Jeremiah: 0:00

Except for French people. Except for, yeah. And that's actually not true. Most French people are totally chill and nice. It's really just Parisians from my experience. And if there are any Parisians listening to this and are like, suck, that's not true. I don't care. If you had been nicer to me when I was in Paris, then I wouldn't have said that. Hello and welcome to How To Language a podcast about grammar. Question mark. I'm Jeremiah.

Marina: 0:28

And I'm Marina.

Jeremiah: 0:29

And today on how to Language we're gonna be talking about, uh, you could probably guess it. Grammar. I. Again, question mark. And, uh, the reason for that is because it is probably one of the biggest topics that people worry about when it comes to learning another language and frankly, about their own language when they're writing in it, especially, uh, which I see frequently in my job.

Marina: 0:50

So we wanna break down what grammar actually is, and. Explore the loaded term of bad grammar and what it actually means in a language learning context.

Jeremiah: 1:05

So, I'll just, throw out a question for you. Feel free to answer. You're the only other one here. What, what, what would you say is the source of most language learner anxiety? I think that's a good inroad into talking about grammar specifically, and maybe that kind of answers the question, but Yeah, I think you

Marina: 1:23

answered it. I mean, it, it's gonna vary from person to person, what? Causes them the most anxiety when they're speaking their target language. We talk about it a lot on here about like, oh, learner anxiety. But I think it's good to talk about it in more detail and, and get at the source of it. It could vary. Like I said, it could be kind of generally sounding stupid. We don't, we don't like to feel. Like we're not smart. And when you're speaking your target language, when you don't feel very proficient in it, you can kind of feel a little bit almost like a child. I was just

Jeremiah: 2:04

gonna say like a child. Yeah.

Marina: 2:05

Yeah. You're having problems expressing yourself. You might be saying ungrammatical things. You might be pronouncing things wrong. Oh yeah. You're worried about your accent, you're worried about just totally butchering words. And then a big part of it is also gonna be having bad grammar. Saying something ungrammatical, saying something that sounds unnatural. Things like that.

Jeremiah: 2:29

Those bullet points are good. Those capture really like. The, the vast majority of what people worry about, when they're learning another language. So you mentioned grammar for the last point, and I think it's worth defining our terms here because grammar in particular is a word that people just use willy-nilly. And I think it's not actually clear to most people what specifically grammar is. So how would you maybe define grammar for the purpose of this discussion?

Marina: 2:57

Grammar is a hard thing to define in linguistics. That's not really something that we talk a lot about in linguistics. Instead you're gonna hear more about things like syntax, which is sentence level, language at the sentence level, or morphology, which is language at the word level. And then whether or not certain constructions are grammatical. But for this discussion we can kind of. Say that grammar is the logic, and the patterns of how words are created and strung together in a language or in an utterance. So it's gonna be a mix of syntax, so like sentence level mix of morphology, which is word level. And all of that combined creates a coherent language. We can distinguish the two. Syntax and morphology to make understanding grammar as a concept more manageable.

Jeremiah: 3:52

Yeah, grammar. Yeah. Grammar is a term, like you mentioned, we don't really use it in linguistics. It's kind of like accent actually, where. It's more of like a lay person's term or like a general term that, that people use. It's not quite as scientific, which doesn't mean that we can't speak about it scientifically.

Marina: 4:11

Mm-hmm.

Jeremiah: 4:12

Like you just did.

Marina: 4:14

The idea of grammar comes up a lot more in language learning and language acquisition studies and so I don't think it's like inappropriate to talk about grammar. Yeah, so true. I guess I'm just, it's hard to define. Yeah.

