What is the best way to teach grammar?

[letnja-kisha.livejournal.com]

Hi everyone,

What has been the most effective and useful way for you to learn Russian grammar in class? Do the explanations of the teacher help?

Thanks in advance.

Comments

[belacane.livejournal.com]

I had an amazing teacher who explained things very well.... but I also spent a lot of time making sure that I really understood what was going on, by taking good notes.
I took notes in ways that I could understand them, not exactly how the teacher wrote them down.

I also made sure to memorize the declensions as quicly as possible, so I didn't have to keep referencing the charts.

Practicing with russian speaking relatives (one of the main reasons I wanted to learn the language really well) and russian speaking friends also helped.
when i had no one to talk to, whenever i said something in english, i would repeat it to myself in my head in russiasn if i knew how to.
helped a lot.

[devinshire.livejournal.com]

We spent a lot of time listening to Kino songs and analyzing the lyrics. Like when we were learning the past tense of verbs, we'd study "Videli noch" because there are SO MANY past tense verbs in that song.

It's not that our professor wasn't qualified, but it's hard to teach grammar without concrete examples of how it all works. And it was fun to sing the songs. :)

[letnja-kisha.livejournal.com]

That's a great suggestion, thanks!

[red-kitti.livejournal.com]

Keeping a journal, either online or one that is turned into the teacher has been the best way for me to learn grammar personally... I've learned a tremendous amount of grammar on LJ (see my earliest entries! I still have a long way to go, but I'm making progress)... Of course, if you turn in a journal to a teacher (is that teacher you?), the teacher ends up with an incredible amount of work... (When I studied Finnish, there was no LJ, so I did the journal thing...and wrote short stories and letters to friends of course.)

I think the big thing is learning things in context. If you are studying a set of vocabulary words or a specific grammatical rule and try to memorize it without any context, it won't stick...

[philena.livejournal.com]

With me, we learned grammar through reading literature, and then all of our grammar exercises were taken from the reading. It was certainly tough at first, but when you start remembering which participles to use and how they're formed by asking yourself whether what you want to say is more like when Voland said when he's talking to a giant cat or like what he said when he's prophesying an editor's inescapable decapitation, it's lotsa fun.

[snopova.livejournal.com]

I think a very good and quick way to learn a language is to buy a book with anecdotes and read and translate them and then try to tell them. They are short, you can start at any page, you will have to understand the sense, and they all usually include some conversational language.