vix86 Wrote:

quark Wrote:I know this will probably be considered bad advice, but if the OP is getting that stressed out, they should put RTK away, and just focus on watching and listening to a lot of Japanese.

I don't think there is anything wrong with putting the RTK away and focusing on real Japanese. The reason why people try and recommend that people start with the RTK first is because after you start learning tons of words and then try and come back to the RTK you　often have a hard time making Heisig's keywords fit within your model of Japanese.

Maybe this is why RTK wasn't the best fit for me. When I had started, I was going into it with the vocabulary I had gleaned from watching anime (so about 100-200 words) plus I had worked through about half of Japanese for Everyone. That, and I was seriously having difficulty working with stories, and producing kanji from that.
But then again, I'm working with KO2001, and have kind of hit a brick wall around 816, which is roughly where I was when I stopped using RTK. I've had to really ease up on how many new kanji I learn. I have now gone from 5-10 a day, to 5 a week, maybe. All my exposure now is coming from reading manga, kids novels, and Rocket News.
Maybe the key to learning Japanese is realizing that you're going to have to experiment and try a bunch of different methods at first until you find something that works.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:I've always wondered how some people just pick up a core deck and learn the vocab without much kanji practice. If it was that simple why do RtK at all? Yeah handwriting doesn't improve but lolhandwriting in this day and age.

If word recognition is merely a matter of mass-exposure even with kanji included RtK loses its meaning.

By Kanji practice I'm simply going to assume you mean "writing it" because you don't need to really study kanji hard to necessarily be able to "recognize" them. Seriously though, most people learned to read before they learned to write (kanji or alphabet). Of course handwriting follows close behind, but you can learn to recognize a lot of stuff without needing some huge in depth knowledge about "whats this radical mean, whats this stroke mean" sort of thing. Not only that, but most reading occurs without consciously sitting there going "ok...暖かい..日 sun hmm migrating ducks (or ここに）a'hah! Warm あたたかい" Maybe if they can't remember the character's meaning at sight but generally we categorize the characters, maybe based on a bushu. This is why even Japanese mistake 暖 for 緩 if they are reading too fast.

RTK is still important because writing is important. If you ever plane to actually do something significant in Japan in daily life, you will at some points need to be able to write. For instance if you plan to take a Japanese 入試, you won't be able to get away by writing in English unless you are lucky and they allow it.

quark Wrote:Maybe the key to learning a language is realizing that you're going to have to experiment and try a bunch of different methods at first until you find something that works.

Fixed.

EDIT 2: Lol or better yet.

quark Wrote:Maybe the key to learning is realizing that you're going to have to experiment and try a bunch of different methods at first until you find something that works.

I read the posts to this thread and initially thought that it's nice to know how others are/were doing and what your expectations should be. But then I realised that benchmarking yourself against what people are saying here is to some degree pointless.

Some claim that they are fluent after 2 years of study (but then admit that their main focus was reading, so probably writing, listening and speaking are not that good after all), others are saying that 4 years being in Japan is what took them there (but 4 years in Japan can not be compared to 4 years outside of Japan), then others are saying that a JLPT level can be reached after such and such number of years (again, JLPT, as I understand, focuses mainly on passive language skills, so when you study output, the time you need to spend on reaching JLPT2 will be longer then for those who don't care about it).

So, it's nice to read those post and get some insight into others achievements but unless your method of studying is the same as somebody else's then the year figures are not that meaningful.

I'm surprised that passive language learning does not translate into output. I haven't had too many chances to speak English but I can still do it just fine when necessary. I've practiced writing a lot though. Kinda figured that I could learn to speak Japanese the same way. Especially since pronunciation is much easier than in English.

So basically get familiar with passive skills, then learn to write like a native, and afterwards I should magically have fluent speaking skills. Sounds like a dream but it's based on experience.

Tzadeck Wrote:People say this type of stuff on the forum all the time, but it just doesn't translate to my real life. I've lived in Japan for about four years, so I've met a ton of Japanese learners, and everybody's level seems pretty much the same according to the number of years they've studied.

There are a few things which I see that cause variations:
●People who have especially outgoing personalities get better at spoken conversation much quicker once they are living in the country.
●Some people never study at all (despite saying that they want to), and they never learn more than about 300 words even if they live in Japan for years.
●People who get married to Japanese people who don't speak English improve quickly, especially if they have kids together.
●People who study abroad in high school and take classes entirely in Japanese get pretty good within a year, even when they start from scratch.

