Generic Grammar Course? (was RE: Why students do not study Russia n anymore)

[Elizabeth B. Naime]

On Tue, 6 Jun 2000, Udut, Kenneth wrote:

> I wonder:
>
> Do any colleges/universities offer
> a course in plain ol' grammar?
>
> That is - some kind of course that
> brings together all *known* possibilities of
> grammar 'styles' and gives examples, definitions,
> explanations, etc?

I think linguistics is the closest you get to this.  It is useful to have
an idea of what's out there, although I don't know how useful it is to
memorize a huge number of possibilities;  simply knowing that your
language's way of doing things isn't the only way would be a big head
start for the average college student.  A background in phonetics and
transcription would help students hear the language, and give them a way
to record it before they have the alphabet committed to memory.  Working
on courses that actually ask the students to draw conclusions (here's 15
sentences in inupik, with rough English translations -- *you* tell *me*
how many cases are represented, and what they mean) would let students
learn the target language, not just keep trying to find parallels between
the target language and their own.  I think linguistics is fun,
mind-bending and useful!

But it is also a different sort of knowledge than actually using a
language.  Some students find it distracting.  The skills needed to write
a linguistic description of a language are often NOT the skills needed to
write a learning grammar of the language.  Language learning and language
analysis are not the same thing.  Some people, and you seem to be in this
group, really like to approach language "rationally":  these are the
cases, these are the rules, this is the word order... many people,
probably a majority, learn better from "picking the language up" in actual
use than from memorizing tables.  I wonder what the best approach for both
types would be?

Elizabeth Naime  <elspeth at ukans.edu>

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