Jeremiah: 4:25

I'm linguist pilled. You'll have to excuse my linguist pilled brain. And I mentioned earlier how I see this a lot come up in my work, working in a writing center and in a writing center context, what that looks like is often writers who come in for a writing appointment will say that they want help with grammar, quote unquote, even if they don't actually know what grammar means. And the way that I know that they don't actually know what grammar means is that they will come in and on their. Intake form, they'll say, I need help with grammar. And then they'll start asking about like, citations or punctuation or something. Mm-hmm. Um, so the word grammar kinda gets used as a shorthand for everything from like flow, you know, very sentence level and even almost paragraph level writing all the way down to punctuation. Which is kind of funny because punctuation isn't, isn't even like a natural thing in, in language. Which arguably, well, not arguably, grammar is a natural thing in language. We've talked about writing before, so I won't get into punctuation, but it brings up a, an important point, which is that the grammar of a language has a lot of similarities between its, uh, spoken and its written form, you know, of the language. I. But not a hundred percent overlap. For example, spoken language doesn't have punctuation like I just said. And so what, and also what you would call like flow, not you, but what a normal person would call flow. Rude. Uh, you know, what a person would call flow. Which again, is also not a linguistic term, is different in writing versus in speech. And there are different expectations in particular, in writing versus in speech. So for example, again, it's okay in speech to use a certain amount of filler words like, you know. Obviously not too many because that can annoy people. But if you're having a normal conversation with somebody, nobody is going to be shocked if you say, you know, a couple times or if you say like a couple times. Some people like to make a stink about that, but those are the people that don't understand the difference between spoken and written writing, in writing these, you know, filler words tend to be a lot less tolerated, let's say. From audiences, and again, that can vary depending on the type of writing. But just to say that, as a language learner, it's worth distinguishing between written language and spoken language for purposes of thinking about grammar and how important it is to have like really precise, quote unquote correct grammar.

Marina: 6:56

Especially when we're talking about learner anxiety. Yeah.'cause when you're writing, even if it's in your target language, you generally have a lot more time to think through your answers When you're writing, you have a lot more time to think about your. Sentence constructions and what words you're using to make sure that what you're saying is grammatical. But when you're speaking in your target language, it's like, it's kinda like improv. Like you're, you're flying by the city to your pants. You are more likely to make mistakes because you're producing language in real time. And so I think, you know, that's part of the reason why people feel a lot more anxiety when they're speaking versus writing. So today we're gonna be focusing on speaking.

Jeremiah: 7:42

I love that it is exactly like improv, in more ways than, than one. I don't, maybe I don't need to build off of that, but I kind of want to because like how an improv, I've never actually done improv to be clear, but my understanding of it is that a big part of it is someone else says something or does something, and you build off of that to continue the skit. Is that?

Marina (2): 8:06

I think so.

Jeremiah: 8:07

Yeah. That seems to be right. And weirdly, that's actually a lot of what spoken language is because another thing about spoken versus written language is that spoken language typically has an immediate audience, whereas written language has a remote audience. Usually in writing, you can't get feedback from your audience in real time. Whereas in speaking, you can. And also, whereas in writing, the flow of information goes one way and speaking typically the person you're talking to has something to communicate to you as well. Even if you are giving them a lecture or a speech, you're still getting important information from them in the form of feedback, even if it's not verbal. Which you're also basing your production on. So it's an added dimension that you have to think about when you're speaking, which I guess I'm getting a little far away from grammar, but that's yet another reason why it's totally expected, especially for language learners, that there will be, less grammatical production from you. Like that sentence I just said, which was a really weirdly worded sentence, because of all those things that you're juggling as a speaker.

Marina: 9:16

So bringing it back to a language learning perspective. When people say grammar, they're usually referring to a set of rules that you learn when learning the language about how sentences are put together. So, for example, in Spanish, you're gonna learn that object pronouns come before the verb unless it's in the infinitive, in which case they can be attached to the end of the verb, right? That's a grammatical rule that you learn. Um, which brings up another grammar point actually, when, when people think of grammar, they often think of all these words that a lot of people find hard to remember and know what they mean. Like parts of speech objects. Adverb, subjective, reflexive aspect, so on, that can be pretty daunting, which is a part of why people can struggle with explicit language instruction. Meaning that, you know, when your teacher says, put the object pro down ahead of the verb, elicits an definitive, and you don't know what any of those words mean, you're, you're gonna wanna say yourself on fire. Like, that's not a fun learning environment. On the other hand, people who have been learning a language for a long time and are very proficient in it, um, which applies to native speakers more than anyone else, honestly, will often tell you that they can't explain why a certain sentence is grammatical or ungrammatical. They'll just say, oh, it sounds right. Um, for first language, English speakers listening, I could say, me the lake, go. Me the like to go and maybe you couldn't explain in grammar terms what, what's wrong with that sentence, but you know, it's not right because it doesn't sound right. At the same time, even though the construction is wrong, you probably still kind of understood. Could at least guess what I was trying to say,

