One of the biggest challenges when learning a new language is learning a new grammar. Language learning apps are great for acquiring and maintaining new vocabulary. They’re built for introducing and repeating diverse vocabulary whenever you need it.
But one common complaint among language learners who rely heavily on apps is their slower progress in understanding sentence structure as compared to classroom learners. How can we get around this problem? Let’s read on to get the answer.
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Grammar Lessons In Language Learning Apps
First of all, there’s nothing wrong with using multiple platforms and media to help you on your language-learning journey. It’s in some ways better! It can keep the mind limber, offer more strategies for accumulating new information, and tend to increase the amount of overall hours you spend in a week studying your target language.
But not everyone has the time or money for textbooks or teachers, if they’re even available to you for the language you want to learn. And at any rate, even if you have multiple resources you’re utilizing for learning a language, you want to use each one of them to their full potential, don’t you?
There are a few ways your language learning app can help you understand the grammar of the language you’re learning, if you put in the effort yourself, too!
How To Tackle Grammar Content In Language Learning Apps?
First of all, most language learning apps offer a certain amount of grammar lessons or pointers throughout the lessons. Depending on the app and the level of development for a given language, this can be more or less present, more or less comprehensive. Obviously taking the time to read and digest this material instead of just tapping through to get to the next quiz or game format segment is a simple bit of mental discipline that can help you.
But in a way, such lessons, while conveniently located, don’t offer anything unique to the app experience: they’re a truncated version of similar lessons or explanations one might find in a textbook. Can you use the format of the app itself to improve your knowledge of the grammar of a language while you’re doing your quizzes and exercises?
In my experience, you can! The time you spend practicing a language in an app is a great opportunity to break down sentences and carefully think through the grammar. When you’re practicing speaking the language live with another human being, thinking like this – let alone taking notes and looking things up – is a surefire way to bring the conversation to a halt, and look like a social misfit. In short, you’ll be robbing yourself of the experience of speaking!
But even when an app is quizzing you on pronunciation, you’re not really speaking to the app. This can be a very useful thing. The time you spend on quizzing and drilling yourself on the app in your target language presents liminal mental space between concrete comprehension in active conversation and abstract study of lesson materials. You’re more focused on the language rather than on its abstract quality. It’s similar to reading a grammar book, but in a more slowed-down manner where you can deconstruct more readily than in a conversation setting.
I had previously mentioned sentence structure as a particular stumbling block, and isolated vocabulary acquisition as easier by implication. But before I say anything else, I need to emphasize that I don’t think you should try to give up memorizing vocabulary and focus on grammar instead!
On the contrary, I think acquiring a lot of vocabulary is going to tremendously ease the process of learning grammar for you. The less you need to decode the words in a sentence, the more you can focus on how they all fit together. That’s why one of the first pieces of advice I’d give is to do your lessons over and over until all the vocabulary itself is second nature to you, and the structure of the sentences stands out more to you.
Strategies For Understanding Grammar In Language Learning Apps
Now, the question arises: What language learning strategies are best for learning?
Depending on the language you’re studying, and what other languages you know, the process of isolating and learning grammatical idiosyncrasies becomes easier or harder. If you’re going from English to Afrikaans, for example, where many of the words are familiar and many of the underlying grammatical assumptions are the same, there will be many similarities and many of the qualities of the differences will be obvious almost at first glance. “Oh, there’s no helping ‘do’, you just have to say things like ‘I go not’” or “the adverbs and prepositions go in different places”, “this preposition looks the same as an English one but is used slightly differently”, and so on.
- Use the relative transparency of differences you can basically understand to your advantage! Internalize the patterns you see more through repetition and variation, have short little pretend conversations based on each sentence you read as you go.
But what if there’s much more to the process than that? Most people want to learn a new language and find some things about it are very different to their expectations from other languages. Sometimes people learn new languages specifically for that reason, because it’s challenging and that can be fun!
Let’s go with Chinese as another example. If Chinese is one of the first foreign languages you’re learning, with a starting point in English or Spanish, a lot of things can seem very off-putting about the grammar! There is indeed a lot to learn, and you can skim a Chinese grammar book to get a taste of how much needs explaining. That can seem very overwhelming! But let’s put down our grammar book for a minute and think through how you can use your language learning app to overcome at least some of those hurdles.
- As you’re going through lessons and learning vocabulary, take note of what doesn’t seem as difficult as you might expect. Chinese doesn’t have grammatical gender, or strictly speaking any tense, it basically doesn’t have a grammatical case either. Most of the words are nice discrete units you can define, and they appear the same way every time. That’s a tremendous help to the learner, especially if you are getting your vocabulary in and internalizing a lot of Chinese sentences through regular practice on your app.
In the place of complications you might’ve come to expect from a western European language, Chinese has complications of its own (outside of the use of tone in pronunciation and the use of word-specific characters rather than an alphabet). Chinese nouns fit into classes based on the shape or kind of thing they are, and you need to use “measure words” that match this. Chinese lacks articles like “a” or “the”, but has sentence level particles and different kinds of determiners from those in English or Spanish, and stuff like that will certainly take getting used to!
The fact that you can often understand a Chinese sentence by reading through it and understanding some of the key words shouldn’t make you just ignore the small words you don’t understand in between! The devil, as they say, is in the details, and down the line key aspects of everyday Chinese speech will rely on things like measure words and end-of-sentence particles. Look at the translation and look up the characters themselves to help yourself internalize these particular grammatical features of Chinese and can use them yourself when you need to!
The fact that apps provide you with a lot of sentences with translation is really a great boon to your efforts. Many languages, from Tamil to Turkish, will extend the root words you’ve learned from the vocab list section of your app work with a series of suffixes. Students often find these suffixes intimidating, particularly when they stack up and turn short words into long ones.
- If you look at the sentences that use them in translation, you’ll begin to realize that many of these suffixes are translated as key prepositions and auxiliaries and other such independent words in English. Match the suffixes to English words with roughly the same meaning and start practicing them as translations of each other as you go. This will really help you go from clumsily stating the keywords in the language you’re learning to form grammatically correct sentences.
Again, it will help you to spend time studying outside of the app on your own, looking up these features of the grammar and how to use them appropriately in a textbook, grammar, or videos online. But having them used in natural sentences over and over again first will help highlight frequently used ones, give you hints about their use, and help them feel less forced. Again, repeat lessons until they seem second nature, and take notes for yourself!
What Language Learning App Focuses On Grammar? Ling Does!
If you’re looking into downloading a new language learning app, Ling is one app I can recommend that will provide you with resources you’ll not find elsewhere. From Kannada to Korean, from Bosnian to Burmese – Ling provides a comprehensive course covering all manners of everyday situations with appropriate vocabulary. Real sentences spoken by native speakers are provided, and simulated conversations are available in-app.
Whether you’re learning a language that you can’t find on other apps like Urdu, Gujarati, or Yoruba, or a widely available one like Spanish or Chinese, Ling will provide you with dozens of units with multiple lessons each. You won’t lack new vocabulary to memorize and many example sentences to study and practice.
In fact, you’ll be amazed to go through the Grammar Notes feature that the app provides for some of its top-ranking languages like Thai, Tagalog, Punjabi, Serbian, and so on. These grammar lessons explain to you the ‘whys and hows’ of the sentence structure which you are learning in the main lessons on the app.
So don’t think much before trying the Ling app! It is available on App Store and Google Play Store.
