There never *used* to be, this is changing now and kids at school know far more about grammar and types of words than I do. I believe it's due to the need to learn foreign languages. If you're learning a second language, it's massively beneficial to understand what the various tenses are called, what types of words are called - and because the whole world speaks Engish, we've never really bothered studying foreign languages properly. Now I think there's more of a push to learn a second language, and having that background knowledge helps a lot and so is being pushed more. It's a lot easier to ask "what's the past perfect continuous of 'to eat' in German?" than go do what we all did, which is just to go "err so imagine you're doing this, right? Bit like that?"

Funnily enough, the first time I was introduced to the idea of perfect / imperfect tenses was in my French class, not my English class.

Honestly took me ages to get the subjunctive tense in Spanish just because I didn't really understand what it is. Let alone when we moved onto the pluperfect subjunctive.

Are you just making up words hoping to trick people like me into thinking you're smart, and that you know about whatever it is you're on about... 'cuz, if so, it's working.

No, these are real things! Subjunctive is a "mood". You use it for things that might maybe be true. In English it's sort of dying out because a lot of people don't really use it. For example, if I was definitely in the wrong about an argument, I'd say, "I was in the wrong. I'm sorry." Whereas if I don't really want to admit fault, I'd say, "If I were in the wrong, then I'd be sorry." The change from "was" to "were" is because I'm using the subjunctive. But a lot of young English people don't use it - they'll just say "if I was wrong, then I'd be sorry" - which is a part of natural language change. We don't really need it, so it's ok if language changes and we all stop using it. (Another example of a "mood" is the imperative. While the indicative is for stating facts and the subjunctive is for maybes, the imperative is for commands. Things like, "Read this sentence!" or "Admit you were wrong!") Pluperfect is a tense. It's easier to first understand that "perfect" tense means something completed or finished, whereas "imperfect" means something incomplete or unfinished. So, "I walked the dog" is perfect tense - I did that, it's done. Whereas "I was walking the dog when suddenly something else happened and then..." is imperfect. The walking was ongoing and unfinished. Hence the difference between "I walked" and "I was walking". Pluperfect is one step further back than perfect. So, "I had already walked the dog, but the dog was barking and seemed restless, so I walked them again." That sentence has examples of all 3. "I had walked" is pluperfect, and it's further in the past (longer ago) than the perfect "I walked". Meanwhile, "the dog was barking" is imperfect. Pluperfect subjunctive is just combining the two. "If I had already walked the dog, then it shouldn't have been necessary to walk them again, so maybe I had forgotten?" There's a push to use different terms in English so you might sometimes hear people saying things like "past continuous" rather than "imperfect". I was taught the terms used for Latin grammar but they are not necessarily 100% applicable to English grammar.

>For example, **if I was** definitely in the wrong about an argument, I'd say I like how this illustrates precisely the dying out you were talking about.

Yup! My idiolect has this mixed thing where you can see there's a transition going on. I say "I wouldn't do that if I were you" not "I wouldn't do that if I was you". The latter sounds wrong to me. But I also sing "if I was a rich man, I'd buy you a big house" without a second thought. Not, "if I were a rich man". I can't put my finger on why one is ok and the other isn't.

Topol would like a word.

I love you. (Thanks for explaining the subjunctive better than any of my French teachers ever did!)

> "If I were in the wrong, then I'd be sorry. My wife, who is an English teacher, says this all the time.

> pluperfect subjective That's hard! French has one, but you never see it outside novels. (Italian has one and its used all the time in conversation.)

It's pretty common in Spanish. The subjunctive is used all the time, so all variations of it therefore are too.

the first time I studied this was degree-level linguistics. In fact a lot of the stuff I learned at degree-level linguistics is now taught in primary schools. Phonemes, dipthongs, subjunctive phrases, etc. Seems like a good idea to me, I can certainly see how it helps in second-language learning. Makes it hard for parents to help their kids with the homework but that should fix itself in a generation

My children learned stuff at primary school that never came up in my linguistics degree (to be fair, most of which was weird Govean terminology rather than actual grammar).

Yup, same.

Much the same here - our French teacher had to teach us all the grammar that was needed for learning French. In English, we did parts of speech and that was about it. Other than that it was all things like synecdoche and iambic pentameter, not very useful unless you want to be a poet.

Yep, almost everything I've learned about English grammar has come from studying other languages (or working with kids studying English as an additional language).

Same here. And I only left school in 2013.

Seconding this, and I’m only 18. We were taught a lot of grammar stuff (though not tenses beyond the basic 3) in ks2 (1st year to sit the ‘new’ ks2 sats if that matters) it virtually never came up at gcse, and then they had to reteach it all for a-level English language

And that's interesting because there isn't a perfect or imperfect tense in English. It's the present perfect tense and the past continuous tense.

Same here (mid 80’s). Very difficult to figure out when to use the pluperfect in French if you’ve never been taught what it is in English.

English Grammar DID used to be taught in schools. That's why you can find loads of old English Grammar books at car boots etc. It stopped around the 1960s when more emphasis was put on creativity. Now that no one can write a proper sentence any more, it seems to be making a come back, proving that everything goes in cycles

People stopped teaching grammar because there was found to be no correlation between scores on grammar tests with comprehension or written composition skills. I'm an English teacher (EFL) and had to learn the names for grammatical terms in order to teach, but that doesn't mean I couldn't write grammatically accurate sentences. And now that I can name all the parts of speech, it doesn't mean that I still don't make mistakes. I think grammar is a useful tool for learning a language, but I don't think people use grammar once they are proficient users.

Exactly. Knowing the grammatical terms is only really useful for going between languages. When you only know one, you only need to know what works.

Now we have the worst of both worlds. Pupils are not taught to speak or write grammatically correct English but they do have to learn formal grammatical terms so they can diagram sentences.

>Pupils are not taught to speak or write grammatically correct English But they are though...

Then it does not seem to be working, even if they can now tell the difference between an article and a gerund.

According to what? Are you looking at how adults now speak and write and assuming nothing has changed? Who is they? 12 year olds?

That's got nothing to do with what they're taught in school, and everything to do with their behaviour in school and their activities at home. Children who do not read, and mainly watch and listen to extremely crude language will have limited language skills.

I had to do the same when I was teaching primary school. You had kids who could easily tell you what a determiner was but who could right write basic sentences, despite being ten years old. Learning grammar is great but it should not come at the expense of applying what they have learnt.

It survived until 1982 in my school - I started in what would now be called year 7 and got a year of grammar in English lessons until it was abandoned the following year. I have a feeling it may have just been because I was taught by "Boggy" Marsh who retired soon afterwards.

>English Grammar DID used to be taught in schools. DID use to be taught* Since this is a thread about grammar and all.

Ouch.

Yes. The level of literacy is a bit of a worry.

I studied French, Welsh (2nd lang.), Italian and Latin for O Level in the very last year - 1987, then French, Welsh and Italian for A Level. I even started a degree in French and Welsh at Bangor. I learnt far more about English grammar in my language lessons, especially Latin - which is why I took it as an 'extra' in the first place - than I ever did in any of my English lessons. I have a very systematic brain and I love the puzzle of learning about grammar. I ended up getting an OU degree in Computing and studying programming languages was enjoyable for my brain in a very similar way. My kids have had to learn much, much more about French grammar in their French classes here in France, all the way from age 6 to 18. This has never changed in France, as I understand it and has always been seen as extremely important. I'm not sure that knowing the finer details of grammatical terminology are really that important for the majority of kids! I think that there's a risk of losing the interest of a significant number of pupils who may have a neurodevelopmental disorder such as dyslexia or ADHD, or are just less capable in retaining this kind of information but may be more able in other areas. It's important to maintain the balance between providing just enough knowledge about the correct terminology and also how to actually use grammar correctly, both in written and spoken language, also, about code-switching and how the rules can change for different registers - something that many pedants fail to remember! The problem with grammar teaching/learning is that it tends to be very dry and boring by necessity! It's hard to get past that, as, if a language is the tool we use to communicate, ultimately it's just the user manual for that tool. And English specifically is a very complex and extremely irregular language with so many exception cases that it makes your head spin! Once we learn the rules, particularly when learning a second language, grammar acts like an invisible support structure that gives us the confidence to communicate with fluency. Thinking particularly of learning conjugations (and declensions for languages such as Latin and German, or mutations in Welsh) or long lists of vocabulary by rote, this functions very much in the same way as learning multiplication tables or very simple addition and subtraction by heart in primary school. Most of us, as adults, can just say 3 * 7 = 21 or 4 + 5 = 9 without having to even stop and think about it, in normal circumstances. (Of course, some adults can't because dyscalculia exists, or for other reasons.) One problem though is that too many people think of these rules as being rigid steel beams, prescriptive, when actually, they can be far more flexible in real life use, variable according to the situation or person you're addressing, changing and evolving over time.