So as much as I hear people say that you can do such-and-such in just 2-3 years, I've never met anyone who actually did that among the more than 100 Japanese learners I've met (even though I've met people that used RTK and SRS). My experience is that most people start to get really fluent in Japanese at about 7 years of study.

I know that people in this forum aren't lying. I'm just saying that this forum seems to be biased in favor of fast learning when compared to the general Japanese learning population.

I'm talking, of course, only about learners whose native language was English.

I agree completely. 2-3 years is unrealistically fast for most people, and 7+ sounds more accurate. I also live in Japan, and although I've met upwards of a thousand foreigners, almost nobody was any good at Japanese. Of the few people I've met who were truly proficient in the language, the majority had taken a ton of classes and studied their butts off for years.

As for what impacts a person's ability to learn rapidly, I'd add two factors.

1. Age. Younger people learn faster. You teach a 16 year-old how to do something and they comprehend it quicker and retain it better than a 35 year-old, who gets it faster than a 50 year-old, who gets it faster than a 70 year-old. Ability goes down proportionally with age. I wish it didn't, but then I wish I could still run a 5-minute mile too. Dag.

2. Bilingualism. Without exception, the people I've met who were the best at Japanese grew up speaking two or more languages. Bilingualism is a huge advantage. Dag.

My advice to the OP would be to take classes. It's a pretty effective way to be spoon-fed Japanese by a real, live Japanese person.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:I'm surprised that passive language learning does not translate into output. I haven't had too many chances to speak English but I can still do it just fine when necessary. I've practiced writing a lot though. Kinda figured that I could learn to speak Japanese the same way. Especially since pronunciation is much easier than in English.

Speaking ability does tend to lag a bit of course, but my feeling is that people who say this (that they have high comprehension, but can't speak), may be overestimating their comprehension ability. You can trick yourself into believing your comprehension is high if you can catch enough of the vocabulary to follow the story, while detail and nuance goes right over your head (unbeknown-st to you). Likewise reading, you may think your comprehension is high, but can you read even half as fast as a native? or even a quarter. Are you really understanding it in its entirety? Do you have to reread lines? use a dictionary? Can you completely follow the conversation between your colleagues and peers? or only when they're speaking with you?

IceCream Wrote:@Tzadeck: aren't you basing that on speech fluency though and not stuff like reading books??

Like, if you met me irl, you probably wouldn't say i'm very good at Japanese cos i can't speak for toffee. But reading a novel isn't a big deal in comparison to output.

Also, your sample is likely to biased, because if you're living in Japan, you're naturally going to put higher importance on speaking, and lower importance on reading literature, i think.

My sample is definitely biased, since any sample all connected with one person is biased. I know I don't always phrase it that way, but I make all my points with the hesitation that I could be wrong.

I actually haven't met very many people who have really shined in one or two skills and really lacked in others. The only exception is one guy I know who can speak quite well but can't even read and write hiragana without it taking a long time (I was really surprised when I was helping him buy concert tickets at a Combini, since I would have assumed from his speaking that he would have been able to fill in forms in katakana and hiragana just fine). But, he's kind of a musician ladies-man too-cool-for-school kinda guy, so it matches his personality. He never studies anything (maybe in his life), but he is really good at talking to people, especially women, so that's how he gets his practice.

It makes sense that those doing self-study outside of Japan would be worse at output than the average person I meet in Japan. But living in Japan you get a ton of input and knowing how to read kanji has practical benefits, and yet I still don't know anyone in person who ever managed to read an adult novel in under four years of study, including myself.

@nadiatims I don't think it's so strange to be able to understand something and not say it. And everyone has to reread lines sometimes and use a dictionary. I do that even in english.

Like, speaking is just a different thing entirely. Why should it be the case that i must have a problem understanding the word Ninniku (sorry, no IME) if i just can't bring the word into my head when picturing a garlic.

... it doesn't. It just means that in your brain the sound Ninniku brings up a picture of garlic, but a picture of garlic doesn't bring up the sound Ninniku.

They're different links in your brain, and you need both i guess.

Yes, passive learning helps to some degree, and given enough real life situations, i think it'd change. But not likely if i just carry on reading & watching tv.

p.s. i mentioned that specifically because i was in that exact situation last night. I was taking a japanese friend who's visiting London to a pub called "Garlic and shots" and he didn't know "garlic" in english, and i couldn't remember the word in Japanese. When we got there, there's garlic in the window, and i show him, and he says Oh, ninniku. And suddenly i remember, like, of course it's ninniku!!! There was some drama i watched with some who said they have a ninniku shaped nose, and that's where i learned the word. So...

