Alkanadi:We have all been taught grammar in school.

Well, then how is it that college students are often unsure of (for example) what a predicate does, and have to be reminded how to use participles? Professors continually lament that "students can't write well anymore".

In much of the English-speaking world at least, there has been a significant shift away from instruction of formal grammar over the past half-century. I should think this fact is uncontroversial.

Alkanadi:

eshapard:

Tempodivalse:
I think that's what it boils down to - language learning has to be made easier today because most people (even the well-educated) have never really been taught grammar and are overwhelmed when it is thrown at them.

This may (sadly) be true.

We have all been taught grammar in school.

I think we are an ADD generation that can't focus on anything because we are used to a highly stimulating environment.

Grammar just can't capture someone's interest these days. We need to come up with new, exciting ways of learning.

I think this may not be entirely the case. When I was in elementary school in the 1950s in a semi-rural area of the USA, we were taught intensively prescriptive grammar, spelling, and usage. Some children were even called down in front of the class if they made grammar errors. This continued in secondary school in the early 1960s and even in (state) university in the late 1960s. Right is right and wrong is wrong, and don't you forget it. To this day, I remain a more or less prescriptivist with respect to English grammar and spelling, and partially with respect to vocabulary, although I acknowledge that vocabulary expands over time to accommondate new situations and usages.

What does this have to do with Esperanto? I have been around the international auxiliary language movement for many years, and I have noted that E-o has much more stability than some of the others. Yes, vocabulary has expanded to accommondate new situations, and grammatically acceptable speaking/writing styles have shifted somewhat over the generations, but the basic structure of the language has remained stable according to the Fundamento de Esperanto. This is a major strength. Other conIALs (such as IALA Interlingua) have a would-be stable base (such as the Interlingua-English Dictionary and the Interlingua Grammar), but, as nearly as I can tell, some I-a advocates have been less willing to adhere to the essential, original structure of the language than the advocates of E-o.

Vestitor:It's not that we're an especially ADD generation now. We've had generations of school kids (and adults) fidgeting in their chairs and yawning because learning things takes work.

Nothing can be learned without some work and you have to reach a point where you're stimulated enough to want to put in the work without it feeling like too much work. Unfortunately that itself requires pushing yourself over an uncomfortable set of obstacles in order to properly begin.

The late 20th and 21st century culture keeps on telling us that you can get so many things with minimal effort. See slogans like: '[add skill acquisition] in 10 days' etc. We've now come to think that if it feels like work we are doing it wrong and there must be a way to 'work smarter, not harder', cue all the patented special methods for learning things in a week.

It's not particularly new, but because so much is freely available now we get the idea that all it takes to learn something is to sign up for it, and so there is more signing up to multiple commitments than there is committed learning.

+1

And it is in this way that technology and increased access to knowledge is in danger of dumbing us down. Please don't misunderstand, I am very thankful to have such extraordinary access to so much wonderful information in so many fields of study, but arguably our abundant access has a tendency to produce laziness. We take for granted the instant gratification and accessibility. I struggle to remember my wife's phone number because it is programmed into my phone and I no long dial it from memory.

Not incidentally, this is one of the (many) reasons I enjoy language learning. It is voluntary self-discipline. Esperanto is a completely unnecessary language for me. My family does not speak it. I have no one to regularly converse with. It does not help me at all in my life or work. That is a major reason it is valuable to me, because it is a discipline that brings pleasure with practice and effort.

Do hard things. Too much today comes too easily.

Alkanadi:
We have all been taught grammar in school.

Not I.

Bemused:

Alkanadi:
We have all been taught grammar in school.

Not I.

I also never learned grammar in school. I went to good schools and the only grammar I learned in school was in my four years of Latin class (an elective chosen by few students, so most students did not learn this material).

I remember my first Latin teacher, an old man who soon retired, teaching us how to diagram a sentence and mark the grammatical functions of the words and clauses. In another time in history, we would have learned this skill as children, but I never even heard of it until I was 15 or 16 in Latin class.