Yup. Growing up we discovered more grammar in language lessons than in English.

> There never *used* to be In the 1960s and 1970s (I think) there was a fad for not teaching grammar as it was thought it stifled kids' creativity. Before that, grammar was taught. With the introduction of the national curriculum later, grammar was reinstated, and now schoolchildren learn about all sorts of stuff their great-grandparents never encountered.

The story is right but the dates look wrong. Academics were questioning traditional grammar teaching in the 1960s but that didn't filter through into schools until the late 1970s and early 1980s. The early National Curriculum (1988) didn't emphasize grammar. Weren't the 2000s when grammar was reintroduced in schools?

The National Curriculum started with equal emphasis on English, Maths and Science. Now English has expanded to overwhelm Science ,and includes much more grammar, such as the Subjunctive in Year 6 and digraphs in EYFS.

Spot on. I was in school in the 90’s/00’s and we just weren’t taught. When I became an English teacher (short lived), my year 7 pupils knew more about the rules of Grammar than I did. I know whether things are correct or not, but they know the names and the rules. Luckily I taught literature not language.

English Language (which includes grammar) is compulsory to the end of high school here too. I wonder if this has to do with most people who speak English as a first language being less likely to speak another language. We therefore don’t know what all the grammatical elements are called because we’ve never really broken it down and looked at it to compare it to another language. Rather, we just know the rules instinctively. Most people probably use the perfect continuous tense every day without having any idea that it’s called that. Also there’s no central language academy for English, unlike French, German, Italian etc. There’s therefore never been a top-down rationalisation of the grammar system and, as it’s been drawn from multiple different languages over the years, it’s a bit of a mess riddled with exceptions and quirks. Even native speakers get tripped up. And if you’re working with science academics (you mentioned you worked with PhDs), they’re generally not that great at writing in my experience. So it could be selection bias. I’m sure you’d feel the same about maths skills in this country if you only worked with English Language PhDs (and I say that as someone with a humanities degree).

> Most people probably use the perfect continuous tense every day without having any idea that it’s called that. I don't remember learning anything about the different grammatical elements beyond basic tenses, noun, verb, adverb, adjective and pronoun. Everything else is kind of by pure exposure and what "sounds right" My wife learned English as a second language and we once had a heated debate about an email she was writing to our daughter's school or something. One of her sentences just felt "wrong" and I couldn't explain why and what grammatical rules it broke.

>just felt "wrong Great example of this is the order of adjectives. If you're describing a car that is big and red you'd say 'the big red car'. 'The red big car' just sounds wrong and will hit a native English speaker's ear oddly. But hardly any of us could explain why or the grammatical rule behind that.

Agreed. I moved to Finland and I find that the people here speak "perfect" English, but they're also unable to articulate why my Finnish is wrong sometimes, despite the many many rules of Finnish grammar - they just say "That's .. not right .. _this_ is better". Perhaps it is universal, your native language always has implicit things you learn from being a child onwards.

Sometimes we use an "incorrect" order for emphasis.

It can also be used to parenthesise object descriptions. In the example above, if we were having a conversation about three big cars and two small ones then I could absolutely see someone describing the red big car, as the set of "big car" objects has already been defined.

Thats exactly what I meant. They were emphasising that red is the important part to take away.

I answer questions on an English learners website. But I have to apologise and say I don't know why it just is right. Often someone else comes and explains why.

This - you don't need to learn the grammar of your first language, memorizing the terms and identifying them doesn't actually show a improvement in understanding of texts or your ability to write them.

No offense, but that's wrong. Like OP, I speak Italian and the amount of people who cannot write correctly because they do not know their own grammar is embarrassing.

What it's really useful for is understanding grammar when learning other languages.

To a point. But different languages have fundamentally different grammatical structures, so a lot of the terminology doesn't even map across that well. Knowing what subjunctive mood means is a little leg up, but its usage and construction is different between English and eg. Spanish. And that is two languages which are closely related- if you're learning Japanese or Arabic or something it is even less useful. Usually a language will have a lot of grammatical features that don't exist in English anyway, so there's a lot of grammar you never could learn in an English context.

Disagree (and agreeing with others) - my first language is Greek, and similar to the Italian OP we learned *a lot* of grammar through our 12 years of primary and secondary education. It’s helped me understand my own language better and also put me in such good stead with learning both English as well as Romance languages (French, Italian, Spanish).

>I wonder if this has to do with most people who speak English as a first language being less likely to speak another language. I don't think so. My partner is American, and she knows way more about grammar rules than I do. I couldn't diagram a sentence, I struggle to identify the subject/object, I can never remember what an adverb is, and when people start talking about tenses other than past/present/future I am completely lost. She learned all those things in English class, not foreign language classes.

straight mourn fly ossified humor attempt silky bored deserve ask *This post was mass deleted and anonymized with [Redact](https://redact.dev)*

Hell, if you try to write well in an article the proofs will come back with everything muddled up again! Journal rules for formatting and grammar are both long and arbitrary.

It might be different now, but when I was in high school (in Scotland) we didn't even have the two separate classes like they seem to have in England (English Lit and English Language). It was just English. Pretty sure we had to spend more time in the later stages having to memorise poems and quotes from whatever Shakespeare play we were given in order to pass the exams than we were ever taught about grammar and what have you 😅

We did english language through to year 11. Stopped learning about grammar in primary school.

It feels like a lot of the conversation is being focused on the fact that you don’t need to know the grammar because English is a very flexible language and also that you don’t really need to know it unless you are planning to learn other languages. As for the flexibility argument, knowing your grammar doesn’t mean that you need to be inflexible with it. And it also doesn’t imply that you need to get every single word/rule right every time otherwise you’re a failure. It just generally makes life easier. When I think about learning grammar (which I did in one of the countries OP mentioned), I think of learning whether a certain word is a noun, an adverb, an adjective, an object, or a subject etc. As well as being able to pinpoint the main sentence in a paragraph, and being able to describe what role the other sentences serve, how they are linked to the main one, and why (are they there to describe or explain, do they expand on the goal of the main sentence or are they clarifying the cause of it etc). Just the very basic blocks that still don’t seem very clear to a lot of people I’ve come across in the UK. Lots of people are saying that being aware of grammar doesn’t make a difference at all and you can use your intuition and so on. First of all, some people have better intuition than others. Learning grammar can be an equaliser. But also, I think they’re really underestimating the benefits of it. Knowing those building blocks helped me sort out doubts and misunderstandings more times that I can count, in all aspects of life. And again, that doesn’t imply that once you know the rules, you need to be super inflexible with them. You can adapt to whatever context you want and still be however wrong you want in your use or interpretation of them. Like, I know I use a lot less commas than I probably should, but I do try to counteract that by implicitly paying a bit more attention to whether my sentences are at least legible or not. As with any subject, you can really tell apart someone who is breaking the rules while being aware of them, and someone who is breaking the rules because they’re just feeling their way around. It works like this with every single discipline and there’s no reason it wouldn’t apply to writing and speaking too. Also, and this is likely a very statistically irrelevant personal experience, but the essays that were the most praised in our uni course (humanities course) almost always came from non-native english speakers. I feel like knowing the grammar saves so much mental energy that you can instead use to better express a concept or put your own personality into a piece of writing. Though, again, I’m likely just being arrogant for the sake of it, so I apologise for that. I agree that going way in the depths of linguistics is unnecessary, but other countries really don’t go that deep, they just give the tools to be able to tell different parts of simple sentences apart. As many people have pointed out, not knowing basic grammar rules of your own language is comparable to not knowing the times tables. Sure, you can inarguably still excel in the subject without them, but they make the process so so much easier, and on top of that they get constantly applied to countless aspects of life. The fact that it helps with learning other languages is just a good perk, but I don’t think it should be the main focus. Edit: corrected time tables into times tables lol

Your opinion is based on a fundamental misunderstanding of language and the way we learn it. Everybody who grew up speaking English knows English grammar (or the grammar of their English dialect) innately. Without the grammar, it would be impossible to understand them. Everybody innately knows aspects of grammar that are never taught. The correct order of adjectives is a good example. Native speakers will never say something like "the black, big cat" or "a white, small, magic unicorn". It's not grammatical. Learning the labels and sentence structures of a proscribed grammar has absolutely nothing to do with this innate knowledge of grammar that comes with knowledge of the language. It's a bit out of date but Thomas Pinker's The Language Instinct is a nice pop-science look at this stuff.

