orthohawk:

Suzumiya:But, before learning any language if the person truly wants to linguistically broaden their minds they should first learn their mother tongues. You can identify accusative, dative, locative, etc. in all languages even if they're not morphologically indicated. Most people learning a foreign language never bother to learn their mother tongues first, as a result, they learn a lot slower than they should and make mistakes in places they shouldn't. Plenty of people venture to learn and don't even know the difference between an adverb and an adjective, at least learn to do a syntactic analysis; it'll help you a lot.

Oh, I'm with thee on that! When I taught, I was so disgusted with the typical American student's ignorance of basic grammar that I convinced the school administrator to let me offer an "English grammar for language learning" class for all the 8th year students in preparation for Spanish or French classes they had to take starting in 9th year.

I also think this is a very important point; if one doesn't understand basic grammatical concepts in one's own language, one will have to start from scratch with them in another language, which would, I imagine, be significantly more difficult. I once was talking to someone about language learning, and I said something about adjectives; I don't even remember what I said, all I remember is her answer, "What's an adjective?" I tried to hide my shock at the fact that a full-grown adult would not know what an adjective is, and explained it as well as I could, most of which explanation was learned from School House Rock (doesn't everybody watch School House Rock? Apparently not). I think that the reason I have had comparatively little difficulty with the Esperanto accusative, is that I already was familiar with the concept of direct object. My siblings and I are/were homeschooled, as I mentioned in other threads, and we would print out grammar worksheets, in which we would, among other things, underline the subject, cross out prepositional phrases, and write "DO" over the direct objects and "IO" over the indirect ones. I always enjoyed these little exercises, and through them gained an understanding of basic grammar for which I am forever grateful, although I am not a grammar expert.