@Tzadeck: i dunno, it just seems like it really isn't that much of a hard thing to be able to do. Like, if you read Akai Yubi by Higashino, it's basically just like watching a drama, with some descriptive words thrown in. In fact, most of his books have been adapted into dramas, so it's not just me saying that. So if you can understand a drama before 4 years, you can understand his books. Other books are harder, but it really just is basically a normal sized vocabulary with more descriptive words added. Perhaps part of it is being open to tackling something when you don't understand everything, and learning from that, i dunno. The first few books you read are a bit of a slog, i think, for anyone. But after you have the most common descriptive words down, you can pick up more through each new book and read without it being particularly straining, i think. So perhaps it's just that the people you met haven't made the effort to get through the first few.

i dunno, i just think it comes down to putting in a bit of effort at the start so you can coast later, after the initial vocabulary... and that's in any subject, from fiction to science to history to economics, to whatever. I don't think it's some special skill that comes from years of learning particularly. You just have to go at whatever subject it is, and SRS the base vocab til you know it. Like, i can't read economics in Japanese, it's soooooo difficult - i have to look up practically every word. But i know if i just took every word i didn't know, like bonds, and fiscal policy and currency and so on, and shoved them in an SRS, in a few months it wouldn't be a problem.

It's not strange, but I do think it represents a different level of familiarity. You (not you specifically) may well have a high level of comprehension compared to zero comprehension and may know a lot of words but how closely does it compare to the kind of effortless and high accuracy comprehension you have of your native language.

Tzadeck Wrote:and yet I still don't know anyone in person who ever managed to read an adult novel in under four years of study, including myself.

I was definitely reading novels (and other books) in less than four years, and comics in less than 6 months. But this comes into what I said above. Back in those days I was one of those people who thought I could comprehend a lot (and I guess I could) but not speak, but the speed at which I was reading and nuance I was missing was huge. Especially in the beginning I was pretty much decoding. I was reading novels before I could read novels basically. I was dumb and really neglected my listening for the first year.

Now I'm learning my third language (mandarin) I'm experiencing the same thing. I feel like I can catch a lot of meaning but it's a very low level of comprehension and speaking ability obviously is almost non-existant. Though in a strange way it sometimes seems like I can actually say more than I can understand, because I can string basic sentences together but have trouble getting the replies because my compehension ability can be pretty much summarised getting the gist some of the time.

re:ninniku
I get that there are words that you recognise that you don't find yourself using, but I think that just means the word hasn't been encountered frequently enough in your life to reach the level of maturity that it can be recalled easily.

IceCream Wrote:i dunno, i just think it comes down to putting in a bit of effort at the start so you can coast later, after the initial vocabulary... and that's in any subject, from fiction to science to history to economics, to whatever. I don't think it's some special skill that comes from years of learning particularly. You just have to go at whatever subject it is, and SRS the base vocab til you know it. Like, i can't read economics in Japanese, it's soooooo difficult - i have to look up practically every word. But i know if i just took every word i didn't know, like bonds, and fiscal policy and currency and so on, and shoved them in an SRS, in a few months it wouldn't be a problem.

This is basically why I've come to agree more and more with the idea that if you really want practical use in the language; cram vocabulary, like core6k, and then do grammar. At a certain point you'll know about 70-80% of the words people are saying. You may not have all the glue to make sense of the full thing, but knowing what people are talking about will allow you to do and understand a lot more.

EDIT:
@nadiatims: I feel like I know what you are pushing on the 'reality of comprehension' part. About 2 years ago I would watch an anime episode with no subs or with the screen minimized and "feel like I understood everything." In fact my friend says that a lot now. Then I went and studied abroad and realized the truth of it and I tell this to my friend now. "Best way to see if you actually know whats being said in anything is to ask yourself, 'Can I say in English what they are talking about? Even the most rudimentary thing.....Oh they are talking about attacking that, etc. ?' If not then comprehension is an illusion you are trying to fool yourself on." I still think having that feeling though points to something though. Maybe it means that with some work you may actually be able to understand that stuff easily.