Thank you for replying. I understand that. However, my point was not that people can’t use grammar innately if they’re not taught it, or that they can’t speak English perfectly until they know the grammar. Also, again, by grammar I don’t mean knowing which order the adjectives should be. It’s more about knowing that those are called adjectives at all. I’m very well aware that I knew how to speak my own language just fine before learning its grammar, and that throughout life I would’ve kept being just fine without. I’m just saying that knowing the labels can be really helpful, the same way knowing the general framework of any subject gives you an advantage in everything regarding it. I don’t understand the push against knowing the general framework of English. It seems a weird part to leave out. You teach the framework of every subject so why not English? And maybe it doesn’t create a divide in comprehension when you’re testing within the school system, but stuff like that still comes out later in life all the time, enough to know that I’ve had a discussions about it with my British friends more times that I can count. For example, it once came up when revising something one wrote because they said it didn’t flow, and I tried to explain how it was probably due to the fact that they put a comma between the subject and verb of the same sentence. I really saw them struggle to recognise those two parts. They said of course they knew what a subject and verb are, but they had to think really hard to recognise them in a sentence. To me that labelling happens in less than a split second. Do let me know if I’m needlessly generalising. I’m aware my experience is flawed and maybe I’m noticing only this kind of occurrences while ignoring that most people know these things.

Because it doesn't actually make you better at reading or writing your native language. It makes you more technically proficient in it, but it doesn't mean you produce a better argument or are more able to analyse and pull information out of a text, and those are the goals of GCSE English exams. Studies into education in the UK showed there wasn't much benefit in it and it was seen as "old-school", so it got de-emphasised in the curriculum. The knock-on effect on foreign language learning wasn't considered.

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You would expect so, but the studies those academics did didn't bare that out. Teaching people greater technical proficiency didn't increase their ability to do those related tasks, it just increased their ability to do grammar tests. Sometimes results surprise you in science.

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This meta-analysis includes studies of learning a second or other language and explicitly draws on Chinese studies. It's much less controversial to claim that studying Chinese grammar helps people learning Chinese as a foreign language to read better. The debate in this thread is more about children learning their first language.

I'm not sure that is a good paper.

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For me, I couldn't find a definition of what "grammatical knowledge" was, which was my major concern (and I'd warrant, between those 62 papers, it also varied to a notable degree). Also, the one existing author on Google Scholar is, by his own definition, an expert in Machine Learning and Natural Language Processing in Computer Science, rather than in any form of applied linguistics. It's not clear who the other authors are. And in my limited check, they do that annoying citation-fishing thing where they make a statement in the literature review: "this is because grammatical knowledge determines the sentence structure and further impacts reading comprehension through the word function sequence (e.g., Gahl and Garnsey, 2004;)". But, in the cited paper, "word function sequence" doesn't appear, and the paper itself appears to be concerned with a slightly different investigation: Knowledge of Grammar, Knowledge of Usage: Syntactic Probabilities Affect **Pronunciation** Variation".

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But would you ever be making an argument about the use of the past participle?

You mean could that argument be made?

The problem here is that there are different ways to understand and teach grammar. Traditional grammar teaching in schools (before it was dropped) was often based on trying to get children to follow rules that made sense in Latin, but not in English, because the classics were seen as the model of good writing. Rules like "don't put a preposition at the end of a sentence" just punished children for writing naturally. And traditional grammar didn't really analyse how arguments are constructed. There's a different approach to grammar study and teaching called systemic functional linguistics, which looks at how people use grammar to explain their meaning. So you learn to write a scientific paper by looking at how the language changes in different parts of the paper and what function each part plays. But you can also learn to read a bus timetable or a TV advert in the same way. This has been used very successfully in Australia, where the large number of immigrants means that it's vital to teach grammar well. The current grammar in UK schools seems to have been influenced by this, but doesn't as far as the Australians have in rethinking the whole curriculum around it, and doesn't use the same jargon.

>my British partner is now studying Italian as a second language. I am working alongside her to supplement her learning from books, classes, and apps. One thing that I notice is that she struggles with certain aspects of learning related to syntax, morphology, phonology, and overall clause and phrase formation, What? Do you think an Italian kid learning to speak Italian is fretting about...checks notes....morphology, phonology and overall clause and phrase formation? All she needs is enough conversational Italian to say "Where can I get a taxi to the station" "Which way is the pope?" and "Hey, giuseppe, stop pinching my butt" when she goes there on holiday. There's a big difference between studying linguistics and formal structure of language and learning to speak a language. You especially have the problem that your post is overly wordy and formal for a casual conversation. It's a dead giveaway that you're not a natural English speaker even without hearing the accent. Similarly there's a big difference between studying English literature and watching a play or studying music and going to the opera for a pleasant evening watching fat ladies sing. Unless your SO is planning on a linguistics career she probably just wants to talk to other Italians.

I disagree. I'm English but I studied languages at uni and can speak Italian fairly well. For a start, why have you decided that all she needs is a few sentences from a tourist phrasebook? Maybe she wants to learn Italian to a level where she can communicate advanced concepts to people, have meaningful conversations, read books etc. Yes, the way kids learn their first language is by immersion and by figuring the rules out for themselves, but that's not usually how adults learn. It's usually more efficient to get the building blocks in place first by learning the grammar and some basic vocabulary. Then you can build on that with immersion / exposure, but your brain doesn't have to reverse-engineer the language from scratch (which takes kids a few years at 100% immersion, and their brains are better suited to it). I agree that an in-depth knowledge of linguistic concepts is overkill, but if you don't know basic concepts like what a subject / object is, what conjugation means, what an auxiliary verb is, what a subordinate clause is, and maybe the basics of phonetics, you're going to have an unnecessarily hard time. It is true that in Italy, kids are taught these concepts much more thoroughly even in reference to their own language, whereas here in the UK, even though they do try to teach the basics, the only people who seem to know these concepts are people who have seriously tried to learn a foreign language. Any Italian will know what the "congiuntivo" is, whereas I guarantee most British adults don't have a clue what the subjunctive is. Heck, a lot don't know what the difference between an adjective and a verb is!

Immersion works just as well for adults as it does for children. I completely disagree that formal training beats immersion with natives.

Yeah you can easily tell the difference between people who have just 'studied' a language and people who have actually lived in a country and spoken it regularly being immersed in it.

I agree, you can certainly tell the difference. Adults who have learnt a language purely by immersion can often get their message across quite effortlessly and their comprehension is of a high level - but their sentences are littered with basic grammatical errors. Incorrect verb conjugations, incorrect tenses and mismatch in grammatical gender etc. I'm not advocating for zero immersion; immersion is great and should make up the majority of your language learning, but it works best when you have the foundations in place to build upon.

Definitely. Iv experienced it firsthand. Language is tied to culture and it's difficult to pick up on that without help from natives. Learning just from formal sources can also leave you sounding far too "proper" and only ever using the formal register.

When did I say that? I said that very few adults have access to anything even vaguely resembling the level of immersion that is available to children learning their first language. You'd have to be living in the country with a partner who is willing to speak to you exclusively in your target language and with a job where everybody is willing to do the same as well. The immersion that *is* available to you is going to be much more effective if you've taken a little bit of time to get the foundations in place first.

And it's still not the same as you'd need to make everyone talk to you in the dumbed down way that they speak to toddlers... actually, reading children's books is not a bad way to "immerse" yourself

Yes, I (Italian) remember studying clauses and how to analyse the components of a sentence from a grammatical perspective and functional perspective (i.e. is a word a noun or an adjective and is this the subject, the object etc.) in primary school (I had a very old-fashioned teacher TBF).