Jeremiah: 11:16

yeah. So that raises, brings up the question of like, what is bad grammar?'cause people are afraid of having bad grammar, you know? So, you know, what, what does bad grammar look like? Is that even a real thing? And I guess my. Thoughts on that? Is that when you're trying to go about things in a scientific way, as we strive to do on this show, an important thing to do early on as we did above, is to define your terms. So, you know, what do we mean when we say we're afraid of having bad grammar? The bad quote unquote, implies that making grammar mistakes is, some kind of like a moral failing on the part of the speaker. And hopefully if you've been listening for a little while, you'll know that we don't really get down like that. So our first major takeaway for you today is that there is no such thing as quote unquote bad grammar, as in like bad frowny face. Um. You know, negative, um, immoral grammar. Uh, what I mean by that is that bad grammar is not like a crime against the language or some kind of a sin, and it's not something to be ashamed of, which, you know, is easy to say, hard to put into practice. So yeah, there is no such thing as bad grammar. What there is such a thing as is ungrammatical constructions so Ungrammatical Construction is just a fancy way of saying that there are ways of saying things that fit the established patterns in the language, and then there are ways of saying things that break the established patterns. Language. And what does it mean if something is an established pattern? It just means that people are expecting you to phrase things in that way. And if you don't, it's gonna sound weird, quote unquote, like we talked about above. So what we're talking about here, the, the, the concept that you can put in your notebook is grammatically nice, long word.

Marina: 13:07

Take notes.

Jeremiah: 13:07

So that's our keyword for today, grammatically. Feel free to write it down. And it is, on a spectrum more so than being a yes or no. So grammatically, grammatically is on the spectrum. Something can therefore be more grammatical or less grammatical. And if you're thinking, well, that's not true, there's just right and wrong. I got proof for you. Listen to the following sentences. Oh my, One, she's talking to me. Two. She's talking on me.

Marina: 13:39

Hmm?

Jeremiah: 13:40

Three. She talking me. Four, her talk I five, I talk her six talk. Seven I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I, I. So, uh, marina, what do you notice about the sentences that I, that I just said?

Marina: 14:02

Um, some of them sounded fine. She's talking to me is a totally perfectly grammatical sentence in English. Same with just talk as an imperative. I, I would argue that that's grammatical potentially, depending on the context though. That's, that

Jeremiah: 14:19

is interesting.'cause the context here is that I'm saying that she is talking to me. Ah. So if I just say talk, it's not grammatical for the intention that I meant it, but it is objectively grammatical in the sense that it is a grammatical construction.

Marina: 14:31

That's interesting.

Jeremiah: 14:32

It's kind of fun, right? Mm-hmm.

Marina: 14:33

So you're, all of these sentences are trying to say the same thing.

Jeremiah: 14:36

That's what I was going for. Okay. Got it. But no, that's a really good point you raised about talk, being perfectly grammatical, just meaning something totally different.

Marina: 14:43

Right. Okay. And then the rest, well, almost all of the rest were just totally ungrammatical. Like her talk, I, that's a word order that's completely ungrammatical. In English,

Jeremiah: 14:56

not to mention the pronouns are in the wrong case, but,

Marina: 14:59

right, right. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. The object pronouns are in the wrong case.

Jeremiah: 15:03

Would, would you say it's still understandable in the same sense that the first one she's talking to me. Like, would you say that, depending on the listener, it's possible to still get that meaning from that her talk? I,

Marina: 15:16

I mean, I think you could guess. Mm-hmm. You could guess that, but you get a, you could, I think that a more. A more common guess that you would get is that you're trying to say, I talk to her because, interesting. The pronouns are in the object case.

Jeremiah: 15:32

That's interesting.'cause yeah, the next one I talk her

Marina: 15:35

mm-hmm.

Jeremiah: 15:35

Sounds more like that.

Marina: 15:37

Mm-hmm.

Jeremiah: 15:37

And what I was going for here is that it's the same words as her talk I, but because of English word, word order. Mm. Um, it sounds like it means the opposite. And so even though the words haven't changed, the order changing makes it less grammatical. Mm-hmm. Relative to what I was trying to say, but equally on grammatical rel like ob objectively,

Marina: 15:59

right. And then she's talking on me is interesting because it's like, it's close, right? It's close. The on is wrong because we, in English, we don't really have a well. Not for this situation. You could talk on a subject.

