Learning grammar is fun, actually

29 May, 2026

Welcome to my grammar manifesto. It is long so here's a table of contents!

• Introduction
• Debunking common myths
  • Kids are not language learning geniuses
  • Native speakers don't magically pick up complicated grammar rules
  • Grammar can be fun, actually
• So how should you study grammar?

Don't get me wrong, I also hate grammar. It is annoying and dead boring and it sucks and I am always making stupid mistakes. I have spent a frankly shameful number of years being mediocre at German because I never bothered to crack open a textbook and actually practice some grammar. My favorite language is Indonesian, which is pretty well known for NOT having any of those pesky verb tenses and cases and irregular plurals and grammatical genders and so on.

A lot of language learning advice and methods online are very anti-grammar. Which makes sense, it's just a response to most people's experiences learning a language at school. Most classes are very grammar heavy, and don't have so much reading/listening/speaking. For that reason, classes alone are not a very effective way to learn a language, in my experience.

That being said, a lot of the response is blown way out of proportion. To my eyes there are 3 main categories of language learning method:

• Focus on grammar (textbooks, most classes)
• Focus on speaking (Benny Lewis style "speak from day one")
• Focus on comprehensible input (Dreaming Spanish, Refold)

The problem with focusing exclusively on one skill is that you need all 3 to actually be good at a language. You need to understand the language, you need to learn to speak, and you (unfortunately) need to learn some grammar if you want what comes out of your mouth to be intelligible.

Fair warning, the rest of this is basically just a rant in reaction to all the "learn like a baby!" comprehensible input only methods. If that is the method that's most fun for you, then by all means keep going! I just find some of the arguments very obnoxious. Thus, I would like to talk about 3 things:

1. Kids do not learn languages easier than adults
2. Native speakers in languages other than english DO learn grammar at school
3. Learning grammar is very rewarding

Kids are not language learning geniuses

Yes, babies seem to pick up languages by magic. But what you forget is that they are spending all day, every day surrounded by the language. As an adult I have other stuff to do, unfortunately. If only I could spend all day doing languages... Luckily we have the US government who has tested this, and we thus know that it takes native English speakers between 23-88 weeks of full time study to achieve B2/C1 fluency in a foreign language (23 weeks for easy ones like French or Spanish, and 88 for the hardest languages like Arabic or Japanese)¹

That makes ~1000-3500 hours for an adult to reach B2/C1. Compare that to a 5 year old, who has 20 THOUSAND hours of input, and still speaks like a 5 year old. I did elementary school fully in French (4500+ hrs), and came out of it at around a B1 level. You can do better. Even Dreaming Spanish, probably the slowest method out there, is faster than that. As adults, we already know at least one language, and we thus have the perfect foundation to learn another language based on the rules and patterns we already know in our native language.

I will give babies some credit. They are indeed better than adults at accents and hearing difficult sounds. Some sound nuances indeed may be impossible for adult learners to pick up. Certainly most of us have an accent. However, as long as your accent is understandable to natives, then it doesn't hurt your overall language skills.

Native speakers don't magically pick up complicated grammar rules

This is maybe the fundamental misconception that native English speakers have. We learn very little grammar in school, and English is easy enough that we don't have to. This is not the case in a lot of other languages.

To explain my background, I was in a French immersion elementary school. I had one hour a day in English, and the remaining 5-6 hrs were in French. I can recall very, very little grammar in English class. I can remember at some point learning about irregular plurals, irregular verbs in past tense, conjunctions and prepositions, and punctuation rules. (Mostly I remember doing a LOT of spelling tests.) Maybe we would have intentionally learned more grammar if we had more time, but it was clearly not necessary for me to learn English. I spoke English at home and was a prolific reader, so I learned English very well without ever having to spend time intentionally learning grammar.

This was NOT the case in French. Something you might know about French is that there are a lot of verb tenses, grammatical gender, homophones, etc. We spent a LOT of time in elementary school on grammar. We probably had nearly an hour a day of it, learning and drilling all the verb tenses, practicing conjugation and adjective agreement in dictées, doing grammar workbooks. In middle school French class we continued to have one day a week focused on grammar, and one on spelling. You might think we needed this much grammar study because most of us were not native speakers, but this was following the French curriculum and using textbooks and workbooks from France meant for natives. (Not to mention that the 1/3 of the class were native speakers, and they did not actually do any better than the rest of us!) You CANNOT learn French well without seriously spending time on the grammar. It doesn't need to be the thousand hours I probably spent in school, because as an adult who can intentionally study, you can learn way faster than a kid. But it is absolutely a mistake to think that you can just "pick up" complex grammar rules just by listening to enough of the language. I mean, maybe some rules are straightforward enough that you could. But it's going to be much, much faster to just read up on the grammar rules! And if you want to be able to write/speak correctly, you will also at some point just need to sit down and practice.