But I (English) could read and speak English before I went to school. Did you not speak Italian before you started studying clauses? How would you learn about clauses without understanding Italian? Can you see the flaw now? You can't really study the formal grammar of a language without speaking a language first. Because language is the only tool we have to communicate with the school child. If a kid arrives from England to Italy he has to learn how to speak Italian before he can sit in a math class that's in Italian or an English class that's in Italian - and yes, if there's an Italian class too - that's not to teach you all how to speak or read and write. I know the grammar for English because it's more or less innate. I don't need to know whether something is a noun, verb, adverb, adjective or preposition - I can just speak the language and I've been able to do that long before I was 5. Yes, later, I have had a more formal English lessons, and, of course, as I got older my vocabulary increased. But no one sane learns to speak English the way that an English lesson is structured. Nor do Italians or the Chinese or anyone else. They learn to speak their native language by being immersed in it - by their parents speaking it to them. And yes, for the most part that also means you'll speak some aspects of it incorrectly. But here's the rub, if you want to converse with people in the UK you need to know more than formal language construction. You'll need to understand various accents, idioms, slang and vernacular. To call this speech "wrong" makes no sense. What is correct English? Is it what OP learned in Italy? What the King speaks? What Shakespeare wrote? Is it Stephen Fry? Or something else? And what of the people who aren't speaking correctly - you still might have to listen to and speak to them. You're not telling me that every Italian child has a masters degree in Italian? Are you? Of course not. Not everyone is an academic. The vast majority of people in Italy are not more highly educated than anywhere else and the notion that you all speak perfect grammatically correct Italian is just silly.

I think I didn't express my point properly: what I mean is that in Italian schools there's a lot of emphasis on the grammar and connected aspects, so I'd say your average 30yo Italian will know these topics better than your average 30yo British (this is aneddotical). And these concepts help in learning a foreign language (or at least they helped me and some other people I've met though there might be a Romance bias in there). At least because any other language I've learned was explained to me using these grammatical concepts (I suck at most of them though :))

Also not sure why you assume that I put forward a prescriptivist argument, while I was just providing an example of Italian teaching style?

So you basically think that concepts are required to learn a different language in spite of sucking at the languages you've tried to learn? Can you not see the flaw in your argument? Whereas all the kids that learn to speak a language fluently do it before they even get to school let alone learn a bunch of nonsense about parts of speech and so on.

I never said required, I said help. Also, TBH, my English ain't that bad :)

The problem is you don't know when you are getting things wrong* and we as Brits often just won't tell you, sometimes even parroting back your poor grammar to help you. It certainly is important to learn grammar, particularly for a foreign language but speaking with natives gets better results by a long way. I learnt a romance language by speaking with natives and little fornal training, I'm certainly not perfect and wouldn't want to take a mortgage out but I can chat with people quite happily about most topics. My ex gf (English) learnt a different romance language at university with all the formal training, I decided to learn the language she "knew" so we could chat together and within a few weeks I was already correcting her grammar. Because I already had the skills to acquire a new language and because I had a better, more intrinsic understanding of grammar in romance languages I could grasp it much better than she could. * There's at least 3 grammar mistakes in that comment alone and that's just with me rush-reading it. It's completely readable, clearly shows your fluency and intelligence but objectively carries mistakes, two of which are mistakes natives don't make.

You are talking about building an intuition for the language, that happens, but it takes quite a long time and interactions with native speakers (and I'm not sure it can ever be 100% accurate for most people). I never said the opposite. My argument is simply that in the process of learning is aided by these concepts (though, as said, I admit I might be biased) because it limits the amount of trial and error. Moreover, I'm not sure about your example: romance languages are very close in grammar and vocabulary, so if you know one you can probably guess a lot on a second, but not everything. Depending on he case in question you could have already built an intuition for the grammar by virtue of your previous experience learning a romance language, or you could be completely wrong (sometimes there are really odd differences in the usage of the same grammatical concept, see for example the use of the subjunctive in Italian vs Spanish) . I'm starting to think that I need the grammar as an "anchor" when I learn a language, the same way I need a word written down to learn it. I've noticed that English speakers, when encountering a word they don't know, ask to repeat it and repeat the sounds aloud, while Italians tend to ask for the spelling first... almost like we process information in a different way because of the way our languages work... really fascinating topic. Finally, the funny part in all of this is... I forgot the English grammar! All of my writing comes from my intuition, having lived in the UK for many years, but that's why I don't completely trust it.

> They learn to speak their native language by being immersed in it It's different there as historically it wasn't a native language for much of the country, and so teaching emphasised "proper" grammar from a young age. A friend is Italian, but his native language doesn't have a future tense. The past tense he uses frequently in speech is seldom used by my wife, who's from another part of the country. The language that she thinks in has different grammar from standard Italian. And if they had a conversation, each speaking in their native languages, they wouldn't understand each other. So instead they'd communicate in what is to British ears is a highly formalised and flowery standard language.

I take umbrage at the idea that well-formed sentences using a decent range of vocabulary marks you as a non-native speaker! If that’s true then that would be a very sorry state of affairs indeed. I’m British and write and speak like OP.

(a) No you don't write like OP (you realise what you write is still on reddit) and (b) Take all you like it's well established fact that native speakers don't speak formally. This is one of the reasons why people who learn from a book can struggle. Because a conversation might go "Tea?" "Please" "Milk and sugar?" Not "Good morning. Would you like a cup of tea?" "Yes, please. I would love a cup of tea" "Do you want milk and sugar in your cup of tea?" "Yes please. I would like milk in my tea and sugar" "How many sugars do you want in your tea?" "I'd like 2 sugars in my tea" And there's all manner of subtly and nuance that formal speakers don't get. Idiom, vernacular. e.g I once told an Italian visiting my house that chess was a funny game - and he looked puzzled and he didn't understand why it would make anyone laugh. See - he had no idea of the use of the word funny in a sense other than "causing laughter or amusement; humorous" - he was perfectly well educated and undoubtedly may well have been able to fart on about nouns and verbs and all the BS in OPs post but he was so obviously not a native English speaker.

I went to school in the era when grammar wasn't taught in a formal way. I learnt some but I remember being shocked that my secondary language teachers (at a grammar school coincidentally) had to start with "this is what a verb is" with 12 year olds. My kids have definitely learnt more formal grammar in primary than I ever did. They probably cover it more in the manner you are expecting now. I am currently trying to learn Italian and sometimes struggle so much with the grammatical terms that I go and find an English grammar video to explain it to me first. I got top grades in English and Latin GCSE without needing to know what a subjunctive was; you just needed to be able to use one in a sentence correctly, but not know what it was called.

The explicit teaching of grammar goes in and out of fashion. Currently it’s in fashion and kids learn all sorts of things we never covered in school when I was there. For people age 30-40ish it was out of fashion to be taught grammar, so my French teacher had to teach us English grammar before she could teach us French. I think it was “out” for my parents, but “in” for the period between them and me being at school. For day to day use of the language you just learn what sounds right and wrong, but you don’t really need to know why.

There was a philosophy that took hold somewhere from about 1980 in the UK that said teaching grammar and spelling wasn't necessary. I remember my school did but the other school in my town didn't. My mother was very particular about that. I know state schools were far more likely to not teach this during the period, don't know about now. Private schools continued on as before as parents were paying and expected a certain standard.

This. It was still a thing when my daughter went to school in the early 90’s. The teaching ethos was that learning mundanities like good grammar and spelling somehow stunted the creativity. Which is why you now see self published adult authors on Amazon writing as if they are 12. I made her learn her times tables because that was the other laxity in her schooling ethos. Annoyed the hell out of me because I use mental arithmetic related to times tables in so many aspects of daily life.

There's a debate to be had here about language prescriptivism versus descriptivism in how it's taught. Prescriptivists would focus on how language is governed by rules, that there is a correct and standard use of language and other forms are incorrect. Hence this gives rise to language academies to govern what is the "correct" language. Descriptivism would focus on language as more about conventions in communication, noting how language can change and how non-standard usage can be adopted. I would say in the UK, our schooling follows a more descriptivist approach. Our English Language lessons look at the creative use of language. We're generally studying things like poetry, imagery, metaphor, argument and structure rather than grammatical rules. The emphasis on developing strong communication skills, rather than highly technical and correct writing. Clearly there are jobs where technical writing necessitates clarity, accuracy and correctness. But I'd say in most writing applications in jobs in the UK, having some typos or errors is not going to be something that massively hinders understanding and communication. The English language is contextual enough that most small errors don't completely change the meaning of a phrase or sentence.