Jeremiah: 16:17

Right. But I'm saying like she's talking to me. Right? So if I'm a learner of English and I want to say she's talking to me, but instead I say she's talking on me'cause I use the wrong preposition, which is super common because prepositions in every language are really complicated to remember.

Marina: 16:31

I feel like this is a good example of like an actual utterance that an English learner would, would, would do. Mm-hmm. So

Jeremiah: 16:39

is she's show is I think also she talking me is also an utterance that an English learner might use.

Marina: 16:44

Yeah, yeah, totally. So,

Jeremiah: 16:46

but one is they're both ungrammatical, but one is more ungrammatical than the other.

Marina: 16:50

Yeah, I would agree. But I think like for all three of those, she's talking to me, she's talking on me, she's talking me. I think that those are like. Like you could understand what they're trying to say. Mm-hmm. Even if some are more ungrammatical than others.

Jeremiah: 17:05

Yeah, exactly. That's, and that's what I was going for, which is, you know, way more grammatical than I, I, I, I, I, that one's just

Marina: 17:12

funny.

Jeremiah: 17:13

Yeah. Um, and is not an utterance that someone, whatever actually say, but it gets at the point that like exactly what I was saying, which is that grammatically is on a spectrum, and at some point on that spectrum, you veer out of what is intelligible. Mm-hmm. Um,

Marina: 17:32

I remember like our syntax professor in college talking to us about grammatically,'cause this is a big thing that comes up in syntax is grammatically tests where a syntech ian will construct a sentence that is somewhere on the spectrum of grammatically and show it to first language users and be like, does this sound right to you? And then the responses are. Really interesting about revealing things about the spectrum of grammatically Mm. In a, in a given language. It's really interesting. It's not, it's not as, textbook grammar as people expect. Like I think people expect grammar to be like, there's like this to somewhere that contains all of the rules. And then linguists just like look at those to determine what's grammatical. But we look at what people think. Yeah. And how people perceive these things to determine if something is grammatical or not. Something that was grammatical a long time ago is no longer grammatical and vice versa. Mm-hmm. You know?

Jeremiah: 18:40

Yeah. Like, I feel like that is kind of the contradiction at the core of like understanding why African American vernacular English is. Is a dialect and not just like a, a series of mistakes. Yeah. Okay. Let's, let's use the sentence that we just used for the other example. She's talking to me. Mm-hmm. In aav. If you wanted to be like, she is regularly talking to me, you can say she'd be talking to me.

Marina: 19:05

Mm-hmm.

Jeremiah: 19:07

And then if you wanna say that she's talking to me right now. She talking to me.

Marina: 19:11

Mm-hmm.

Jeremiah: 19:11

Right. And if you ask speakers of AAVs, this grammatical or not as this grammatical, does this sound right? Mm-hmm. They would say, yeah. and then if you look at the tome, yeah, it would say, now you can't say that. And it's like, too bad. I, I just did, I just said it.

Marina: 19:28

Like two first language users of a language could look at a sentence and one says It sounds right, and one says that it doesn't sound right.

Jeremiah: 19:36

You're right. Which is gonna depend on their dialect,

Marina: 19:39

right? Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I, and I think that's just further, further shows that like, this is a lot more messy than people, I think first assume.

Jeremiah: 19:48

Do you think that grammatically is like the only metric for determining whether something is appropriate to say or do you think there are other metrics that are as important or more important?

Marina: 20:02

Yeah, so grammatically. I would say is not the only metric for determining appropriateness. There's so much more to language than that. I think that goes back to one of the learner anxieties of feeling like what you're saying isn't natural. Oh, this is grammatical. Like, oh my God. Like when you're talking to your language partner and they're like, well, a native speaker would never say that. But it makes sense. I get what you're trying to say. Ouch. It's grammatical. Yeah, no, that doesn't feel good. But using. A hyper grammatical sentence around your best friend would probably seem a little out of place. Because grammatically is always informed by the social context. Language isn't just a static system of rules inside your head. It's a social behavior that mediates human interactions to allow us to communicate extremely complex information.

Jeremiah: 20:58

At a distance. Because you can look at like other forms of communication in the animal kingdom. Like do you know how ants rub their antenna together to communicate things? It's not language, but like that's the basis of it is they rub. Did you know that they rub their antenna together? I did not know

Marina: 21:12

that. No.