@nadiatims

interesting... i guess only time will tell if it's the same for me, then.

i'm certainly not decoding in the sense that i'm translating the words to english in my head though, it feels like just reading to me for the majority of the time. Of course, if i encouter vocabulary i learned recently it is still more decoding though. And still much slower than reading english.

i think with ninniku it may well be that i haven't heard it enough times. But, I dunno though, i think that using it just that once in real life is enough to be able to use it again, wheras reading it or hearing it a number of times still doesn't give that effect for me. It just seems like it's such a different thing. I mean, i can read and comprehend great literature in english, but it doesn't mean i could output it.

So, perhaps there is some critical mass of times seen / heard where passive vocabulary and grammar becomes active, but it's training it in a non direct way. It's probably much more direct to just train output through actually outputting, i think.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:I agree completely. 2-3 years is unrealistically fast for most people, and 7+ sounds more accurate.

There is no reason to take 7+ years. People only take that long if they barely study/study ineffectually - is learning at a decent pace for 2-3 years really that unrealistic? I think people set the bar too low for themselves.

Quote:As for what impacts a person's ability to learn rapidly, I'd add two factors.

1. Age. Younger people learn faster. You teach a 16 year-old how to do something and they comprehend it quicker and retain it better than a 35 year-old

Is this something we're supposed to accept at face value?

If young people are so smart why is the pace of school so slow?

vix86 Wrote:"Best way to see if you actually know whats being said in anything is to ask yourself, 'Can I say in English what they are talking about? Even the most rudimentary thing.....Oh they are talking about attacking that, etc. ?'

Sounds a bit odd to me. Languages are their own entities. Sometimes even if you know a word in one language doesn't mean you can recall it in another language easily. That's because at some point you don't need the help of your native language to comprehend another language. Situations arise where you know what a word means, but can't seem to be able to translate it even to your native language. Of course some people are better at this than others. But I don't think it's some sort of benchmark of comprehension at all.

Especially considering that translating is not always so straightforward, as same concepts are said differently.

Quote:If young people are so smart why is the pace of school so slow?

That's not what he said.

@Icecream

There's also the possibility that you're being overly hard on yourself. I think people who immerse themselves spend more time around things they don't understand and that can lead to negatively (or realistically compared to the show-offs) assessing your level. But I think you'd be surprised how quickly your speaking ability improves given the opportunity once you have the passive base.
Specifically training output may in the short term get you speaking faster, but I think the total volume of knowledge getting primed for later activation is less than with input activities. There are a number of reasons for this, people kindly matching your level, patronising teachers, drilling of easy patterns, limited nature of a lot of social conversation, you're unlikely to use a dictionary 50 times during a conversation etc.

@Betelgeuzah
While it's true different languages are different entities. When you do translation, it does force you pay extra attention to truly understand the meaning of the source.

nadiatims Wrote:Speaking ability does tend to lag a bit of course, but my feeling is that people who say this (that they have high comprehension, but can't speak), may be overestimating their comprehension ability. You can trick yourself into believing your comprehension is high if you can catch enough of the vocabulary to follow the story, while detail and nuance goes right over your head (unbeknown-st to you). Likewise reading, you may think your comprehension is high, but can you read even half as fast as a native? or even a quarter. Are you really understanding it in its entirety? Do you have to reread lines? use a dictionary? Can you completely follow the conversation between your colleagues and peers? or only when they're speaking with you?

I notice that when it comes to punctuation and how it can change the meaning of a sentence I do have trouble understanding the nuances. Thus my comprehension is not on a level of a native, but that also depends on what is considered the standard comprehension/output ability of a 'native'.

I guess I am just content at where I stand, even if I could be better too. If I can get as far in Japanese without speaking much then that would be optimal.

I haven't done RTK, and for the longest time when I started learning Japanese I hardly did any kanji study beyond what I learned in class. I knew about 400 kanji when I started reading novels, and I don't think that was necessarily ideal -- I wish I had stuck with children's novels with furigana so I didn't end up with a bunch of sight words I couldn't pronounce, but this was back when the only way for me to get Japanese books was to ask my teacher to bring me some back from Japan.

It was super tedious, in those paper-dictionary days, to look up all the kanji that I didn't know, but even if I had done RTK it would have been super tedious if I didn't know the readings. Gradually I started to acquire the vocabulary so that I could read chunks of text and get the gist of them. I think the number one thing that let me succeed in Japanese was massive comprehensible exposure* and the number of kanji you need to know in order to get started with massive exposure is actually quite small.