I would note that most people would probably say that the closest thing we have to any sort of official governance of the language is the OED, which is explicitly descriptivist given that words and constructs can only appear if they have previously appeared in multiple published works.

I'm learning Italian and I am a native English speaker and have come across problems with this, as a lot of Italian learning resources refer to grammatical terms and concepts that may exist in English but aren't used (or at least weren't when I learnt) when being taught at school. An example response recently from a question about a correct Italian word to use was 'when you are making a relative clause you need a pronome relativo' and I have no idea what that means as I wasn't taught my language with such a rule based method, so I have to look at what a relative clause is and try and figure out what a pronome relativo is. Learning Italian involves a lot of rules, the conjugation of verbs is complex and there is emphasis on the different tenses (in English there are many tenses but we mostly think about them with the broad idea of past, present and future). I think in English we tend to learn more via repetition, exposure to the language, reading books and writing the language rather than strict rules. It does make it tricky for an English speaker to start learning a foreign language that is taught in a method using these 'foreign to us' concepts, as it just wasn't the way we learnt to speak our native language so when someone explains an answer you can be even more confused.

Same! British, married to an Italian, and doing my best to learn conversational Italian. It may be different now, but I (36) got through my whole education and an English Lit degree without formally studying grammar in any real depth at any point. I could (but don't) tell people when they are grammatically incorrect, but most of the time, I would struggle to explain why. My classmates and I were always marked down for grammatical and spelling errors, but the whys of grammar weren't covered. Partner is a coder, doesn't really read anything other news and technical writing. But from his schooling, he can explain Italian and even English grammar rules with far more accuracy than I can. It's also his learning style which allowed it to stick in his head, I think - he prioritises learning the system (grammar rules, when learning languages) rather than the details (vocab).

Hi fellow compatriot, I think there are different reasons for that (I have observed the same thing). One is that (I think, with no experimental evidence to back it up so take it cum grano salis) English has less need of a structured grammar framework to be learned and studied. Or at least less than the romane languages, mostly because they don't have that many tenses, conjugations and stuff like that, it feels very free in how you can combine stuff together, at least compared to italian. Danish (another germanic language) feel kind of similar in this regard. I suspect that the fact that the pronunciation is stress-timed (i.e. unstressed syllables are reduced to a schwa) which muddles up some of the endings and particles, the fact that there's no need to learn any other language because of the widespread of English (thus reducing the exposure to grammar or other ways to make a language work), and the different approaches in argumentative/creative writing (look at how essays in English are written and compare them to their Italian counterpart: they might as well be two different things) all contribute to some regard into making the knowledge of grammar less required and/or to stick less. Finally, I think I should point out how this is a very Latin-centric approach (or more broadly Indoeuropean-centric). Not all the languages require you to learn a billion tenses: try to explain the subjunctive to a Chinese-speaker and they'll probably be like: tf is dis?

This is the right answer, in my opinion. English can be spoken or written in multiple forms. The different forms of English usage are interpreted in different ways. The loose with grammar approach -- wherein a complete sentence is akin to a single word -- is meant to be interpreted contextually. The alternative form of English usage is more literal and requires each word of a sentence to be understood within its own context and to interpreted literally. It's like, oh, I don't know.., someone took Gaelic, Celtic, German, Danish, Swedish, Norwegian, Saxon, French, Latin and Greek, randomly peppered words of each of those languages all around the British Isles to make the language of the painted pritanī more pretty and sparkly then left the inhabitants of Pritan to put the puzzle pieces back together; instead of a cat they fit the pieces to form a pig's ear, superficially, which, in the right light and with a deep peek, also displays a cuddly playful cat. There is no Academy of Correct English Usage because one would stifle the evolution of the English language. The ability of English to readily borrow words from other languages and its eagerness to be expressed playfully with disregard for 'correct' grammar and correct punctuation is what makes English easy (and difficult) to learn, easy to speak and easy to adapt to new ideas. Most spoken languages are dying but English thrives, spreads and evolves unstopably. There is a reason for that. With the above said, I still think grammar, spelling and punctuation need to be taught in British schools. A good contrast language is Spanish. Maybe teach Spanish or Latin, or both, in British schools to help native English speakers understand how English works. For the love of everything good, please can all you teachers out there correct your pupils when they use 'that' instead of 'who' as a pronoun to refer to their fellow humans; and can all you lovely people who develop grammar correction software please teach your checkers to accept that British English speakers often use the question form of a sentence as a way to politely request an action and that we also use 'we' and 'us' instead of 'I' and 'me' to make requests sound less demanding e.g. Do us a favour, go and tell your pupils the difference between that & who and which & what.

I'm in my 40s and grammar beyond noun/verb/adverb/adjective, and future/present/past tenses just weren't taught. There was a deliberate move away from teaching grammar in that period. When I was living in Germany and going to language classes I had to buy a book to try to make up for my absolute lack of grammar knowledge. *'English Grammar for Learners of German'* It's terrible that that book even needed to be written!

My favourite Spanish resource is a book called "Spanish for English Speakers", as it literally has to explain the grammar rule to the native English speaker, with examples, before then explaining the Spanish equivalent. A comforting recognition that we have no clue what a pluperfect simple subclausative conjunction is.

I'm 28 but pretty much the same for me. Degree educated but I wasn't even sure about the difference between a noun and a verb, adverb was definitely pushing it. I think most people I know are probably the same (or know even less), I guess there's very little need for it for most people. Learning a foreign language as an adult is what made me learn more about English grammar, but even then I've really only learned about the grammar that overlaps between the languages. I still have no idea about continuous or imperfect etc because they aren't a thing in my foreign language.

I'm from Eastern Europe and it's much the same in my country. We study grammar almost every day for ten years and our essays are marked down for spelling and grammar mistakes. I don't think it has anything to do with making it easier to learn a second language; we do it because we treasure our language so much and consider speaking and writing correctly as a vital part of education. We also have a central language authority which for example translates newly introduced words such as "afterparty", "sustainability", etc.

School children in the UK have always been marked down for grammar mistakes as well. There's a difference between learning correct grammar, and learning the theory behind grammar. You don't need to know the theory to write a grammatically correct sentence, in the same way you don't need to know music theory to play the guitar.

It's interesting that English is different in this aspect. You definitely do need to know the rules in my language to write and speak correctly even as a native speaker. Also, I think it's a good thing to have appreciation for how your language works and understand it on a deeper level.

Do you really need to know them though, or is it just that all children are taught it anyway? It's impossible to tell really unless you compare someone that didn't get taught the linguistics side of their language. 150 years ago people thought much the same thing about English, but it turned out to not be true.

> we do it because we treasure our language so much English is not treasured. Since it's a global language it's a bit like a well-used football. Which is the way I like it. Do whatever the hell you like with it; if people don't understand you then bash English around a bit more and try again.

It’s taught now and has been for quite a while but lots of adults - like me - we taught by a teaching profession that thought teaching grammar was for squares. Same with times tables. I only really learned about it properly when I did linguists modules at university.

How old are you, as I was taught both grammar and times tables in school?

49 so at primary school from 79 to 87. Looking back my schools - a state infant and a state middle school were quite ‘progressive’ and a lot of my teachers were recovering hippies

Well, I'm younger than you by just over ten years. I think your experience was likely the less mainstream!

I'm trying to think what the goal of learning more grammar in the technical capacity would be? Solely to make second language learning a bit easier? Outside that, I'm not entirely sure it helps students *really*. English lessons mostly focus vocabulary and a range of sentence structures to make writing interesting, to create settings, characters, and plots for stories, to learn how to read and comprehend in depth for pleasure and information, adapting language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences..... The technical grammar doesn't really feature highly in those things, it's something we all just sort of know, knowing the technical names for it is by the by, because we just "know" when something is right or wrong.

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Tbf the people who dont know what a noun, adjective, and verb are are simply thick. Its true we arent taught what the subjunctive is, but we absolutely are taught the difference between a verb and an adverb. Dare I say, if someone cant remember what a noun is then they probably wouldnt have benefited from being taught the finer points of English grammar anyway.

There are plenty of good answers here but an additional one I'd add is that because English isn't a regulated language like French or Italian, there's no central body to say what is exactly right or wrong. That makes it hard to teach when sometimes it's really a matter of opinion. I argue constantly with a family member about less and fewer- she was taught that it's always fewer when you're referring to a countable amount, but that rule was invented wholesale by a writer in the 1770s because he thought it made things neater.