Jeremiah: 21:13

Yeah. Okay. So ants fun fact rub, like maybe it's only certain species of ants, but like they're very organized, you know, Uhhuh, and part of how they're able to do that is. By like communicating things by rubbing their antenna together. Uhhuh with between ants. Okay. They also use scent trails, but anyway, um,

Marina: 21:30

okay. Ant guy, I love

Jeremiah: 21:32

ants. I love them. They're cool, but it, that only works like when they're touching. So language I think isn't just amazing because of its complexity, but also because of the fact that it works from far away. That's like something that people don't always think about being cool about language, but it's really cool. It's kinda like the invention of the telegraph, like totally changed. So much about everything from like war to, you know, diplomacy, all kinds of stuff. And language was like the OG version of that because, it's something, it's, it's just like a very useful. Adaptation. It's, I'm getting a little bit of a tangent, but it's, it's cool. I'm sorry.

Marina: 22:09

I didn't know you were such a freak about ants.

Jeremiah: 22:11

I love I'm You didn't know that. I love ants. They're awesome. They're the coolest animal around. This is another reason that sign language is awesome because, this is something they actually have over spoken languages, which is that you can sign a lot farther than you can shout. Depending on the vision acuity of the person you're signing to. I'll hand it back over to you while I think about ants.

Marina: 22:31

Remember the famous bee dance?

Jeremiah: 22:33

Oh my God,

Marina: 22:33

Since I brought up Please Dance.

Jeremiah: 22:35

Since I brought up ants, I will explain the bead ants really quick, which is that one of the first things you learn in linguistics, and I'm really sorry if this is burst, bursting, somebody's bubble about animal language. To be clear, I am not anti animals. I'm vegan. I love animals. But they do not have language. I'm sorry. They don't. And then I know you're thinking maybe what, what about the bee dance? Don't bees dance to like communicate? Isn't that their form of language? And the answer is no, because. You know, bees don't have, like what? What do bees not have? They don't have, they don't have, they don't have any of it. They don't have any of it. They don't have syntax, they don't have morphology.

Marina: 23:12

They can't use it creatively.

Jeremiah: 23:13

They can't use it creatively. That's really the key thing is being able to use the language to communicate about things other than what is in the immediate environment. Language is also like a system. It's a very complex system of symbol symbols. Which animal language isn't. And then I know you're thinking, what about Coco the gorilla who learned sign language? And if you actually look that up, Coco, the gorilla did not actually learn sign language. Gorillas are really, really, really smart. And Coco learned that, if she did all these really specific things with her hands, then she would get things that she wanted, like food and playtime, whatever. Coco was never able to get the whole grammar thing down, like how to actually produce grammatical constructions. Um. I don't have all the knowledge about cocoa in my head, but I get, I promise you, if you look this up or if you look at a linguistics textbook and don't just look at like whatever the tabloid headlines say, because they love saying like, oh, animal this language. Same with dolphins. Again, I'm digressing, but bees don't have language. Cocoa. La Gorilla doesn't have language. I'm sorry. You know.

Marina: 24:23

The point that I was trying to make about grammatically is that it's not the end all be all, and if it's not actually as important as people think it is, then maybe it's not such a big deal to get it wrong sometimes.

Jeremiah: 24:38

Yeah, I would completely agree with that. What do people think? Will happen if we say something wrong. Like, what are people so afraid of? And then what actually happens? Just people know like, okay, if I take this advice and if I do make grammar mistakes, what's gonna happen to me if I make a grammar mistake in a conversation?

Marina: 24:57

Well, for me, I think there's a fear that if you say something wrong in your second language, the person you're talking to will not understand you. Which never feels good. Or worse, they'll laugh at you or think that you're stupid. I think most people know that intellectually this probably won't happen. Most people are just nice and happy that you're learning their language at all.

Jeremiah: 25:25

Except for French people. Except for, yeah. And that's actually not true. Most French people are totally chill and nice. It's really just Parisians from my experience. And if there are any Parisians listening to this and are like, suck, that's not true. I don't care. If you had been nicer to me when I was in Paris, then I wouldn't have said that. You know, just because for me, like I know that there are no ghouls or creatures in our house, uh, in the night. It doesn't make me any less scared of the dark and, you know, yeah. That's me admitting to being afraid of the dark. And, if I can do that, you can have a conversation with your, uh, Brazilian neighbor in Portuguese.

