4.2.1. General principles about sentence patterns

What we are dealing with now takes us into--gasp--grammar. At a very broad level, there are similarities in the grammar systems of different languages. An expert can see that. It may be far less obvious to the language learner, who may be unable to see the forest for the trees. For many languages, published descriptions of the grammar do not exist. If a published grammar description does exist, it may seem overwhelming the first time you look at it. Once you are well on your way into using the language as a communicator, you'll find that all that grammatical detail is not as bad as you thought it was when you first looked at it. As your speaking ability grows, you'll be amazed how much of that grammar just becomes a part of you. What is left will be easier to tackle. You don't need to worry about everything all at once. You want to start with simple things, and build up gradually to more complex ones.

You may hear comments about the complexity of some aspect of the language you are learning, comments such as, “There are hundreds of verb forms.” What exactly that means depends on the language. But I suspect it is never as bad as it sounds. There will be certain forms that are the most important ones, and the less important ones will follow patterns. It is impossible to go into detail on this, but take my word for it.

There may be a lot of irregular forms. In English we form the past tense of a verb by adding -ed. For example, walk becomes walked, and talk becomes talked. However there are some verbs that have an irregular past tense. That is, they don't follow any rule. The past of go is went. No matter. Just learn the irregular forms as separate vocabulary items. So what if it adds a few dozen vocabulary items?

In some languages there may be a lot more irregularity. So, for example, given the present tense form of a verb, it may be impossible to predict exactly what the past tense form will be (though there will be some similarity). That would mean that for every verb you would have to learn two forms, one for present tense, and one for past tense. Even then, it is likely they will fall into groups that behave similarly. (The irregularity may not necessarily have to do with tense--I just use that as an example of irregularity in general, even irregularity in words other than verbs.)

Yes, some parts of some languages can be very complex, but you don't have to get everything perfect to become a basic speaker. You'll have lots of time to grapple with the complexity, little by little. In general, this complexity will not make it harder for you to learn to understand the language. Once you are hearing the language with good understanding, you'll hear those complex forms over and over, and they will start to become familiar. Later on you may really want to get every detail right in your own speech, but remember, we are only considering the initial month or two. Right now your goal is to learn to understand enough basic sentence patterns that people can generally get their meanings across to you, with effort, and you can generally get your meanings across to them, with their help.

Another area of complexity has to do with nouns falling into different classes. For example, in French every noun is said to be either masculine or feminine. Some languages have several classes of nouns that are largely unpredictable. The noun class is important because you need to know it in order to know which form of adjective or verb or some other word to use with that noun. Fortunately, you don't have to know the class a noun belongs to in order to understand the language. The native speaker who speaks to you will do it correctly, and you will be able to understand what is said. Over the long term, it will be challenging for you to develop accuracy in using noun classes when you are the speaker, but while you are just a basic speaker you can expect to make mistakes, knowing that they will not usually interfere with communication.

In general, no matter how much people howl over the alleged complexity of some language, that complexity will affect the ease with which you learn to understand the language far less than it will affect the ease with which you learn to produce it in speech, and your ability to speak intelligibly will be affected less than your ability to speak accurately. So have no fear. You can move right ahead with rapidly learning to comprehend a lot of the language. Then you can move right into being a struggling, inaccurate, but intelligible speaker. Finally, you can gradually move on to being a fluent and accurate speaker. Remember, all we're concerned with right now is becoming struggling speakers, albeit genuine speakers.

Before talking about different categories of sentence patterns, we ought to think for a moment about the different functions of sentences. The patterns serve the functions. Three of the major functions of language are to get people to do things (this involves commands and requests), to get people to give you information (this involves questions), and to give people information (this involves making statements). As you work on the types of expressions described below, using the types of methods described above, you are likely to involve yourself in all three of these broad functions of language. However, at this stage there is an over-riding function in the LRP's use of the language with you, and that is to enable you to learn the language. The LRP is saying much of what she says with a view to helping you to learn things you did not know before, to strengthen your knowledge of things you have previously learned, to find out what you have successfully learned, and to allow you to demonstrate your learning and to feel good about it. The LRP will not have thought all of this through in these terms, but I can just about guarantee you that these will be among her main concerns, and increasingly so as you increasingly train her.

When it comes to the actual details of the grammar systems of different languages, there is no way I can give specific suggestions of things to cover in your sessions with your LRP, since languages vary widely at just about every point. Fortunately, I can give suggestions that are likely to lead you into learning to comprehend a good variety of sentence patterns in any language. That will help you to become a basic speaker. From there on, the language will lead you more and more deeply into itself. You just have to get a foothold. Become some kind of a speaker. Then communicate a lot with people for a long time. You'll become a good speaker eventually.

So let's consider some of the kinds of sentence patterns that you will want to learn to understand as a basic speaker of the language. In each case I will give examples of sentence patterns that might be used with TPR (usually object manipulation) and/or pictures (either loose, or pasted in a book). These two techniques tend to be enough to cover just about any sentence pattern. I find that either technique by itself is not enough, but where one technique fails, the other typically comes to the rescue.

My suggestions (usually in the form of English sentences such as “When this picture was taken, it was about to rain”) are mainly there to show you that it is possible to learn these sentence patterns by these comprehension learning techniques. If you come up with your own techniques and approaches to specific patterns, that's even better. If you attempt to follow my suggestions, you'll need to extend them to include numerous examples. You will do that during your preparation for your language sessions. As an exercise, why don't you make up a few of your own example sentences each time you read one of mine. That will increase your confidence that you can do it. In your sessions you'll give your LRP a few illustrative examples (in English, say) of the sentence pattern you are interested in. She will then make up sentences for picture after picture, following the general pattern you suggested. Thus, if you have a hundred pictures, she may make up a hundred sentences. She will be describing the pictures to you or referring to them in one way or another, and you will hear what she says, process it in your brain, and respond in some way.