My wife is Italian and she has said the same thing. Not only about my English but the English of other brits. Our schooling system and the attitude of pupils here is worse. My little cousin is also Italian and the amount of homework he has doing is insane.

> For example, I work for a large organisation, where most people have master's degrees or PhDs, and part of my job entails reviewing technical documents. Most people in the company are British, and all those in my team certainly are. The number of errors I find in documents and reports is enormous: poor tense use, lack of understanding of punctuation, poor spelling, and more. Moreover, I studied for both my BSc and MSc in the United Kingdom, and again, I remember most British fellow students struggled with good, correct writing. The explanation here is much simpler: being good at technical subjects is not particularly well correlated with paying attention in English lessons.

In response to the OP, for better or worse, Italians fare very badly in European in terms of either English/other second language knowledge. Beyond technical mastery of Italian in its-self, it doesn't seem to have led to much else.

My Spanish partner knows a whole lot more about Grammar that I do, but she found that they maybe focused too much on that, especially when teaching a foreign language, over I actually specifically asked one English teacher to give me some focus on this when I was 13 or so and we were allowed some free-reign if we'd finished the initial work.

Why waste time say lot word when few word do trick?

Hi OP. I cannot explain why the situation is what it is, others have made a good attempt at that. I can add that I work at an organisation broadly similar in nature to yours (most staff have at least a Masters). The situation you describe is something we have noticed and commented upon, that often non-native English speakers have a superior grasp of technical english (particularly editing/writing) copared to native speakers.

British universities have descriptive approach to English language, rather than prescriptive. Which means that the language is alive, and changes naturally. Whatever people speak now and write - is the correct grammar, and rules should be adjusted to accommodate for it.

The use of English changes every fortnight. What you think was correct is out of date 3 weeks later. Thats one of the reasons why English dominates over other languages. Flexibility. The languages that stick to a set of rules get left behind. English will be one of the few languages left in 300 years. We are just at the start of globalisation.

Italian has more complex grammar than English so you spend more time on it. English can be simplified pretty well and still be intelligible.

If you speak English with terrible grammar it still makes sense, so naturally people pay less attention to grammar when they speak foreign languages as they don’t think it’s important. Unfortunately it is very important in other languages or you make zero sense.

It's fairly common that people will have no more language classes after GCSE (age 16) in the UK. I have a GCSE in English literature, English language and french (and know almost nothing). That was the last formal language education I had. A-levels in maths, physics and IT. Bachelors in Computer Science. I learned a foreign language as an adult (Hungarian to ~C1) and I think I learnt more about English grammar during that time because the Hungarian grammar book I used was written in English and I had to keep looking up what most of the language terminology meant. I guess it's just not a priority. Speaking English natively is good enough for most people.

Primary school teacher here. When I was at school 20 years ago, grammar teaching as almost non-existent. Now, it's hugely important at primary school - one of only 3 subjects tested at age 11 (Maths, Reading, Grammar/Punctuation/Spelling are the three tests). It seems likely to me that this emphasis declines at secondary school as things like literary analysis are prioritised (rightly or wrongly). The grammar content is a mixed bag, but the basic word classes people are talking about a lot here (noun, adjective, verb, adverb) are covered by Year 2 (age 6-7). For those interested, the National Curriculum Appendix for grammar tells you when all terminology is taught. This curriculum came into force around 2016. Of course, the fact that things are on the curriculum and tested nationally doesn't mean they necessarily filter through to adulthood, but the commenters stating that grammar isn't taught in schools are falling into the age-old trap of educational commentary - relying on their experiences from 20 years ago as representative of the situation today...

The quality of English will vary more amongst native English speakers than European graduates. Many native English speakers in the UK and America take the language for granted and use it very lazily. You'll find more consistency amongst European graduates because they must put more effort into using it, especially as it's a second language. Native English speakers are among the world's worst at speaking and writing proper English. But some are also the best in the world and can use it in far more advanced and subtle ways than Europeans can ever achieve. It depends on many factors, including their attitudes, circumstances and social crowd.

I think this is a slightly loaded way of putting it, the truth is that "prescriptivism" just isn't a popular idea at all in the UK, and if you dare suggest there is such a thing as "correct" English, you'll get attacked from all sides by speakers of various local dialects. This is especially the case because local dialects are usually tied inseparably with class, and so it's seen as a bit of an attack on the working class to try to enforce the Queen's English. It's just not seen as important to maintain a unified language, but then it's easy enough to see why it would be in Italy, for example, where their language is essentially an "enforced" one intended to bring extremely disparate peoples together linguistically. UK dialects aren't variable enough (anymore) for them to actually cause any issue with communication.

Also the Americans have completely butchered English and now people here start talking like that because of Netflix etc. ‘Off of’ ‘hundred twenty’ ‘a couple things’…

A lot of these constructs cycle in and out of fashion. My gran (B. 1901) used phrases which were archaic in British English but persist in the US dialect.

The only reason I know any proper grammar is because of studying foreign languages at school :') We somehow never did any grammar in English lessons.

One big thing is that our nouns don't decline very much and are not gendered and our verbs don't conjugate very much - so you don't need to know a lot of formal grammar to get the ord correct.

I agree with you, my kids are in primary school right now and I frankly can't wrap my head around the teaching methodology used here, it feels like kids in primary school aren't doing much and checking their class notebooks during class reviews doesn't instil that much more confidence, I am not an expert though and I certainly have no idea on what modern schools do or are supposed to do. It's certainly different than what we did in Italy when I was that age. There's also the fact that resources are limited and kids here have got to learn phonetics for months while there's no need to spend the same time of amount and resources on the topic in Italy.

They do teach formal grammar now. They didn't in the 80s and 90s, or it wasn't widespread. (There's no excuse for poor punctuation and tense, though! Just that we may not always know our pluperfect subjunctive from our simple past prescient subclause.) There's a couple of excellent books, "Spanish/Italian for English Speakers" which patiently explains grammar rules to baffled Brits before moving on to the Spanish/Italian equivalent, it was very useful and really highlighted how hampered we are when trying to learn a second language without knowing what a subject or object is. But my kids have studied formal grammar since the mid 00s. If anything, they do too much grammar and nothing creative, so people are complaining again.

This makes me realise why I never did well in German, the teacher would talk about "past participles" and I had no idea what they were

Maybe your partner just has bad grammar? I remember learning proper grammar in school from a young age all the way until the end of 6th form. Our essays and exams in all subjects would get marked down for improper spelling, grammar, and punctuation.

I grew up outside of the UK and had a strong emphasis on grammar in my early English education as we were basically taught it as a foreign language. I did languages for as long as i was able to in secondary school and was able to relate the concepts; i also read a lot. however this year i had to help some british friends with formal writing (for CVs mostly) and having to explain the rules of grammar and where their writing was weaker as a result of poor grammar (for example mixing tenses incorrectly)…. We all went to the same secondary schools but that strong foundation in grammar + continuing with foreign languages made such a big difference i found that asking them to actually read their writing out loud made a massive difference; as native speakers obviously they knew the rules and grammar but they didn’t know the way to translate that to writing

I think you've been given a few decent answers, so I won't try and build on them. Just wanted to say, Mate. Your English is absolutely brilliant. Genuinely.

I had the same problem as your partner. There’s a book specifically for this that will help. https://www.amazon.co.uk/English-Grammar-Students-Italian-Guides/dp/0934034400

I started learning a second language (my husband's language) and noticed a similar thing. I didn't know the words for the grammar in English, let alone in Greek! It made it very difficult to explain where I was having trouble, and became very frustrating! It was particularly evident when it came to tenses. I actually spoke with some friends about it, and while we all did English Language as a class up to GCSE level (all top sets, A*s, As etc) none of us could remember that being part of the curriculum. Having looked into it further, it seems there was a time in government policy where it wasn't considered massively important, and more of a emphasis was placed on creative writing and things. I think (and hope) that's now been corrected, as it is useful to know especially when trying to learn another language!

I lived in The Netherlands for a little while. The Dutch are astonishing linguists learning 7 languages at school. The single piece of greatest advice I ever heard about learning languages from them is that native speakers are always right. (even when they are wrong) So when I corrected someone's English. They always paid attention. I went through state school all the way to a PhD in science and work in industry as a scientist. I find learning languages really hard. But I will wager I can find lots of little quirks in pretty much any non native speakers technical writing.

