Thread: ''What happened''

Robin, I understand what you mean. Training makes one's language skills automatical, and learning tables of grammar is useless without much application.
Probably you forgot how you started learning English. But can you speak, read and write in Russian, if you don't know what object and dative case are, it's endings, what prepositions are used with it? I mean if you study the language as an adult. And if you know nothing about declension at all (if you are an English native speaker, for example)?
I don't believe that an adult can study a foreign language without learning grammar.

Originally Posted by Marcus

I don't believe that an adult can study a foreign language without learning grammar.

Its not about not learning grammar but learning the grammar by example and not as terminology and rules. Children learn their native grammar without knowing what an object is. In school you don't learn the "truth" about your language, only the formal rules extracted from observing what the speakers and writers of the language are doing. You could easily do without that. Of course grammar (as in terminology and precisely formulated rules) is useful, but it is not the best means of access to learning the language.