I was curious. As a child, I was taught English grammar in English, even though it was not my native tongue. We were taught using the A1 Ladybird book series. Now, as an adult, I'm trying to learn new languages, and I'm curious about how others study grammar as adults.
Should grammar be studied in TL or native ?
StudyingI studied Arabic grammar in English, till I got to an intermediate level and switched to learning it through Arabic.
All the languages I have learned in school have used my native language for teaching grammar, up until university studies where everything is taught in the language studied. I don't see benefits using the TL at a point where you can barely speak it, but at some point it makes sense to transition to using it for the most part.
A talented teacher can teach grammar in the TL. Olga Jarrell (YouTube “Amazing Russian”) is a great example. After I heard how she did it, I could also see the huge benefit of more native TL input.
I have been studying with a teacher for a month (3 months total in my current TL) and he has been speaking to me in the TL only, even when explaining grammar concepts and honestly I don't see why not do it this way. Your vocab scales with the difficulty of the grammar concepts anyway, so you won't get to a point where things are completely incomprehensible, imo.
If I had a one-on-one tutor who was fluent in both languages, he/she could explain things to me in the TL. But it only works with one-on-one teaching (two-way commuication) which many people cannot afford.
Learning a language is the same as any other "learning how to do" skill, like tennis or voilin. The tutor identifies which parts you don't understand, and breaks those parts down into words you understand.
It doesn't work for a classroom of 30 (or 300, online) where each student "does not understand" different parts, and has a different set of "words they understand".
I use "learn by doing" in comprehensible input format personally and professionally.
It all depends: what stage of learning you're at, what resources you can use, etc. Oh -- and one has to distinguish studying "grammar" as linguistics understands it from "grammar" as style mavens try to prescribe it.
At its core, "grammar" just means "how do real people really speak? What patterns do they use?" At early stages, I've generally learned the patterns through some kind of syllabus that presents one pattern at a time -- sometimes with some intermediary language, sometimes without any intermediary, but always in a way that made the pattern clear. At some point in learning Italian, I bought a French grammar of Italian just to be sure I had a French perspective on contrastive features. In French and Czech, I mostly use grammars meant for natives. It all depends. I know that most Czech-for-foreigner classes in the Czech Republic do NOT use any intermediate language, because the number of mother tongues is too varied. But they also tend to be "communicative" more than "form-focused."
Edit: "get" > "got" > "bought"; added last sentence
Metalinguistic terms like verb, agglutination, consonant, etc rarely come up in everyday speech, but are pretty common in discussions of grammar. Grammatical discussions also tend to use complex sentence structure. I feel like you'd have to already have a pretty high level of proficiency in a language to understand a grammar explanation given in that language.
You could potentially teach grammar solely through comprehensible input in your TL (and it sounds like that's what A1 Ladybird does, now that I've googled it), but formal discussion of language structure is best done in a language you already know well.