Very small children don’t learn grammar formally, yet they learn to use it intuitively and learn to speak correctly. All of us have this same innate ability and can rediscover it.
Here’s a quote from the Czech Wikipedia: "According to Chomsky, the development of speech is defined genetically - he concluded that there is a kind of universal grammar that is innate and not learned during life – a person is born with a basic grammatical template into which any world language could easily fit. According to the 1992 Arts and Humanities Citation Index, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar between 1980 and 1992 and was also the eighth most cited scientist ever."
So how does it work for children when it comes to learning grammar? Children listen to anywhere from hundreds to thousands of hours of a language that is new to them. Gradually, in the process of understanding, they begin to distinguish between frequently repeated words and phrases that always have a clear meaning. These are often one or two-word phrases. We call them a linguistic pattern, for example, I want..., I don't like..., I need...
They first begin to imitate this pattern themselves in a simple way to meet some needs they have, and after that, they creatively change it based on some rules of the language that they heard and deduced.
For example: I want chocolate. I want a sweet. I need a car. I need to go away.
Children are not afraid to incorporate regularities even into irregular forms and to speak with temporary errors. They correct these later through autocorrection when they listen carefully and notice the deviations in the way they speak from the correct language of someone who knows the language very well - for example, their parent.
It is only from these model sentences, which children already use quite regularly, that they eventually derive the whole grammar of the language spontaneously so that by pre-school age, they can speak relatively well.
That’s why at Mooveez we first learn to speak with the help of conversations and a natural learning process. Only then, with sentences that we know how to use, do we "help" the user understand the grammar in that sentence. We encourage users to listen to the new language a lot, to try to speak it, and to not be afraid of making mistakes. They will gradually learn the grammar by using sentences they already know. This is easier than we would expect because:
We are all capable of learning to speak any language. We have proven this by learning our native language and we can awaken this ability in ourselves again.