Yeah, there are relatively few kanji I can handwrite from memory, but I don't think being able to handwrite complicated kanji from memory is something that should be a top priority when you're just beginning your studies.

*massive COMPREHENSIBLE exposure because you don't learn anything by pure immersion. Really, you don't; hearing children with deaf parents don't learn English from watching TV. Exposure works when you understand what you're hearing/reading.

@nadiatims

yeah, i'd definately much rather attempt to learn to speak with a large passive vocabulary than from nothing. It's maybe like, you can transfer passive knowledge to active knowledge quite quickly when you use it in a real life situation, but if that passive knowledge wasn't there already, it'd be much more difficult to try to learn it through outputting.

That also fits with my experience... when people in Japan tried to teach me some vocabulary that i didn't already know, i found it very difficult to remember and use it later. But words that i did have a passive understanding of already, i could probably still use again now fairly effortlessly in the right situation...

Betelgeuzah Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:"Best way to see if you actually know whats being said in anything is to ask yourself, 'Can I say in English what they are talking about? Even the most rudimentary thing.....Oh they are talking about attacking that, etc. ?'

Sounds a bit odd to me. Languages are their own entities. Sometimes even if you know a word in one language doesn't mean you can recall it in another language easily. That's because at some point you don't need the help of your native language to comprehend another language. Situations arise where you know what a word means, but can't seem to be able to translate it even to your native language. Of course some people are better at this than others. But I don't think it's some sort of benchmark of comprehension at all.

Especially considering that translating is not always so straightforward, as same concepts are said differently.

Quote:If young people are so smart why is the pace of school so slow?

That's not what he said.

That's so true, I've always wondered why some things just don't come out well in English and it's is simple, it doesn't make sense in English. I believe over time your Japanese will be able to pretty much understand J-J (internally too). I don't have that auto-translator going off in my head like when I first started.

Betelgeuzah Wrote:

vix86 Wrote:"Best way to see if you actually know whats being said in anything is to ask yourself, 'Can I say in English what they are talking about? Even the most rudimentary thing.....Oh they are talking about attacking that, etc. ?'

Sounds a bit odd to me. Languages are their own entities. Sometimes even if you know a word in one language doesn't mean you can recall it in another language easily. That's because at some point you don't need the help of your native language to comprehend another language. Situations arise where you know what a word means, but can't seem to be able to translate it even to your native language. Of course some people are better at this than others. But I don't think it's some sort of benchmark of comprehension at all.

Especially considering that translating is not always so straightforward, as same concepts are said differently.

Quote:If young people are so smart why is the pace of school so slow?

That's not what he said.

By "if young people are so smart" I meant "if young people pick things up so quickly". Adults just have less free time than children, and obviously someone who just left HS will be better at studying than someone whose mind has been turned to mush from doing nothing but a menial job for decades, but otherwise it's not like one's mind starts decaying after childhood passes.

People just say these things to give themselves an excuse not to do something at an older age.

nadiatims Wrote:Speaking ability does tend to lag a bit of course, but my feeling is that people who say this (that they have high comprehension, but can't speak), may be overestimating their comprehension ability. You can trick yourself into believing your comprehension is high if you can catch enough of the vocabulary to follow the story, while detail and nuance goes right over your head (unbeknown-st to you).

Yeah, i've definitely done this. I once watched a drama without subtitles and then later watched it with japanese subs... man, i even had details of the plot wrong. You know that feeling where you're laughing but you can't put your finger on exactly what the joke is? You're probably just picking up on other cues that you're supposed to be laughing. I see it at work a bit. People making body language like they're understanding, when i know their ability and i'm pretty confident they're missing the vocab/grammar to understand what was said. I remember doing it myself. Sorta natural when your performance is being assessed.

I've often wondered whether people who claim total comprehension from an absurdly early time (1 year, etc) aren't just deluding themselves. They're watching, with no real clue as to what is going on other than what the video itself makes clear, fooling themselves into thinking they're understanding every word. Especially when they're fans of the "never look up words in the dictionary, it's too slow" school of thought.

dizmox Wrote:

Betelgeuzah Wrote:

Quote:If young people are so smart why is the pace of school so slow?

That's not what he said.

By "if young people are so smart" I meant "if young people pick things up so quickly". Adults just have less free time than children, and obviously someone who just left HS will be better at studying than someone whose mind has been turned to mush from doing nothing but a menial job for decades, but otherwise it's not like one's mind starts decaying after childhood passes.

People just say these things to give themselves an excuse not to do something at an older age.

