Grammar or Vocabulary in Language Learning?

Time is our most precious resource. In the modern world, we don’t have enough time to do everything we want. Work, school, family, and hundreds of other things, all demand our time. How on Earth can we find the time to devote to something like learning a language?

The answer is to use the time you have as efficiently and effectively as you can.

When I am talking to a new student, they often complain about their level of English grammar. They say they want to improve their grammar so they can use the language better.

In response, I often ask them a simple question: Would you prefer to improve your grammar or your vocabulary ?

What would your answer be?

My answer is simple: Vocabulary is much more important than grammar.

My students are often surprised by this answer.

The traditional way of teaching a language has been to focus on the grammar. Classes look at the present simple, followed by the past simple and then the present continuous, and so on.

Most coursebooks are organised according to grammar, so you will do the present perfect in chapter 7, the first conditional in chapter 8.

Lots of teachers write grammar questions in their tests, or use grammatical words when explaining new language.

However, if you think about it, vocabulary is much more important than grammar. I have three arguments that will hopefully persuade you that I am right.

First, think about the type of mistake you might make and if somebody could understand you.

For example, if a student says “I play football yesterday,” there is a grammatical mistake. The speaker has not used the past of the verb ‘play’.

But do you understand her? Of course you do. The vocabulary tells you all of the important information. She may not be 100% correct, but she has succeeded in communicating her idea.

A different example. “I played garden yesterday.” In this example, the speaker is correct, grammatically. However, the vocabulary does not make any sense.

My second argument.

A long, long time ago, it seems, I had a job teaching English in London. Students came from all over the world to study English with us. I had one student who seemed to take pleasure in asking the most complicated questions about English. To this day, I am convinced he did this to try to test me to see if I knew enough about English grammar. They were very challenging questions, often with no easy answer. They were also very interesting questions and often generated a lot of debate in the teachers’ room as we tried to find a good answer.

There was just one problem; that the student’s vocabulary was not very good. He spent hours at home writing the questions and then read them to me from a piece of paper or just asked me to read them myself. I think he also got help from friends who had a better level of English.

This problem meant it was very difficult to talk about the answers, simply because he didn’t understand me. Which was actually a good thing because when I didn’t have a good answer I could just talk quickly and pretend I knew what I was talking about.

This student knew almost everything about how the grammar worked. But he knew very little about how to express this knowledge in English. Also, he was not very interested in improving his vocabulary. Instead, he just wanted to ask more questions about grammar.

I tried to explain that his grammar was good enough and that he needed to spend his time looking at vocabulary, but I don’t think he believed me.

My third, and final, argument.

When you go on holiday to a country and you don’t know the language they speak there, what do you bring to help you communicate? You don’t bring a grammar book, that is for sure. What possible help could a grammar book be?

No, you bring a phrase book. This phrase book will be full of useful expressions and vocabulary that you can use. You don’t need to understand the grammar, just use the phrases.

I intend to write more about what types of vocabulary you can learn and how the brain remembers vocabulary, but for now, the most important thing to remember is that vocabulary is more important than grammar. If you have limited timed available to study, focus on vocabulary before grammar.

I am not saying we should ignore the grammar of a language. We need to know the basics about the rules of the language. But we need to know much, much more about the words of a language.

What about you? Do you focus on the grammar of English or the vocabulary? What do you do to improve either your grammar or your vocabulary? Leave me a message in the comments. I promise to answer every message.

Also, if there is something you would like me to write about in these articles, let me know and I’ll see what I can do.