Psych Up

Americans have grown up believing learning languages is hard. It is not hard! It merely seems hard because language instruction in American schools and colleges has until lately been so exasperatingly dull and unrewarding.
Grammar, I again protest, is usually presented in American classrooms as a kind of obstacle course designed to leave you gasping face down on the Astroturf somewhere between the pluperfect and the subjunctive. Grammar can do that to you if you insist on attacking it the old way: frontally, rule by rule, exception by exception, with no fun en route and never feeling the joy of progress.
You’re going to learn grammar, all right, but the conquest will never give you pain. You will waft through the thickest walls of grammar like a cartoon ghost and continue your journey onward through the language. Every time you look backward that wall will be lower, thinner, full of increasingly wider openings, and eventually it will disappear entirely. Contrary to centuries of American superstition, you don’t have to conquer the grammar to possess the language. Conquer the language and you’ll possess the grammar!
I’ve long entertained the fantasy of putting the old orthodox grammarians on trial for war crimes, the specific charge being assassination of the fun that flows from gaining command of another language. Their defense will predictably be “Bah, humbug. You can’t immerse, converse, rehearse, or even play around with a foreign language without a good foundation in the grammar!”
They’re right in insisting on the importance of grammar, but who says you’ve got to have it first, as some kind of brutal initiation? Where is it written that you must wrap cold, wet blankets of grammar around your eagerness to learn another language until it disappears? (Your eagerness, that is. The grammar never does.)
A six year old in America doesn’t know what the word grammar means, but he knows to say “he does” and not “he do.” How does he know? “He do” just doesn’t sound right.
That’s all! And that’s enough!
Years later he will be taught that the English verb in the third person singular of the present tense adds an s or es to the infinitive form, which serves uninflected for all other persons singular and plural.
You don’t have to know grammar to obey grammar. If you obey grammar from the outset, when you turn around later and learn why you should say things the way you’re already saying them, each grammatical rule will then become not an instrument of abstract torture disconnected from anything you’ve experienced but rather an old friend who now wants you to have his home address and private phone number.
When the grammatical rule come first, followed by its pitiful two or three examples in the textbook, it seems to the student like an artificially confected bit of perversity rolled down upon his head like a boulder.
When the grammatical rule comes after you’ve got some of the language in you, it becomes a gift flashlight that makes you smile and say, “Now I understand why they say it that way!”
So, you are right now and forevermore warned not to bridle or to question, “Why is the word for ‘go’ in this French sentence vais and in the very next sentence aller?” Simply embrace the faith that both sentences are correct and learn them like Catholic children in strict parochial schools learn the Baltimore Catechism.
The more shaken you become by grammatical storms, the more tightly you must hug the faith. I vow it will all become clear. And in this world. You won’t have to wait for any other.
It’s easy to reason, “Who am I trying to kid? They’ll always know I’m a foreigner. They’ll excuse my mistakes. So forget about all those rules. I just want to get by. Gimme some words and phrases and get out of my way. As long as they understand!”
That’s an attitude to be resisted. When you learn another language, you will be accepted as an honoured volunteer into the culture of another people. Do you want to be accorded a low rank or a high rank? Learn the language properly, which means (eventual) conquest of the grammar. Don’t be a buck private when, for a few minutes of extra concentration, you can be a general.
Look at it this way. Grammar is not a marathon run in which, if you tire, falter, or fall, you fail. Grammar is an edifice you must build on your property. But it doesn’t have to be done all at once. At the appointed moment in your studies, I will advise you to master the first five lessons in your grammar book. (Some call it a textbook or a workbook – it’s the book they’ll give you at the bookstore if you ask, “Have you got anything that teaches you French?”) After that, you will advance through reading, conversation, comprehension, and real world contact with the languages in addition to the grammar.
As I grappled with the complexities of grammar in Russian, Finnish, Hungarian, and, to a lesser extent, German, I had visions of those people way back when they were wandering tribes. I imagined the tribal elders squatting around campfires consulting with soothsayers who warned them, “In the mid twentieth century a child will be born to the Farber family in a place they’ll call America. He will try to learn our language. At present it’s too simple. Get back to work and come up with some more grammar. Let our noun endings mire him up to his hips. Let the felsh of his face feel the thorns of our verbs. Flay his back with exceptions to our rules and let his hair get caught in our inflecting negatives and perfective aspects.
“Hurry!” the soothsayer concludes. “We haven’t got a century to waste. Get in there right now and mess our language up so that poor guy will never get it!”

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