Tempodivalse:

Alkanadi:We have all been taught grammar in school.

Well, then how is it that college students are often unsure of (for example) what a predicate does, and have to be reminded how to use participles? Professors continually lament that "students can't write well anymore".

In much of the English-speaking world at least, there has been a significant shift away from instruction of formal grammar over the past half-century. I should think this fact is uncontroversial.

Well I too was taught grammar at school (beginning late '70s). At least twice a week at primary school and into my teenage years. I wasn't the only one in those classes, nor was it the only class learning grammar.

However, when learning the grammar of your native language you tend not to worry so much about it since you can already function in the language and tend to get more proficient as you go along; without having to pore over the grammar.
It's generally in foreign language learning that students pay more attention to grammar, for obvious reasons. It explains Erinja's experience with Latin lessons. Many non-English students (especially in small countries) are introduced to other languages, mainly English, early on and thus start puzzling over the grammar they need. Far more than over their native languages.

As far as this relates to Esperanto, I personally think that people pay far too much attention to absolutely perfect grammar. It's a symptom of a language that is less used in a spoken way and lives too much in a written medium. Under these circumstances many people become tiresome grammarians and translation machines.

I remember being taught grammar. I do not remember learning it.

Vestitor:As far as this relates to Esperanto, I personally think that people pay far too much attention to absolutely perfect grammar. It's a symptom of a language that is less used in a spoken way and lives too much in a written medium. Under these circumstances many people become tiresome grammarians and translation machines.

As far as English is concerned, I am not a fan of arbitrary rules devised by the Victorians. But for both English and Esperanto, aside from the arbitrary Victorian rules, I'm a firm believer that good grammar makes the meaning clear, and a firm grasp of good grammar enables you to communicate with far more nuance, through use or non-use of certain grammatical forms to add shades of meaning. The language, literature, and communication in general are much poorer if you throw all of that out and say "me talk however me want, you understand so we fine". Rightly or wrongly, I think your ideas are much more likely to be taken seriously if you speak in a grammatical way, and I find good grammar easier understand when I read it or hear it, than trying to parse through someone's mistakes and decide what they really meant.

Having said this, I see good grammar as something to aspire to and work towards. I am not a fan of correcting people as they speak or write - unless they have specifically asked for this, or unless the errors have made something hard to understand and I need to ask for a clarification.

I do try to read the situation. If a beginner persistently uses something wrong, and if I have a rule of thumb to get it right, I might ask them nicely if they want my rule of thumb. If someone has been speaking functional, mostly-but-not-quite grammatical Esperanto for 20 years, then I assume they have the resources to learn good grammar if they really want to, and that they simply don't want to, so I would not waste their time or mine by telling them the rule of thumb to fix their grammar.

I expect to see a full range of high and low levels of Esperanto proficiency at a local club or on personal blogs, but I also expect publications of clubs and associations should be free of errors. Again, good grammar is easier to read, and these publications are going to be used by beginners as a model of good Esperanto, so they should not contain errors to confuse anyone or trip anyone up.

I'm not advocating pidgin talk, just commenting on the top-heavy reliance upon grammar in Esperanto circles (online perhaps). Neither should going lighter on grammar be considered a descent into pidgin language or baby-talk.

English grammar is a lot more irregular than Esperanto and there is a patchwork of proficiency, but nuance and understanding is not harmed quite as much as you may be suggesting.

For the record I'd like people to have a full grasp of grammar, but in reality it's not going to happen because people learn differently and have varying abilities, even when they have mastery of a language. Fluency and skill acquisition from usage and experience is different from merely knowing the rules. It's true that knowing the rules AND having experience is the best of both, but not always possible. The world is imperfect like that.

What exactly do you mean by top-heavy reliance on grammar, and in your mind, what would constitute going lighter on grammar?