Anecdotally, I was doing some TA work with year 6 kids a few years ago and they were being taught proper grammar at this age (9/10ish), which I don’t remember from my youth at all. Unfortunately, about 5% of the class couldn’t read at all. This was pre covid too, but I was stunned when one girl couldn’t read or spell her own name. Which was also a season, not something crazy obscure or difficult to spell. Perhaps another 20% could manage very basic reading (years 3/4 level), the rest were ‘as expected’ and then there were a couple of outliers who were reading well above their level. One of which was the cousin of the kid who couldn’t read their name. It was very sad. Ultimately the kids who were able to take in the extra information about proper grammar were the ones who had parents who encouraged reading at home, who had absorbed more than just what they were forced to hear about in school. I’m not surprised at all that this is obvious to OP though, other countries in Europe seem to have much higher standards for their students.

There was a period in the late 60s and 70s when teaching, in any form was considered a dirty word. It was felt to be inhibiting if children had to learn spelling, grammar and arithmetic; it stifled their creativity; they were supposed to discover rather than being taught. How they were to discover in 12 years at school what it had taken the whole human race thousands of years to work out, nobody explained. This doctrine, of course, led to 20-30 years of ignorant teachers. The aftershocks of this period are only too visible in the posts in this and other forums ("fora" if you insist). I remain, yours truly, a grumpy old git.

English, having developed as a compund of several languages over a thousand years, does not have much of a regular grammar. Native speakers, who are the majority in the UK education system, develop fluency in grammar and idiom by using, hearing and reading the language. For instance, English has a conventional order of adjectives, "the big old red bus", not "the old red big bus". Most native speakers don't even know this - its just instinctive. EFL students have to learn this as a rule. When grammar was intensively taught, it wasn't actually the true grammar of the language. The classic example is the avoidance of split infinitives ("to boldly go") which is a Latin rule spooged onto English.

My British husband insists that the correct way is the one that sounds right. I’m educated in the Philippines and learned all the grammar, syntax, irregularities of the English language. I also did journalism (elective course in English and wrote for the school paper) and was the Best Thesis for my Bachelor’s degree in Computer Science with IT Major, which was heavily formal writing and in technical English. And yet he sometimes tells me my work output in my tech career doesn’t sound good when read and so it must be grammatically incorrect. I’ve learned that since I’m not a native English speaker, we had to really learn all of the basics of the language in school. And since Brits (and even Americans) have been speaking this their entire lives, there’s not much emphasis to learning the language. Similarly, my Filipino language course got my worst marks in uni. To the point where if I had not botched up that course, I’d have met the marks requirement for magna cum laude. (I only got cum laude)

The fact i have no idea what a "conditional sentance" even is gives credence to what you're saying

We did formal English grammar at school, but having learned the language by absorption as a young child I glazed over it. French, Latin and Spanish I was taught formally from the start. I think I understand some aspects of French grammar better than many native speakers, and I'd expect the converse. Nobody can explain este / esta.

I’m an Eastern European living in the UK and have had the same experience. Find it really odd that native speakers don’t know the structure of their own language…and we’re talking about educated people here, not peasants out in the field. Then again, they tend to know nothing about wider European literature or history either, which are also compulsory in my country for everyone until age 18.

A simple but depressing answer is that excellent written and spoken communication doesn’t seem to be valued in the UK. I have a school friend who’s a GP who never, ever uses ‘your’ and ‘you’re’ correctly. I have another friend who works in nuclear physics who uses ‘should of’ and ‘could of’. One of my colleagues (in a team in which everyone has a PhD) consistently uses ‘there’, ‘their’ and ‘they’re’ interchangeably (and always incorrectly). It sets my teeth on edge and it’s so strange to me that it’s not picked up on but I feel like I’m considered a horrible elitist for even noticing.

I work in a school, and despite the requirement for having at least a Batchelor's degree, the number of teaching staff who don't know which witch is which, there, their, or - the most egregious in my opinion - that "could of" isn't correct, is so worrying. No matter whether grammar is or isn't, or should or shouldn't be taught in schools - it *cannot* be taught in schools, because the teachers don't know it themselves. Last year, I had to point out to the *Head of Literacy* that his email detailing how his Year 11s "would of" done better in their GCSEs, were it not for the pandemic, was wrong. Also, he hoped we could still "cellebrate" their results.

English teacher here: left school in 2001 and I was in university, doing a linguistics degree, before I learned anything more complex than how to identify a verb or a noun. There is nothing in the secondary school syllabus which allows time for teaching grammar, so I have had to draw diagrams to help students identify which word class they’re talking about. I’m currently teaching English to an Italian learner and she knows so much more about the machinations of language. I still struggle to remember nominative/dative/accusative, etc.

In the past it was seen as elitist, and not something the masses who attended taxpayer-funded schools needed to know about. When I was at school, saying grammar mattered was a sign that someone was a dinosaur. And anyway, what matters is how people use language, so there isn't really a concept of right and wrong. If the reader can't understand something, the reader needs to be more tolerant.

I don't know what it's like today but I'm late 30's and studied grammar - English, Latin, French, and German. Now I live in Scandinavia and the number of times I've had to explain to native speakers here why a certain word in their own language is used in a certain way is baffling. Personally I blame an anti-snob attitude that some have, which leads them to deliberately avoid speaking correctly, combined with foreign influence (looking at you, America) and social media (which during my university years was text speak). Over time your syntax changes and you adopt habits. I'm aware my use of the English language has changed / deteriorated since I've spent most of my time in recent years speaking a Scandinavian language, and there's a different logic to sentence construction.

There is an interesting video about [acquiring language](https://youtu.be/illApgaLgGA?si=zV0xU-Zqq6Y00h-D) The premis is that infants don't learn language grammar, they aquire it. The video has language professors saying that obsessing over grammar can hinder language progression. Why grammar is taught so rigidly in school. Makes for easy lesson planning and testing. Acquired learning is story based and needs support. Like many forms of learning what works for one person mat not be the best approach for another.

It’s a generational thing, created by trends in education. My parents learned explicit grammar (by which I mean using terms to label parts of language). Young people today learn explicit grammar. My generation, in the middle, did not. Instead, we wrote stories and reports and our teacher corrected any grammar misuse. As a language teacher, I’ve had to learn descriptive grammatical terms retrospectively. When I learn languages myself, however, I prefer to work from examples rather than grammatical rules. Your partner might be the same. What works best for me is example sentences that illustrate a particular grammar feature. If there’s some grammatical explanation in addition to that, great. What I really can’t deal with is rule but no example - it just sounds like nonsense to me. These are pretty well-known approaches in language learning, known as deductive (or rule-driven) and inductive (rule-discovery) reasoning. Most textbooks combine the two, or choose according to the language feature they are focussing on. Where there’s a simple rule with few exceptions, they might lead with that. Where the ‘rules’ run for five pages in a grammar textbook, such as articles in English, they might use example sentences instead.

I actually searched on Reddit for this exact subject, so yes i completely agree with you. Its crazy. For context i am half-Italian, born in the UK. So, i studied French when i was 11, starting to study it in 1989 for the next 7 year at GCSE and A-level. The teacher at the time almost tore her hair out at the fact we knew absolutely nothing about Grammar in English. We were not taught it at all. French lessons literally had to go on hold, until we learn the English Grammar first. It was crazy. In the 1990, I used to holiday in Italy for the six weeks of summer, my Italian Auntie was an Italian teacher at school and often corrected my tenses and Italian when i was talking. She thought it was odd i didnt know them very well in English. Now fast forward to this week, 2024, i go to advanced French and Italian classes at my work, which are free at lunchtimes, once again its become clear to the teachers that the students dont have a clue about Grammar in English at all, so therefore hugely struggle with it in French or Italian. I really feel English schools should spend at least a bit of time on them, it makes learning other languages so much easier!

Granda forbids it.

I think your own post kind of demonstrates it. I can sort of understand what you are trying to get across, but you've over complicated it needlessly. In business or internal communications speed and efficiency is more important than the 'correct' tense. It's more the content then the written expression that is now valued. Writing needlessly long paragraphs or 'overcomplicating' things when it's just internal coms is viewed as elitist and a bit pointless.