Marina: 26:05

This reminds me of that time we were in New York. And we were talking to this guy, I think he was from Puerto Rico, and we were talking to him in Spanish, and I made the most basic ass mistake. I said, California,

Marina (2): 26:24

oof.

Marina: 26:25

And I just wanted to crawl under a rock when I said that.

Jeremiah: 26:29

Yeah, it's honestly, it's usually the small things that you learn in year one. Of a language learning program that still trip you up years later. Yeah. That's why they teach it to you in year one. Yeah. Um,

Marina: 26:44

but I'll never make that mistake again.

Jeremiah: 26:46

That's what you think, even though

Marina: 26:47

it was mortifying. You're right. I'll promise you that mistake again.

Jeremiah: 26:52

Yeah. If it makes me feel better, I didn't notice at the time, but I'm sure he did. I'm sure he did. Um, but

Marina: 26:58

that's a good example because. He totally under probably understood what I meant. Mm-hmm. Like he did not derail the conversation at all, but in his head he was probably like, that sounds funny. Maybe. I'm not totally sure why, but it sounds funny.

Jeremiah: 27:13

Yeah. And he probably like didn't skip a beat because he was like, this white girl just said Stans by California. Like at least she's trying.

Marina: 27:22

that was embarrassing,

Jeremiah: 27:24

but, you know, that just proves our point. And you know, it is true that sometimes you will say something so wrong that the person you're talking to will not e will not even understand you at all, and you will have to rephrase. But you know, guess what? That is an indispensable part of the learning process. Not only that, but can you tell me that there haven't been countless times when you said something in your first language that someone didn't understand, like be real. People misunderstand each other all the time. Misunderstandings are unavoidable in human language, whether it's your first language or your second. That's one of the things that's inherent to that, to the whole adaptation of language. That is also why I, I would say that the most important skill in any language is negotiation for meaning. I think we've talked about it before a little bit. We should have a whole, a whole episode on it at some point, because every interaction that you enter into is a negotiation for meaning because you are trying to make yourself understood. You're also trying to understand and. You know, the only basis for your mutual understanding with somebody is your shared experiences that provide the kind of background of the interaction and the language that you're using to communicate is always gonna be imperfect because you cannot have a symbolic system that perfectly captures material reality. So that's just like a permanent. Contradiction in language. That's part of why it's so cool. So every interaction is a negotiation for meaning and being better at a language among other things just means being more proficient at negotiating for meaning in that language. So arriving at mutual understanding faster, but it's never gonna be instantaneous. I'll tell you.

Marina: 29:06

Did we just like discover a new definition of proficiency? I agree that that's awesome. Sure. Are we better than Noam Chomsky?

Jeremiah: 29:17

That was never in doubt.

Marina: 29:21

but you know, that's just the times when people don't understand you. Most of the time. If you say something that's. A little bit ungrammatical. Most people will still understand what you're trying to say, just like me and Stans. But they'll usually be very kind and very patient enough to not hold it against you unless you're talking

Jeremiah: 29:41

to a Parisian in French. Oh my God. In which case, good luck.

Marina: 29:47

You know, other than that though, most people are excited when someone is trying to learn their language and they'll be more than happy to indulge you a few mistakes. If you think about it, when you're talking to, someone who is speaking your language and it's their target language, and they say something that sounds funny, they use the wrong preposition. They use the wrong object pronoun. You don't think any less of them. You think, wow, this person is multilingual. Of course they're bound to make some mistakes sometimes that's part of the learning process. And you need to be able to, accept the same level of forgiveness for yourself.

Jeremiah: 30:25

Yeah, I completely agree. But you know, for those of us who do want to get better at grammar, you know who wanna get better at negotiating for meaning by having the tools in your toolbox to be able to produce in a way that is easier to understand for your listeners, how do you get better at that?