Grammar can be fun, actually

I mean, for one, you can see exactly how far you've gotten in the grammar workbook, and you can check off each section as you get through it. So many things are difficult to measure in language learning; why would you give up your one chance to exactly track your progress?

Also while we're talking about trivial reasons that grammar is fun, it also satisfies the puzzle urges. Sure, you can think of it like homework, or you can think of it like a challenge or a puzzle.

Ok, maybe the actual sitting down and doing grammar practice is not the most thrilling activity. But the results speak for themselves. Whenever you learn a new sentence construction or verb tense, it opens up more things that you can say. In Norwegian I sometimes run into situations where I need a conditional (eg. "if I had been there, I would've..."). It's not the most common thing to talk about, but until recently I had never learned about them so I just fully could not express that kind of idea. Now I have read up a bit on it, and though I'm still quite shaky, I can at least try to make that construction now. In Spanish it's even worse, I spent ages around A2 in speaking/writing, never getting anywhere because I have never wanted to put in the time drilling verb tenses, so I only know present tense. And let me tell you, there sure are a lot of things I'd like to be able to say about the past and the future! My lack of grammar practice is an active roadblock to being able to express more complex ideas, and it's one that would be so easy to fix!!!

Grammar study also helps with speaking/writing confidence. When you practice a specific grammar point, and then you start being able to use it, when before you were just guessing about what felt right, it feels great. Though it is not always a linear progression: when I first learned all the nuances of noen/noe in Norwegian, it was very complicated, and whenever I had to say either of them I would freeze and get super paranoid that I was getting it wrong. But now that I've done more practice, it for the most part comes easily enough. It's nice that it is so clear: if I notice that there is one specific thing I am struggling to say, or one thing that I consistently make mistakes with, then I can just find some exercises about exactly that grammar point and practice until I know it backwards and forwards.

Practicing grammar intentionally is the first step to being able to do it without thinking. There are so many grammar rules that you need to use in every sentence that you say: verb tenses, genders, plurals, pronouns, adjective endings, sentence structure, prepositions, ... When you haven't spent enough time practicing speaking can be very overwhelming! I can only think about one thing at a time, and a few months ago you could really tell - I would be focusing on remembering a new vocab word, and therefore would mess up the rest of the sentence. There are about a million different things to think about at once.

That's where grammar exercises come in! They focus on one specific grammar point at a time so you can really understand and start to internalize the patterns. Then when you go to speak, you'll know that part better, so you can focus your energy on the other parts of the sentence, and all the speaking gets way easier.

Even if you're more interested in the comprehension side of things, it will still help to at least read up on the grammar. I was watching Evildea's Dreaming Spanish series (he is trying to learn spanish only using comprehensible input and nothing else), and one thing that sticks out is he's done hundreds and hundreds of hours of input and can understand quite a lot (like B1 in comprehension probably), but he doesn't know numbers. Like, give him 10 min to read up on it, and the problem would be solved! But it makes sense, kids have to be taught how to count too. He also definitely doesn't understand the nuances of verb tenses - which could again be really easily fixed if he got to spend a bit of time learning the tenses, their endings, in what situations they're used, etc. Basic stuff. When I was learning Spanish, I was watching a series about a guy going to Spanish class in Spain, so they were explaining all the grammar in Spanish with pictures and stuff - if you want to double up on grammar and input, then that could be perfect!

So how should you study grammar?

• Do exercises at the right level. If they're too hard, you will get frustrated, and if they're too easy, you will get bored.
• The ideal is a website or textbook with good explanations and targeted practice exercises that focus on one grammar point at a time
• Learn new things, and spend some time reviewing. For me in Norwegian, this means I am working through a B2 workbook, which is a bit challenging. I am also at the moment working on the exercises from grammatikk.com, which are great for a quick review of all the topics from A1-B2. Doing some review is a good way to check if I have forgotten or missed any basic rules. I expect that the review should be pretty easy, but if there's anything that I struggle with, then I can go back and practice that specific grammar point.
• Don't do only grammar. Duh. Grammar sucks. I mean, if you're having fun then go ahead, but I would say don't spend more than max 1/4 of your time on grammar

Basically, spend a few minutes reading up on grammar! It will help regardless of if your goals are more focused on understanding or speaking the language!