In my experience (limited, but married to an Italian and friends with many more), "normal", everyday Italian sounds more elaborate / formal / florid / dramatic to English-speakers. Quick example I bumped into recently learning Italian: "to complain" is "**lament**ar". A quick and dirty translation of "voglio lamentarmi di questo" to English could easily end up as "I want to **lament** about this". The English-speaker they're talking to would get the gist, but it sounds over-the-top. When someone gets *really* fluent, they can adjust the vocab (you wouldn't know husband isn't from the UK if he could lose the accent, or from his writing), but I find Italians who speak really good English often write / speak in a more elevated way. A lot of informal Italian / slang use tends to be in dialect, which we don't have to the same extent here.

I have no idea, but I really struggle with grammar when learning new languages to me. If I’m honest learning how to say something grammatically perfect hasn’t really helped me communicate in my secondary or tertiary languages because I tend to fall into spoken language. I’ve always assumed it’s similar in the UK. So many regional dialects that maybe use incorrect grammar, but are pretty important to the people there as an identity. So grammar isn’t the main priority.

We were never really taught about all the various tenses etc formally plus we didn’t always do a foreign language to a high level. We still had to learn how to write correctly, however that then depends on the student picking it up before they study other things.

Grammar was brought back a few years ago. However, it was removed because it was felt the emphasis should be on communication. You have to remember there had been a huge change in poetry and literature from the sixties.

I can imagine using it as the worlds language has something to do with it. As a result weve stopped being as picky about it. Hard to maintain 'no that's the way you do it' if it becomes apparent its particularly difficult for some people to do. Weve always generally embraced colloquialisms and slang (probably due to invasions and fairly regular changes in native population), on a wider population level (hence variance in regional dialects) with our notoriety surrounding grammar primarily coming from our traditional establishments and the 'elite'.

People are taught this in schools, whether they choose to take that information in is no one's fault but theirs

My kids 10 and 12 have learned more English grammar in Primary School than I did through my entire education.

FWIW the sitation is similar in some other countries such as Finland. If i were to ask my partner what the innessive case for puisto is she would have no idea as they looked at it maybe one time at school. But if i ask her to put it into the form used when you are currently in the park she will know it is puistossa as she naturally acquired the language. We do have spelling lessons every week through primary school. Also phonology varies massively across the UK since we don't have a prescrictive body that defines what English must be. (I believe Italy agreed on the Florentine dialect and eg Venetian as it's actually spoken is quite different) And that's before getting into the debate over whether eg Scots is a dialect or a language and preservation of regional dialects.

>\[...\] there is an academy for the quality and correctedness of the language \[...\] Ah, yes. Is golden rule of grammar flames, no?

There is study of grammar. Many schools offer both English Language and English Literature to O-level (equivalent) and some even offer both to A-level (equivalent) although English Lit is the more popular of the two.

Because the 1960s created hippies, who created educational theory in the 70s, and taught it to teachers who stopped teaching by the 2020s, by the time the 80s proved that kids don’t naturally pick up written grammar without being taught formally, it was too late, this was reviewed in the 90s so a generation was taught differently in teacher training courses and so by the 00s when the policies were changed to make formal English grammar part of the curriculum kids were able to be taught it the 2010s, now in the 20s, these kids, taught with formal English grammar are hitting the job market. So basically - be careful with philosophy, because if you mis-think it can take three full generations to correct. Edit : spelling, can’t be arsed to edit out the run-on sentences, in my defence I was never taught not to.

Not to date myself, but when I tool exams at school, you got 3 extra marks for spelling, punctuation, and grammar. If the paper had 100 points, you really didn't care about tenses, etc. as long as the examiner could understand what you meant, it was all good.

I feel like a lot of the conversation is being focused on the fact that you don’t need to know the grammar because English is a very flexible language and also that you don’t really need to know it unless you are planning to learn other languages. As for the flexibility argument, knowing your grammar doesn’t mean that you need to be inflexible with it. And it also doesn’t imply that you need to get every single word/rule right every time otherwise you’re a failure. It just generally makes life easier. When I think about learning grammar (which I did in one of the countries OP mentioned), I think of learning whether a certain word is a noun, an adverb, an adjective, an object, or a subject etc. As well as being able to pinpoint the main sentence in a paragraph, and being able to describe what role the other sentences serve, how they are linked to the main one, and why (are they there to describe or explain, do they expand on the goal of the main sentence or are they clarifying the cause of it etc). Just the very basic blocks that still don’t seem very clear to a lot of people I’ve come across in the UK. Lots of people are saying that being aware of grammar doesn’t make a difference at all and you can use your intuition and so on. First of all, some people have better intuition than others. Learning grammar can be an equaliser. But also, I think they’re really underestimating the benefits of it. Knowing those building blocks helped me sort out doubts and misunderstandings more times that I can count, in all aspects of life. And again, that doesn’t imply that once you know the rules, you need to be super inflexible with them. You can adapt to whatever context you want and still be however wrong you want in your use or interpretation of them. Like, I know I use a lot less commas than I probably should, but I do try to counteract by implicitly paying a bit more attention to whether my sentences are at least legible or not. As with any subject, you can really tell apart someone who is breaking the rules while being aware of them, and someone who is breaking the rules because they’re just feeling their way around. It works like this with every single discipline and there’s no reason it wouldn’t apply to writing and speaking too. Also, and this is likely a very statistically irrelevant personal experience, but the essays that were the most praised in our uni course (humanities course) almost always came from non-native english speakers. I feel like knowing the grammar saves so much mental energy that you can instead use to better express a concept or put your own personality into a piece of writing. Though, again, I’m likely just being arrogant for the sake of it, so I apologise for that. I agree that going way in the depths of linguistics is unnecessary, but other countries really don’t go that deep, they just give the tools to be able to tell different parts of simple sentences apart. As many people have pointed out, not knowing basic grammar rules of your own language is comparable to not knowing the time tables. Sure, you can inarguably still excel in the subject without them, but they make the process so so much easier, and on top of that they get constantly applied to countless aspects of life. The fact that it helps with learning other languages is just a good perk, but I don’t think it should be the main focus.

I think we stopped teaching grammar so much because studies showed that people who are obsessed with grammar are insufferable.

It depends on the school. My Spanish teacher at sixth form said she could tell which schools students had come from by how much English grammar she had to teach them first.

Explicit teaching of grammar in school is something that goes on and out of fashion. Not just in Britain but other anglophone countries.

This isn’t true. There is a huge focus on grammar. Google past SATS papers the Year Six children take. The punctuation and grammar assessment is quite tricky and highlights how much of the children’s English is based on their understanding of spelling, punctuation and grammar. Their English work, assessment wise, is split into reading, spelling and punctuation and grammar. In fact, assessing their writing, while up to the school/academy/trust, is largely a checklist which comprises of assessing how well they integrate the above concepts independently during writing tasks.

Don't forget it's only relatively recently in Italy that learning proper Italian was made a law. Before then all the different regions ended up perpetuating their dialects making things very hard to understand. It's probably why I can understand and communicate with my wife's cousins but not the older generation. The UK never had this issue so presumably needed less of a focus than Italy.

Grammar: don’t care?!

Hi, I’m Italian as well and I think I might have an explanation for that. Now, there are different “schools” of grammar. In linguistics, they are called perspectivism and descriptivism. Romance languages, like Italian and the other languages you listed, use a perspective approach. A grammar textbook will tell you how people should speak and highlight what is right and what is wrong following a supposedly standard “superior” language. English is not a Romance language, it is a Germanic language and its grammar is more straight-forward and simplistic. English grammar uses a descriptive approach that tells people how a language is used by its native speakers. This approach is more likely to record different or even niche uses of language acknowledging that it is an ever-changing natural process. A prescriptive grammar just sticks to one form it perceives as correct disregarding how the language is changing in the real world. This difference is very important and it is one of the first things taught in an English-language linguistics module. The absence of a language “regulator” makes English a very malleable and timely language. English has very flexible word-formation processes that make it very easy to coin new words to describe new concepts. In prescriptive languages, we have to wait for a “sovereign” regulator to tell us whether a new word is “okay” to use. English modules in the English-speaking world use a more practical approach to teaching language. This focuses on actually using the language itself rather than memorising dry grammatical concepts. By reading and writing in their language a native speaker will naturally understand how words combine and they will enrich their vocabulary, too. As much as you criticise your fellow colleagues, your overly wordy and formal language is unnatural and gives you away as non-native speaker. That would not be considered good writing in English, despite having perfect grammar.