Yep. There is no way my ability to learn is less than when i was 17. I'd buy that late in life mental performance drops off, but it's not a steady decline from birth! I think AJATT nails it, adults are so awesome at everything that they expect to be awesome at new hard things like learning a language, quickly. When they aren't awesome at it in a month, they panic and think something's wrong (err like the OP i guess). Kids suck at everything so they're used to sucking at something new. They just accept it, and slog away at it like everything else.

I know the biggest thing holding me back, especially with speaking, is a fear of embarrassing myself. Adults have hangups that kids don't.

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:2. Bilingualism. Without exception, the people I've met who were the best at Japanese grew up speaking two or more languages. Bilingualism is a huge advantage. Dag.

I strongly disagree with you. People who've learned a second language will fare better at learning other languages, but this is absolutely NOT true of people who grew up speaking more than one language. I've often been in language classes with such people and they never did better than average.

It's the process of figuring out a language, and how to learn it, that will help you with other languages. If speaking 2 languages alone were enough to make you better, then why isn't speaking a language already making everyone good at learning foreign languages?

dizmox Wrote:

JapaneseRuleOf7 Wrote:I agree completely. 2-3 years is unrealistically fast for most people, and 7+ sounds more accurate.

There is no reason to take 7+ years. People only take that long if they barely study/study ineffectually - is learning at a decent pace for 2-3 years really that unrealistic? I think people set the bar too low for themselves.

I think you're overestimating people's abilities/free time. A lot of Japanese language learners never reach an advanced level. And those that do have lived in Japan for a long time and/or studied their ass off. Two years is the time it would take to reach N1 at a language school, studying full time. It really depends on how much time you can commit. I think that reaching N1 in two years would at least require something like one to two hours of study per day.

Fillanzea Wrote:Yeah, there are relatively few kanji I can handwrite from memory, but I don't think being able to handwrite complicated kanji from memory is something that should be a top priority when you're just beginning your studies.

I wonder how many people can really write Japanese well. I have quite limited writing abilities and I think that it comes from a lack of practice. There are few situations in which you need to write anything by hand nowadays. Considering how hard it is to be able to write kanji as opposed to just reading them, I suppose that only a minority of advanced learners can really write properly. And I don't see it as much of a problem, especially when you see many Japanese messing up kanji themselves...

zigmonty Wrote:Yep. There is no way my ability to learn is less than when i was 17. I'd buy that late in life mental performance drops off, but it's not a steady decline from birth! .

I agree with you. I found this nice blog post explaining how intelligence peaks at 26 (with some parts peaking much later). I think that probably works for language learning too, which means you'd better better at 26 than at 16.

http://www.brainhealthhacks.com/2011/01/...as-we-age/

There's a lot of controversy around Chomskyian linguistics, and certainly the idea of an innate "language module" in the brain:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Language_ac...ion_device

My linguistics program was very Chomskyite, but I haven't kept up with the research enough to really want to dig in and take a side.

Nevertheless, I think there's a case to be made that there's something special about language. Virtually everyone in the world becomes a native speaker of one language, even many people with severe cognitive impairments in other areas. That doesn't mean they know the rules of placing a comma, or know to say "Bill and I went to the movies" rather than "Bill and me went to the movies." But uneducated native speakers have grammatical abilities that often very well educated immigrants who've lived in their adopted countries for 15+ years don't have. So -- I don't think that general intelligence and language learning abilities perfectly go hand in hand.

Fillanzea Wrote:Virtually everyone in the world becomes a native speaker of one language, even many people with severe cognitive impairments in other areas. That doesn't mean they know the rules of placing a comma, or know to say "Bill and I went to the movies" rather than "Bill and me went to the movies." But uneducated native speakers have grammatical abilities that often very well educated immigrants who've lived in their adopted countries for 15+ years don't have.

The rules of placing a comma are a feature of punctuation, which isn't a part of grammar in the strict linguistic sense, and the idea that "Bill and me went to the movies" is less correct than the former sentence, the more I think about it, looks like a grammatical atavism kept alive by prescriptivism.

Precisely, vonPeterhof. I just thought I had to interject that because most people who haven't done linguistics coursework don't really have a good grasp on why linguists have different standards than English teachers when it comes to which sentences are grammatical, but I figured I was going to get derailed by "But lots of native speakers have bad grammar!" if I made the unqualified assertion that the vast majority of people are perfectly fluent speakers of their own native language.