Learn by Example

People that have been reading this blog for a while, may have come to the conclusion that I’m a grammar hater and that I reject explanations by all means. Well dear reader; that’s not true. Although I do believe you shouldn’t worry too much about rules and explanations (explanations will most likely keep you worried or will let your worry even more) in the beginning, I sure think they have their place at the right time. This post I’ll take myself as an example (no, I won’t promote myself as the über-learner, because I’m not. It’s just an example). Here it goes:

After about a year – year and a half of hardcore Spanish acquisition (I don’t want to call it studying, because that’s not what I’ve done), I can say I’m a pretty advanced speaker of the Spanish language. And although I studied grammar in the past (especially the verb forms), I learned everything by example (will come back on this later in this post). Anyway, just now I started fine-tuning my Spanish grammar-wise, just now I’m looking for the small and beautiful nuances in the language. And that’s fine; I didn’t need those nuances earlier, but now that I’ve hit a point where I can understand plain Spanish, I want to go further, develop myself. And that’s where the explanations come in play.

I’ve spoken many, MANY times about how an avarage child learns a language, but I haven’t been very thorough about that. It’s true that a child learns a lot before going to school, like being fully functional – with some errors now and then, that is – and able to develop him/herself to an adult. But in the first years at school there will happen some heavy fine-tuning: the kid will learn how to read and how to write, will unlearn some bad habits in speaking, and so forth. But in reality he/she is already an advanced speaker of the language, and that fine-tuning mostly happens at and beyond the advanced stage (everything before was massive [CORRECT] input). Now, you may argue that we learn different as adults, that we already know many things. Again, that’s true, but Spanish is another language with other logics. What’s logical in English, isn’t necceserily logical in Spanish. Heck, there are even concepts that exist in one language, that don’t exist in another! Therefore, learning those logics at an early stage won’t make sense, but as soon as they’ve become logical for you (they will with massive input), there’s a purpose for reading/learning the explanations.

But back to the example (ME!): I’m now at the advanced stage in Spanish, the point where I want to brush up the Spanish I already know. How can I do that? By memorizing rules? By adding those rules to my SRS items? Not really. I’ll give you an example of how an explanation can be implemented in an SRS item.

Q U E S T I O N
Habrá ido a ver a sus padres.

A N S W E R
= probablemente ha ido a ver a sus padres.

(© Gente 3 textbook)

Now, if I’d look up the form habrá ido in a random grammar book, it would tell me that it’s the Futuro Imperfecto de Indicativo. Frankly, I’ve never heard of that tense and I don’t bother (not at this moment at least). But I will be able to use it AND I understand how the structure works: I’m learning by example. The answer isn’t a rule, but it sure is an explanation and it’s a good one. First I’m seeing the structure (example), and then I get to understand the structure a bit better and grasp the nuance in it. I wouldn’t recommend this kind of items/answer for beginners (they can learn by example by seeing the translation of the sentence in their own language), but for advanced students it’s perfect.

To recap my thoughts: grammar exists, sure. But plain rules aren’t exactly your friend. That doesn’t mean getting a bit technical at times and feeding yourself explanations for tough sentences is bad; it’s more likely to help you and to understand the nuances of the language you’re learning. Anyway, I strongly believe that you should implement this into your (future) SRS items, but not until you’ve hit the advanced stage in your learn (or as I prefer to say it: acquisition).