Thinking in a Foreign Language: 7 Methods to Help You Train Your Brain
In learning a foreign language, there are four basic language skills- reading, writing, listening, and speaking.
6 minute read
When you are learning a language, you need to learn both vocabulary and grammar. You could know a ton of words in a language, but unless you know how to string them together, you are never going to be able to speak the language.
A question we get asked here at Justlearn a lot is whether it is more important to learn vocabulary or grammar. This is a surprisingly tricky question to answer. Let's start by explaining the differences between grammar and vocabulary.
What is vocabulary?
These are the words in a language. Let us give you an example in Swedish. Don't worry. We will give translations.
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Jag (I)
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Talar (speak)
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Svenska (Swedish)
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Inte (do not)
Of course, by knowing the English translation, you may be able to string a sentence together with them. However, how would you know whether the word order is correct? How do you change up the verb to mean something different? That's where the next part comes in.
What is Grammar?
Grammar is the rules that govern the language. As we said, it is all well and good knowing words, but until you know how to put them together, then they are just words. We gave you four different words in the previous section. What do you think the word order is? It may seem obvious in English, but unless you know Swedish grammar rules, you would be completely wrong. The word order would be:
Jag talar inte Svenska (literal translation: I speak not Swedish)
So, why have we explained this? Well, because this makes a nice little segue into answering the actual question.
So, what is more important: learning grammar or learning vocabulary?
They are both equally important.
You can't properly learn vocabulary without knowing grammar. You can't learn grammar without knowing vocabulary.
As we pointed out in the previous section, if you learned the Swedish words, your knowledge of the English language isn't going to be enough to formulate a proper sentence. It wouldn't make sense to a Swedish person.
If you do not know grammatical rules, then you wouldn't know how to conjugate your verbs properly. If you do not know the vocabulary, then you wouldn't have verbs to conjugate in the first place.
We recommend that you learn vocabulary and grammar side by side. Try to avoid learning individual words. Instead, learn sentences. Sentences that you will likely be speaking when you use the language. This will help you to learn grammar alongside actual vocabulary.
As you start to learn these sentences, you will learn the rules of the language. Once you start to get a solid understanding of the way grammar works, then you can go away and top up your vocabulary knowledge. However, during the beginning stages of learning a language, they are both equally as important as the other. You simply cannot learn a language without knowing both of them.
This means that if you are starting to learn a language today, do not spend hours and hours learning word list after word list. This won't go anywhere. Look into ways to make sentences from them. Read. Absorb how the language is really spoken. You will pick up a lot of vocabulary by doing this.
