How to relearn English grammar? [closed]

Solution 1:

So, I am a TEFL teacher and Cognitive Linguist currently working with the Peace Corps in West Africa. As far as re-learning grammar is concerned, there are a couple of really cool books out there to help adults to hone their grammatical skills.

The go-to at universities, even today, is still Strunk and White's The Elements of Style. As far as prescriptive grammar guides go, that's the one held in the highest regard.

I had a guidance technician in college who swore by the Grammar Girl series. Personally, I thought those were (a) more accessible, and (b) funnier. And there's a lot to be said for a text on something as dry as prescriptive grammar being funny.

But then, there's also the cognitive route--the route designed to basically tell your friends to stop bullying you and let you be (though this does not apply to writing. When writing, prescriptive grammar is king, thus stick with the two guides above). For that, I recommend reading Steven Pinker's The Language Instinct. You don't have to read the whole thing either (though it's an excellent overview of language development and acquisition). Chapters 4 and 12 should be enough to get them off your back and show them a thing or two about how grammar actually works.

Give 'em hell, Chris.

/Zach

Solution 2:

Your colleagues don't actually know what grammar is! All adult native speakers of a language have perfect grammar, unless they have some form of medical condition.

Grammar is the rules shared by speakers of a variety of a language which enable them to communicate using speech without really thinking about it at all. These rules are known tacitly, not consciously - unless we go out of our way to study them. This is in the same way that you don't really know what muscles it is necessary to contract, in which order, for the purposes of ambulation.

So for example, in the Original Poster's question they say "English is my first language" instead of a) "English are my first language" or b) "English is the my first language" or c) "English my first language is". The Original Poster's sentence shows the tacit knowledge that a) English is, generally speaking, an uncountable noun, that verbs agree with their subjects and that uncountable nouns take singular verb agreement, that b) we can only use one central determiner for each nominal in a noun phrase, not two, that c) English is a subject-->verb-->complement language, and that the order of the constituents of a clause matters in English. All of this is quite complicated and sophisticated knowledge that the Original Poster has stored away in their brain, and never needs to think about. This is what grammar is.

Now, if we needed to actually be able to consciously understand all of these rules to be able to use them, then there would be no such thing as the study of syntax and there would be no real need for linguistics at all. The blunt fact of the matter is that what we don't know about these rules far exceeds what we do in fact know - or think we know.

So, in short, the Original Poster needn't be worried about the state of their grammar, unless they have suffered a brain injury or have some other illness. They are a sublimely adept syntactician of the highest order already.

However, having said this, there may be some reasons why the Original Poster is getting this feedback. One reason might be that their personal punctuation predilections do not conform with the conventions used by other people in their milieu. So, for example, some pedants may decry using a comma instead of a full stop before the word however. When doing formal writing it is best to conform to the conventions used by other people in your field. It will cause you less aggravation and may also help avoid confusion. Both aggravation and confusion are arguably best avoided.