A Crash Course in English (and German)

I've been teaching English in Japan for about a year now... and now I've got a stronger understanding of the mechanics of grammar. The point that you'll never start understanding something until you start teaching rings absolutely true. Quite a long time, I've always taken my ability to speak the English language for granted-- it was always second nature, something that I never took the time to think about. Now that I've spent countless hours teaching my students the mechanics of the English language, I have now come to appreciate the mechanics of grammar (something I never bothered to learn as a child). After developing an appreciation for the mechanics of English grammar, I realized that is becomes significantly easier to learn new languages and use more complicated structures.

Let's start by understanding how we use english. In English we use a Subject-Verb-Object structure for presenting our ideas. For example, "I ate cake" is a grammaticaly correct sentence. The subject is "I" the verb is "ate" and the object is "cake."

As grammatically correct as "I ate cake" is, it is quite a boring senctence. So, how does one advance from the most rudimentary sentences in English? Simple, we start adding more detailed information to make sentences more interesting. For example, "I ate cake with my friends at the park." Now we are starting to get to the level where most of us speak. What is the difference here? I used the words "with" and "at" to include more detailed information into the sentence. Interestingly these words do not count as verbs, but rather, they are prepositions. Prepositions are words that you use to add additional information. Which in the case of my previous sentence was "with my friends" and "at the park."

It is my understanding that prepositions are just like verbs. Meaning, for example my sentence "I ate cake" becomes the new subject the "with" becomes the new verb and "friends" is the new object. As a result, prepositions can be chained to add additional information to a sentence (indefinately... and if you do it too many times, it becomes the famed "run on sentence").

Taking a quick look at the class of prepositions, we have words such as "with", "at", "for", "before", "after", "so", "because" and etc. To start taking the steps away from the most basic sentences into more advanced English, the usage of these prepositions are absolutely necessary. So I immediately thought "what if I started using these words in another language? Would be immedately be able to speak more complicated sentences in a different language?"

I experimented in German today with some of my German lab mates using this thought process. First I started with a simple sentence "I drank tea." I asked my German friends to translate each of these words in to German and srung them in the same English grammatical structure. It worked!

Now I asked for my German friends to give me the German word for "with" and I inserted my labmate's name and I could immediately say "I drank tea with Jan" (Jan being the name of one of my labmates). And my German friends were immediately impressed. Sure my grammar wasn't 100% correct, but I could immediately start communicating more detailed ideas.

Now the real trick is to start understanding the purpose of some of the major word groups and understand their relation to communicating ideas. If you can get this down, then learning new languages should be a snap!