Quote Originally Posted by Marcus View Post
I agree that exposure is absolutely necessary to learn the language. But grammar is also needed, I think. Probably it would have taken too long time before I would have understood (better: too long for me to understand) how questions are formed in English. (I' m not sure if the last sentence is correct).
bitpicker, did you pick up endings of Russian cases, for example, on their own without learning them and then looked them up in a grammar book just for interest? And grammar is one of the most interesting parts of learning languages.
I did read a couple of grammar books front to back early on, and I still refer to them, read them again chapter-wise and even have some books on special linguistic topics such as particles, phonetics and contractions. But I read those books in order to find out what lies ahead of me. I never sit down with a declension table and try to memorize it. And I still use such tables to look up the correct form if I am not sure about it when writing Russian. Some cases come more naturally to me than others. But I do find already that some phrases and constructs come to mind immediately from thought image to Russian when I need them. I don't have to think a single word in German when I compose a post like this one in English, and neither do I have to think about meaning when I read English. I'll be satisfied when I have reached that level in Russian.

I agree that grammar is interesting; but it is a tool to work with the language. If you're a carpenter, then what you should care about is the wood, not the saw and the hammer. The language as it is being used is the wood, the grammar is the saw and hammer.