Hi Journaly members!

I'm back after a while. The last anouncements of Robin about new features coming soon have made me want to write new entries here on Journaly.

I will make a new series of posts about language learning tips from polyglots. I will try to write in all the languages I have been learning so far - that are English, Spanish, Swedish and Italian. So if you are learning one of these languages or you already speak them, make sure to stay tuned, I would post about the same topic in each language. Why? Because, it will help me keep maintaining my other languages about topics I'm interested in and at the same time, it will make me more comprehensible input for Swedish and Italian since these languages are still at a beginner level.

Let's get started!

Today, I write in English.

In this video, Lydia Machova who is a Slovakian polyglot woman talks about grammar and compares the way of how grammar is taught in school with how grammar is learned by polyglots. Having done both for English and Spanish when I was in school and now with all the languages I am learning, I totally agree with the analysis of Lydia.

I've figured out that I acquire grammar through understanding grammar rules. Once I know one rule, I can apply it with multiple examples. It's the approach of polyglots for learning grammar she explains in this video. For example, in English, I was taught in school that you have to put a "s" at the 3rd person singular and I had to learn all the irregular verbs. I didn't say it didn't work but it was difficult to remember everything. With the polyglot approach, you don't focus on one particular rule. Rather, you let your brain grasping some grammatical structures from what you listen to or read. After some time and hours of listening and reading, you'll notice that some patterns come again. In other words, you'll guess the grammar rule without studying it. As Lydia tells in this video, you don't need to look at lots of examples of verbs that follow the "s"/3rd person rule (if we keep this example in mind) and look at all the exceptions of this rule either. Why ? Only because, you'll find them out little by little.

At school, we learn one rule after another. By the way, if you forgot one or didn't really get it, the teacher don't go back at teaching it, because they have to teach you other grammar rules. Those rules are independant from each other. With the natural approach used by lots of polyglots, from the beginning, you are exposed at shunks of different grammar rules that you may not understand right away, but that's fine because you are building your knowledge of the language in a larger way, which is more interesting in my opinion.

That's it for today, please let me know what you think about this kind of series of entries about language learning tips.

Thanks for reading this post!

// Picture by Lucas Wendt from Pixabay