Did YOU learn English grammar at school? Me no.

A Scottish education of the 40s and 50s taught me the lot. I just loved parts of speech, parsing, clause analysis and the various rules, such as they were. This was a big advantage when it came to learning Latin and, later, Greek. When my son took up Spanish again at Uni, he was puzzled by the grammatical terms which he'd never learnt at school, so I sent him the worksheets I had developed for my mature students. Don't know if he bothered using them! However, my GS, who did the new SATS syllabus last year, had to learn a lot of grammatical terminology which was new even to me. Now in Year 8, I suspect he has managed to forget all about them! Hands up, who knows what a 'determiner' is?

A Scottish education of the 40s and 50s taught me the lot. I just loved parts of speech, parsing, clause analysis and the various rules, such as they were. This was a big advantage when it came to learning Latin and, later, Greek. When my son took up Spanish again at Uni, he was puzzled by the grammatical terms which he'd never learnt at school, so I sent him the worksheets I had developed for my mature students. Don't know if he bothered using them! However, my GS, who did the new SATS syllabus last year, had to learn a lot of grammatical terminology which was new even to me. Now in Year 8, I suspect he has managed to forget all about them! Hands up, who knows what a 'determiner' is?

A Scottish education of the 40s and 50s taught me the lot. I just loved parts of speech, parsing, clause analysis and the various rules, such as they were. This was a big advantage when it came to learning Latin and, later, Greek. When my son took up Spanish again at Uni, he was puzzled by the grammatical terms which he'd never learnt at school, so I sent him the worksheets I had developed for my mature students. Don't know if he bothered using them! However, my GS, who did the new SATS syllabus last year, had to learn a lot of grammatical terminology which was new even to me. Now in Year 8, I suspect he has managed to forget all about them! Hands up, who knows what a 'determiner' is?

Were you taught to write letters when you were at school? We were taught the correct form for job applications, and all official type letters and how to finish them off etc. My children were not taught these skills but naturally we showed them the correct form to use.

Interesting how so few of us were taught all the different forms of speech etc. Our French teacher does consider that to be a lack of UK education.

I had trouble grasping the "rules of of grammar" clauses etc. I never did get the point of parsing sentences etc .
However in general I can write coherent and meaningful sentences given time to think. I learnt my grammar by listening and reading in the way small children learn to speak.
However you need to find those people who themselves have good enough grammar to set a correct example.

The most important thing is being able to express yourself verbally so that you can make the meaning of whatever you want to say to be clearly understood by your "audience".
Not always easy if you are talking "off the cuff" so to speak.

ps that was back in the early '50s

JackyB - interesting about french grammar. I learnt french at school until I was 18, and remember very little about the grammar. But I read french literature, and I can gabble on in french now, and write letters in french. So maybe grammar isn't that important.
Never heard of the subjunctive!

I could never understand when it became the norm to ignore spelling errors in children's writing - I always corrected words that they used often so should be able to spell properly or names of particular people they often referred to. I also corrected mistakes such as -the smorning both spelling and pronunciation.

We had a very good English teacher (although his son was a psychopath, even in Kindergarten) and I had a good grounding in grammar. It's not that hard, really. And I really needed it for learning German later on, especially as I mainly learned it on my own. I also found it interesting at the time to transfer the grammar rules to the French we were learning, as we were using a very "modern" ungrammatical system.

The only foreign language I ever tried to learn was Welsh, to worm my way into the good books of DH's ancient granny. I failed miserably at both the learning and the worming!

Greyduster - I do agree with you about the downturn in quality of the language. When my elder daughter moved to England at the turn of the century (she had learnt her English through me and at school as a second language), she spoke beautifully. Now, after 17 years there it's as bad as the next person's and I sometimes do not understand her, especially when she texts. She now says awful things like "me and him" which makes my toes curl, but I can't correct her or else her English husband steps in and says she's right, not me!

I found Latin much easier to learn than French.

Yes, but I only went to a secondary school. I have forgotten most of it! We could, nevertheless, all write decent prose with proper punctuation by the time we left, and I pride myself that I still can. Our language is going to hell on a handcart, and no-one seems to worry whether you know any grammar anyway.

grumppa - I can still remember the forms of latin nouns.
As well as singular and plural, male female and neutral there was: nominative vocative accusative genitive dative and ablative (by with or from).
I loved latin - I think I was the only one in my class who did.
Much later ( 15 years ago) I tried to learn Russian and found their grammar is similar to latin.
I gave up btw.

Did I learn grammar in school? Obviously not.

I remember learning noun, verb, adjective and adverb that's about it. Some of the previous posts have left me scratching my head. I know when a sentence dosen't read right but I don't know all that jargon.

Welshwife Latin was compulsory up to O level in my day because you couldn't enter University without it, or so we were told. It was my favourite language as it was WYSIWYG whereas French pronunciation seemed too bear no relation to what was written. Latin came in very handy when I was learning Spanish later in life, not to mention how handy it is when it comes to educated guesses in a quiz!

Isn't split infinitives like the Startrek opening line 'to boldly go' ? Instead of saying 'to go boldly'. May be wrong though, a long time since I even thought about these kind of things.

I remember immensely boring English grammar lessons - I think the teacher was as bored as we were. Then there was Latin grammar - ah the joys of the ablative absolute - and French grammar. All before I was a teenager.

I do also remember that splitting infinitives was a crime but now I wouldn't recognize one if it hit me in the face.

Cherryhatrick- then parsing is what Italians call Analisi Logica and make a lot of fuss about in learning their own Language. TriciaF: cannot truthfully answer your question as my memories of Latin are too vague. However, Italian derives directly from Vulgar Latin (I don't mean rude!).

Cherryhatrick- then parsing is what Italians call Analisi Logica and make a lot of fuss about in learning their own Language. TriciaF: cannot truthfully answer your question as my memories of Latin are too vague. However, Italian derives directly from Vulgar Latin (I don't mean rude!).

I learned as you Giulia, spelling, tenses, adverbs pronoun etc etc and that was a grammar school education

I we did a good bit of parsing too when at Grammar school - verbs were underlined in red and nouns in green - cannot remember the colours used for the ther parts of speech. Lots of things they talk about now when discussing grammar never came up - I think that is why we have trouble learning another language.
DH and I were discussing it the other day on our way home from a French lesson - we mused on whether UK children should do a bit if Latin - a dead language now but one which is the root of many modern day ones.

giulia parsing is an analysis of the words of a sentence..."The cat killed the rat."... The is a definite article, cat is a common singular noun that is the subject of the sentence, rat is the common singular noun that is the object of the verb, killed is the third person in the past tense of the verb to kill....and so on.
That is about as far as I can go these days, with the addition of adverbs and adjectives, but it used to be the norm to have to define each and every word in complex sentences.