配合中文版视频，希望我们精心录制的英文版视频对你学会英语有帮助。
Hi. Today I’m going to talk a little bit about grammar. A lot of people think that grammar is very important, and they worry about grammar, they worry about learning grammar. But I want to share with you the fact that grammar is actually not that important. Have you ever considered the fact that native speakers of a language don’t understand their own grammar, they can’t analyse their own grammar. If you ask a native speaker why something is said a certain way, or how to do it, they often cannot tell you in any logical way, they just use it naturally as a part of how they communicate.
So there are really two sorts of grammar. There’s the sort of academic, left brain type of grammar where you learn how to analyse sentences and things. It’s very slow, you can’t respond quickly. And let me give you a story; a friend that I met recently is an Englishman, and he went to France and had dinner with friends at a restaurant and he wanted to talk to the waiter, but he was busy in his head thinking about word order and structure of the language and what was the correct grammar, and basically he was unable to speak, he couldn’t say anything, because he was tied up in his head, thinking about the grammar.
Natural grammar is in your right brain, it’s gut feel, it’s instant, and it’s natural, living grammar. And you just use it because it feels right. And you learn this sort of grammar by having lots of meaning in communication. So you might be reading books, talking to friends, and you’re just hearing the right grammar structures repeated time and time again, and your unconscious mind picks these up and it just becomes part of you. And you store it inside your mind, inside your body and you just use it naturally. There’s been research done with kids in the West, that’s very clear that kids who read lots of books that they enjoy, have very good grammar, and they didn’t spend any time learning grammar. Kids who don’t read a lot end up with not very good grammar, because they have no models and their mind has not been able to pick the grammar up naturally.
So remember, lots of meaning communicated very frequently is the best way to pick up grammar. That’s why we developed Kung-Fu English the way we did. We give you a book that talks about how to learn any language, as you interact with the content, the meaning of the book, you’re being exposed to the grammar over and over again repeatedly, so naturally, unconsciously you just pick up the rules of grammar.
There are some shortcuts that you can use for things like tenses for time, some other things, very simple tricks you can use to remember, very basic, very fundamental pieces of grammar, and these are tools to help you very quickly master the basics of the grammar of a language. I’m not going to go into those today, but we will create future podcasts where we talk about those sorts of grammar and those tools and those shortcuts so you can jump over maybe two or three of the most important barriers.
But remember, to really get the grammar of English you need to be interacting with meaningful content on a regular basis and allowing your mind just to pick up the regular rules of grammar unconsciously.
