2026-07-24
9 分钟What's more important, words or grammar?
That's what I'm going to talk about today.
And I'm talking about it because your vocabulary, your passive vocabulary in particular,
is kind of a measurement of how good you are or potentially can be in the language.
And everything I do in terms of my input learning, input-based learning is oriented towards increasing my vocabulary.
But of course, when we go to speaking, we want to speak as...
Accurately as possible.
We want our grammar to be as good as possible.
So how do we improve our grammar?
So I remember when I was teaching English as part of my activities at LingQ,
and I would give the learner a report where I categorized the mistakes that the learner made.
And I realized very quickly that the major problem people had wasn't so much specific aspects of the grammar.
It was their use of words.
They used words together that didn't really belong together or weren't natural in how the learner used those words.
And that that was a bigger problem for most people than tenses or prepositions
or the use of the article and other sort of fine points of English grammar.
And then I thought, you know, there are certain things in languages that I speak well, say French,
which I think I speak quite well, that I regularly have trouble with.
For example, I caught myself the other day saying, de mon avis, in my opinion, which is wrong, it's à mon avis.
And I've been saying that for a long, long time.