Marina: 30:45

I mean, that's like the whole question of language learning, like there's no secret answer. The biggest thing and the most research based answer is just to practice. It's really that simple. And also not as simple as we wish it was. You might think that it's all about memorizing rules or, knowing, your textbook inside and out, but knowing grammar rules and being able to use them without having to think about it are two completely different things we say in pretty much every episode, chunking can help with this in case you're just joining us for the first time, and we haven't talked your ear off about chunking. Chunking refers to learning set phrases and groups of words rather than just individual words on their own. A very simple example in Spanish would be learning, which means, I'm sorry, I'm sorry, is another chunk in English. Instead of just learning the Infiniti verb, centi, um, you learn the whole thing as one. So you don't have to think about conjugating the verb every single time. Some other examples of chunks in English. Are gonna be like, as you know, without a doubt, I couldn't tell you if you say so. My bad. What are some other ones?

Jeremiah: 32:20

How about that? How bad? A lot of these are like expressions, but chunks can be, not even expressions, but just like words. In linguistics, they're called colocations. Which means like they're frequently located together. You frequently find them together.

Marina: 32:36

all day long.

Jeremiah: 32:37

That's good. Good one. That's a really good one. See you tomorrow.

Marina: 32:40

See you tomorrow. That's a good one. Um. The most important thing.

Jeremiah: 32:46

Yeah. Anything that it's like, like things like that.

Marina: 32:48

You just say a lot.

Jeremiah: 32:49

Yeah.

Marina: 32:50

you just say it and then move on with like the creative part of your sentence.

Jeremiah: 32:55

Yeah, totally. You can almost think of it like the, the, it's, the chunk is secretly a word because it very rarely gets like broken up or altered.

Marina: 33:03

Mm-hmm.

Jeremiah: 33:04

Yeah. But it's not technically a word, but it behaves like one inside your brain.

Marina: 33:09

It takes A lot less mental energy, to produce a chunk than it does to think about every single individual word that you're using. So like in Spanish, another example would be, you say that a lot ahead of things, it's really easy to just be able to insert that into whatever you're saying and without having to worry about Its grammatically

Jeremiah: 33:33

I love chunks.

Marina: 33:34

Yeah. They really are. If if there is like a secret spice to learning a language, it's chunks

Jeremiah: 33:39

I think so too. But yeah, when you are learning a language, you know what else? There are other things that are important besides grammar, which I think we've. Illustrated to some extent. So what else is important other than grammar? I think pronunciation is another one that maybe we could do a whole episode on, honestly, because that is another thing that people hyper fixate on. I think they're really afraid of saying words wrong, like you mentioned earlier. Um, but one thing I'll say is that there's a lot more to it than just sounding like a native speaker. And we did have an episode on native speaker. Early on.

Marina: 34:14

And accent reduction.

Jeremiah: 34:15

And accent reduction. So if you're interested in pronunciation, go back and listen to those episodes. Relatedly, there's also cadence and intonation, which is similar to pronunciation, and I think people conflate them sometimes. But cadence is just about the way that words flow together from a sound perspective. So like. How you're emphasizing words in a sentence, how part of the sentence is faster and part of the sentence is slower. The rate and the flow of your speech, which isn't so much about the syntax, which is, you can kind of think of it like the rules of how words fit together. Cadence is much more like. It's what people mean usually when they say fluent, I think. Because your speech is flowing, which is what fluent means. Would you agree with that?

Marina: 35:11

Yeah. I mean, it's hard to define. It's definitely more of a high level pragmatic, almost paralinguistic.

Jeremiah: 35:22

Sure. Yeah.

Marina: 35:23

Aspect of language, but still very important.

Jeremiah: 35:26

Yeah, it's hard to learn. It's hard to practice. Yes. Other than just speaking because, and actually chunking helps a lot with this because chunks have built in cadence, I think

Marina: 35:37

if you say so exactly,

Jeremiah: 35:40

like in, in a chunk, like if you say, so the cadence. Is that every word gets like more or less equal emphasis if you say so. Mm-hmm. With maybe you slightly more emphasized, you wouldn't know that if you learned those four words separately. And then tried to string them together on your own. So that's something that helps a lot with cadence is, is chunks. And then another concept which is similar to cadence. Intonation is kind of just like cadence, but I, I think, but for the word, I don't know why I say intonation. That is kind of an unscientific term, I think. Emphasis. Emphasis where, where on the word do you put the emphasis? Mm-hmm. And in a language like English, good luck, because it's very hard to know without. Just memorizing like, oh, is it, you know, is it, what's an English word?

Marina: 36:37

Like are you talking about like conflict versus conflict?

