Free How to Learn a Foreign Language by Graham E. Fuller Page B

means. In these examples it has nothing to do with “correct” speech. It has to do with getting the meaning right. If you use a wrong grammatical endinghere, you're not inelegant, you're plain not understood. The grammar rules are designed to make the relationships among words clear. That's why we have to pay close attention to the grammar rules of the foreign language we study.
    The language you study may not have case endings on the nouns (French, Spanish, Italian, Chinese, for example, don't), but most languages do use some of them. Be prepared for them and try to appreciate why it's so important to get them right.
    All of this may be interesting, you say, but it also makes for a lot more work in learning these languages. You're right. But once again let's remember how different people see all these changes. We see German or Russian grammar forcing us into extra labor to demonstrate relationships among words which we English speakers express more simply.
    But a Chinese thinks that our English grammar rules are a terrible nuisance. He sees us adding “-s” to make a word plural, or having different words for “he” “she” and “it”. And “he” changes to “him”, “she” changes to “her”. He complains that we change all our verbs around from “go” to “went” to “gone”, “goes”, “going”, and so on. Chinese has almost no endings. It just brings in new words to change meaning; perhaps the ultimate in streamlined language. Different strokes for different folks.
    Drill, repetition of sentences, use of the material—all of these exercises will make a tremendous difference. It's no good just to learn a list like the one I showed you in Turkish. You've got to hear these endings, practice using them yourself in many different sentences and contexts. They've got to start feeling natural to you—almost second nature. Nothing can replace the tape recorder or classroom drill and conversation practice until you get these endings down cold. If you don't really understand them and feel comfortable with them, it's best not to go on until you do. It's like not digesting a meal properly. It only makes things worse if you goon to eat more on top of an undigested hunk of grammar.
KEY POINTS
    1. Grammar is essential because it tells us precisely what the relationship is among words.
    2. Many languages, unlike ours, express grammatical relationships among words by means of word endings. For example, something on the end of the word changes to let us know whether the word is the subject or the object of the action.
    3. Additional endings may be used on nouns to indicate possession, or location, or motion towards or from the noun.
    4. Some languages go in for the use of endings on nouns more thoroughly than others. Russian loves them, German somewhat less, English, French and Chinese, scarcely at all.
    5. Use of the wrong ending, that is, bad grammar, is simply confusing because it makes the relationships among the words unclear or it gives an unintended meaning.

CHAPTER TWELVE
THE GENDER GAP (UGH, UGH, UGH)
    I promise this will be the last chapter on grammar.
    The problem is that you can't really talk about learning a language without tangling with the grammar problem. And it's important that we get a really firm idea of what we're going to encounter before we go sailing off into uncharted waters of a foreign language without a map and some explanation of all the shoals.
    This time we're going to talk about a gender gap—one gap that we are probably never going to be able to close.
    For some reason or other, in nearly every European language, including French, German, Spanish, Italian, Russian, and even Arabic and Hebrew, there is a curious feature that to our way of thinking is hard to explain. (I've already tried to explain some curious features in other languages that at least have some practical explanation and use. But in this case I have no useful explanation. It's just life…)
    Speakers of these