bet even the non-German speakers can understand that one!)

I get the impression that the German approach to teaching grammar is very different to the English approach. I learned German to GCSE (A*) and took it again as an option at uni alongside my linguistics degree. DH is German. I can understand a lot of spoken/written German, but my confidence in speaking it has been well and truly crushed. I honestly don’t think I’m that bad, but I get stared at like I have three heads any time I try (not by DH, I should add). I try to speak German in a shop or cafe and they answer me in English. Another time, my SIL laughed at me, so I never tried again (her English is shit though, so we just don’t talk to each other at all!). I’ve even had my native English grammar corrected by Germans! It’s bizarre.

Obviously immersion is the best way of really learning a language - it's how I learned English, by spending a year in the UK, attending school, basically speaking nothing but English even at home. We more or less abandoned Dutch.

However, I also learned German and French through the Dutch school system, and there was a lot of book learning concerning grammar. It was essential in both languages to get a really good grasp of the building blocks. We definitely did the genitiv, akkusativ, nominativ, dativ approach and learned the structures. Hard work, but it paid off. We also memorised the irregular verbs in both languages and all normally used tenses. Lots of vocab to learn too. Ultimately, if you're not doing immersion, the only way to learn a language is through hard graft.

I did Egyptian Arabic (spoken only) in my twenties and the same thing applied.

I made friends with a young Thai girl in Thailand who had excellent English. I asked how she had learned, and she said school. I knew a few people from her school and none of them were at her standard of English, even though they were older than her. I pointed this out and she said "Buffy The Vampire Slayer". She would watch it in English with English subtitles. That was a long time ago but the equivalent now will be watching target language YouTube clips and as you say, target language Mumsnet.
Although a lot of native English speakers seem to struggle with the abbreviations on here (DSis, DS2, and me went to MILs IRL, AIBU?)

@IaltagDhubh

I get the impression that the German approach to teaching grammar is very different to the English approach. I learned German to GCSE (A*) and took it again as an option at uni alongside my linguistics degree. DH is German. I can understand a lot of spoken/written German, but my confidence in speaking it has been well and truly crushed. I honestly don’t think I’m that bad, but I get stared at like I have three heads any time I try (not by DH, I should add). I try to speak German in a shop or cafe and they answer me in English. Another time, my SIL laughed at me, so I never tried again (her English is shit though, so we just don’t talk to each other at all!). I’ve even had my native English grammar corrected by Germans! It’s bizarre.

This is a really interesting insight. I think when you are a native English speaker especially living in the UK, you are really used to hearing English spoken by non-natives. We have a lot of exposure to this because it's usually the language multilingual groups have in common. So we're used to hearing mistakes, accents etc. And also culturally it's quite rude to correct people so we - generally- wouldn't interrupt e.g. a tourist asking for directions to correct their English. But this is categorically not the case in other countries. E.g. in Russia (at least I have been told by my Russian colleagues) its not so common to hear it spoke by foreigners and it would be quite normal to openly correct people's mistakes. So if your purpose is learning in order to communicate with native speakers in the country where its spoken, then you need to be prepared to get to a level that would be effective there. If people culturally are less inclined to make an effort to understand you then you'll need to focus more on accuracy. I guess.

I admit I do really struggle when complete strangers correct me, especially if it's not in a friendly way. I would never dream of arbitrarily correcting someone's English, it would feel quite hostile and xenophobic to me.

I also think teachers can go overboard on correcting your accent in another language. Yes, sometimes the accent has to be perfect or else you are saying the wrong word or cannot be understood. But an accent is not always a problem, we certainly cope with English speakers with accents (e.g., when German speakers use a d sound instead of th, they are still totally understandable most of the time).

This is really interesting.

It's a good while since I lived in Germany, but when I did, and Germans used weil and didn't send the verb to the end, they would apologise"! Clearly not the case now.

I have been doing some exam assessments this summer and a couple of weeks ago assessed a student on their speaking who was very fluent and confident but her persistently used wenn and weil without putting the verb at the end. I had to mark him down for that (according to the exam criteria) which is interesting if it is completely common for native speakers! Would Germans write "wenn ich gehe ins Kino" as well as saying it? It feels like a bit of a poor do if we are teaching students grammar that the actual Germans don't even use!

@clary

This is really interesting.

It's a good while since I lived in Germany, but when I did, and Germans used weil and didn't send the verb to the end, they would apologise"! Clearly not the case now.

