When you hear that word, you probably think back to high school and have one of two reactions. You are either like me, and you get excited. Or you're like Ben, and you cringe.
But your word picture is probably something like this:
In our Grammar class here at the MTC, though, we did not learn about comma splices and apostrophe use and correct spelling (we did learn a little about nouns, verbs, and prepositions though).
The purpose of this class was to help us learn how grammar works in other languages. Check out the sentences below.
-In trail I see a tiger big
-Hands smalls
-Pour your boy it into the pail yesterday for my horse
-Kill horse little dog big
No matter how much you dislike (or like) the type of Grammar you originally thought of when you read the word at the beginning of this post, you certainly know something is wrong when you read the four clauses above.
So this is why we took this class. In other languages, the sentence structure is different from English, so learning another language will involve a lot more than just learning words. It will involve learning sentence structure and other complexities. While the sentences above seem silly and wrong to us, they are normal and correct in other languages. These were some of the actual sentences that we dissected from other languages while taking this class (of course, the words were not English- but I only included the English translation for the purpose of this post).
[One of our homework assignments]
Maybe this post will give you a little bit of insight into some of the complexities of learning a new language that we will deal with when we move overseas. This class confirmed- we will definitely need all of your prayers!
This excites me!! Someday!
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