Jeremiah: 36:41

Conflict, yeah. There are words where the emphasis changes the meaning, but there are also words where if you put the wrong emphasis on it. English speakers, first language, English speakers. This is something that I've heard reported from, English learners, is that if you mess up on the emphasis in an English word, people will not know what you're talking about. I say people first language, English speakers will not know what you're talking about. Like if you say like vacation, people are like, yeah, vacation. I'm going on a vacation. If you say I'm going on a v. A vacation. A vacation, people are like, don't know what you're talking

Marina: 37:15

about. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, but that, that's gonna be a thing across all languages. Like, especially like in Chinese with the tones.

Jeremiah: 37:30

Yeah, tones are a little different as much about emphasis, but it is similar because tones being like what we call, phonemic, right. In Chinese, it can actually change the meaning of the word. You're right. Nevermind. It's not an example. It's similar in English specifically for words, for specific words where emphasis is phonemic because it isn't always, it's like partly phonemic, like the example you gave conflict versus conflict. It's phonemic in that case, but in other cases, I think part of the problem is that in English we have the secret rule that I don't really know if they teach it. But it is lowkey a rule in English phonology, which is that most vowels when they're not em, when they don't get the emphasis in the word just turn into, uh, So like, Like here's a word, elementary. If you were to look at it as it's written, you might think it's elementary. But when you say it, it's ary, right? And so if you say elementary, people are gonna be like, what? If you say, if elementary people are, so I think English, the cards are stacked against you if you put the emphasis in the wrong place.

Marina: 38:49

Yeah. And then like Spanish. English doesn't have a consistent pattern that tells you where the emphasis is going to land.

Jeremiah: 38:58

yeah. And then other things that are important, vocabulary and set phrases like if you. It helps to have the biggest vocabulary possible. If you're gonna be like sitting down and wrote, memorizing something, it's worth it to memorize, like vocab words. Not always A lot of the VAB words that you're gonna learn over the lifetime of you knowing a language are gonna come later when you're already proficient and you just get them from context just like you do with English. But early on particularly, um, it helps to give yourself the biggest vocabulary possible. And a lot of that is just like. Learning the words, not just trusting that you'll figure it out.

Marina: 39:38

And that can include learning chunks.

Jeremiah: 39:40

Yeah, absolutely.

Marina: 39:41

I would say that something like siento is a vocab

Jeremiah: 39:44

word, definitely.

Marina: 39:46

Even though it's technically two

Jeremiah: 39:47

words. Definitely. Yeah. When we say vocab, don't assume that it's just individual words. It's absolutely chunks. Probably more importantly. Especially for, you know, cadence and having conversations. Although it is frustrating when you're having a conversation and you can't remember a basic word like bathroom.

Marina: 40:07

I don't think that. Anything that we said will get rid of learner anxiety entirely. Because, like we talked about, you can know all this stuff intellectually, but that doesn't stop your body from having a visceral reaction to the idea of speaking and sounding stupid. But, you know, it is something to to think about and hopefully it will help you feel. Even just a fraction, less nervous about having bad grammar. You know, and encourage you to, Think about grammar in a little bit more nuanced way.

Jeremiah: 40:51

Yeah, definitely. I agree. And as far as the anxiety goes, I know we say this every time, but like you, you just gotta practice. You gotta do it. You gotta talk to people. And one thing that I find helpful for that is to compartmentalize, temporally. And what I mean by that is if you right now decide that you are going to go talk to that person over there in your target language, the you that is making that decision. Time is different from the you that's actually gonna be doing it. And then once you are that future self, your past self has done this to you. And now you can't back out of it. So like, try to think of yourself as like multiple selves who are freak, who are constantly like putting each other in situations that you don't wanna be in. Mm-hmm. And then once you're in that situation, just do it.

Marina: 41:42

Just disassociate. Just disa. Exactly. Disassociate. Kill yourself. An ego, ego, death, ego, death,

Jeremiah: 41:50

meditate for 16 hours, experience ego death, and then go order at the Mexican restaurant. Thanks for listening to this episode of how to Language on the topic of grammar and grammatically in particular, if you like what we do. Follow us on, Instagram at how to lang to keep in the loop about things that we have coming up and new episodes and whatever fun stuff we have coming your way.

Marina: 42:22

Bye

Jeremiah: 42:23

bye. Thanks for listening.