I have been doing some exam assessments this summer and a couple of weeks ago assessed a student on their speaking who was very fluent and confident but her persistently used wenn and weil without putting the verb at the end. I had to mark him down for that (according to the exam criteria) which is interesting if it is completely common for native speakers! Would Germans write "wenn ich gehe ins Kino" as well as saying it? It feels like a bit of a poor do if we are teaching students grammar that the actual Germans don't even use!

The only correct way is still 'weil / wenn ich ins Kino gehe'. People do put the verb at the end in spoken language, but you wouldn't find this in a book or a newspaper. Definitely can't say 'wenn ich gehe ins Kino' though.

When I lived in Germany many aeons ago I did sound almost native. I've obviously lost loads of ability as it's difficult to practise as English is so consuming. DS then went to live in Berlin for a year on the Erasmus scheme with no language ability whatsoever as he went to school in the time when you didn't have to take a foreign language at GCSE! I tried to teach him some grammar before he went but he just couldn't get his head around that he'd need it.

In the event when he went to Germany he realised there was no way to learn without formal lessons so we paid for some. The best thing was that he got a German girlfriend who had the patience to speak mostly in German with him even though (obviously) her English was of a very high standard.

He and I try to speak mostly German with each other now he's back. He did learn really loads in his year there but still doesn't want to acknowledge that the only way to deal with irregular verbs, for example, is to learn them and that you have to learn your verb endings. He did learn the cases, though.

When I started learning mfl at school my teachers still despaired at how little English grammar we had been taught; my grammar knowledge comes from my mfl lessons.

I'm really interested to read everyone's replies, so thank you! I wanted to reply to lots of points but never find any time so before the kids come back, I just wanted to share , esteemed German politician, using "weil" and not putting the verb to the end! It's at 3min 58. I heard it on the news this morning and I was shocked and stunned, but couldn't find a link to it on the web till now

I did a higher in German 20 years ago, it was a bloody hard and long slog. Just leaving pages and pages of declensions and repeating them all to get to the one I needed in thr exam. Speaking was a joke.

I tried with little hope on Duolingo, it picked up that I knew the nouns and could have a bash at everything else. I am not learning the accusative case naturally with examples rather than 3 pages of explanation and rules.

Horses for courses.

I applaud the OP and others for wanting to learn or improve in a language other than their mother tongue. There are different learning styles- for me being in the place is important.

Really interesting. I live abroad in a French speaking country, but work is in English and home is English.

Just so happens that I did French from Y7 to a-level, then a bit at uni as a sideline.

My take on it is that we, in England, at school, don’t learn about grammar properly in our own language so we therefore don’t have the foundations of the structure of language generally.

My kids go to the local school and are fluent and even at 7yo are learning the elements of language. It’s hilarious to hear them say “oh I’m just conjugating verbs” and “can you help me practice the imparfait”.

Thing is, they understand these concepts already… I struggled with them as a teenager and just kind of went along with it, without fully getting it.

So I do think if we’d had a better understanding of the technical pieces of our own language it would’ve been easy to turn understand how to construct another one.

That being said, I do also think it depends on how you learn. I quite liked the patterns and rules. But my husband does not get it at all. He’d be much better learning by absorbing/listening or being immersed. Studying the language is just not for him.

So grateful we could give the kids this opportunity of being fluent in another language. But geez I’m envious too!

Whoever said upthread that they'd been told not to try to speak like a native because you'll never manage it ... well, I'm on my eighth country of residence and my sixth (modern) foreign language and I totally agree. I do think people can reach that point over many years of living somewhere, but it goes far beyond having a flawless command of the language. It's not enough to speak correctly; you have to reach for the images, turns of phrase and references a native speaker would instinctively use, and that's a matter of long, long acculturation.

I've been in Italy (which I fully intend to be my last ever new country) for two years and am well and truly in the Uncanny Valley stage. My friends here tell me that I speak perfectly correctly – and if you don't, here, people will tell you – but I reason in a way that no Italian ever would. I don't use the set phrases and metaphors my local friends do. And I still instinctively put the emphasis on the crucial word of a sentence and expect that to influence the meaning, as it would in English, rather than just fronting up and saying what I actually mean to imply.

That's a really persistent habit that just makes no sense here, and it marks me out as an English-speaker no matter how well I use the pluperfect subjunctive (which I had to look up just now because, like OP, I find understanding grammar much harder than actually using it). It will take me years to work past all this; probably even longer because my work means that I write and edit English every day, so I won't ever completely immerse myself.

For me, the single most effective way to learn has been regular translation exercises in both directions. Something about tackling grammatical principles in action makes my brain far more likely to retain them! I really recommend that to any fellow sponge-like language learners.