It wasn’t until I began learning German that I needed to give thought to how languages worked, piece by piece. For practicality’s sake, they made the right choice. I already knew that it sounded wrong, so I wan’t going to say it my school recognized that and instead spent the time I could have been mapping out sentence structures teaching me more vocabulary and poetic forms.
Listening to and reproducing grammatically correct sentences was way more efficient than spending my English classes mapping out sentence structures and understanding the linguistic reasons behind why “The dog brown I yesterday walked” is wrong. Being immersed in the language and observing others around me since birth taught me that, “The dog brown I yesterday walked” wasn’t normal English sentence structure, and that the better answer would be, “I walked the brown dog yesterday.” I didn’t need to know any more about the rules of English grammar than what was accepted as understandable and ‘normal-sounding’ by my peers and what wasn’t. The reason for this wasn’t because I only ever had horrible English teachers (quite the contrary! I still remember the preposition song set to the tune of “Yankee Doodle” my 6th grade Language Arts teacher made us learn that has served me well) the reason is because I was raised in an English-speaking society/household. I learned more about English grammar in my German classes than I ever learned in any of my English classes.
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