Native speakers, how did you learn English grammar at school?

We were taught grammar in the classes we call English in elementary school. We also went over vocabulary and literature. It was so long ago that I really don't remember the order or what the books were like. I do remember our vocabulary book. You learned 10 different words each week and did exercises in the book based on them. And I vividly remember the exam we had in 3rd grade on went vs gone and I got almost every single one wrong. I was devastated because I had never failed a test before!

>Obviously, a native speaker master grammar before they "learn" it. tell this to my middle school English teacher who made it her mission to annihilate any misuse of "good" and "well" by students, even in casual conversation. PHEW. native speakers have native grammar, which is highly regional and frequently differs from standard grammar. what natives learn is how to use standard grammar in formal settings. the teacher I mentioned above was doing her job by kicking our bad habits in class (and I am thankful for her), but as an adult, I still answer a casual "how ya doin?" with "doin good, you?" because part of mastering English is knowing when to be formal and when to be casual. *this is all in the US, btw. schools vary a ton here, but we learned grammar in elementary & middle school & literature and essay writing in high school, which I think is pretty standard.

We were taught at first (age 6) that a sentence is “a complete thought” and that we shouldn’t have run-on sentences. Around age 12 it got more explicit about dependent and independent clauses, so we learned how to actually spot a “comma splice” and how to resolve it with either a conjunction or a semicolon. We were taught about subject-verb agreement. I remember learning about complex vs compound sentences. I learned to diagram sentences. To this day, if a sentence is too complicated for me to diagram, I take it as a sign that I should break it up or rewrite it. Obligatory mention of School House Rock’s _Conjunction Junction_. We were taught about active and passive voice and actively discouraged from using passive voice outside of lab reports and poetry.

In primary school you are taught about verbs, nouns, adjectives, adverbs, synonyms, similes, clauses & embedded clauses, tenses, etc as well as spelling generalisations (for every spelling rule you'll find exceptions). For example, in Years 1 & 2 you are taught about suffixes 'ed' and 'ing' which can then be applied to past, present and future tenses. Recounts such as journal entries will lend itself to past tense and narratives to present and future.  In primary school, you're taught how to use punctuation and how to structure text for a variety of genres whereby grammar may vary (such as poetry vs imperatives in instructional texts). Some teachers will refer to linguistic terminology such as 'perfect tense' or 'perfect continuous' but most don't. In my case, I studied Applied Linguistics and so I would but also add the caveat that knowing those identifying labels were not as vital as learning the content; that way those motivated by metalanguage could engage and those less interested knew what to best focus on. I can't say the majority of teachers do this unless mandated. English is also a SVO (Subject Verb Object) language. By telling older students this helped children from diverse language backgrounds to be more cognisant and also improved my teaching as I could predict common errors in language structure and grammar made by those who had other languages than English as their first language.  By the time kids get to high school, many have integrated their learning and often forget the 'how & why' - in my anecdotal experience teenagers will repeat back that 'a verb is a 'doing' word' until undergoing a quick refresher of Grammar in general. Getting onto the National Curriculum in English will show the progression taught in schools. There's no one book I can recommend.  [Australian Curriculum - English](https://v9.australiancurriculum.edu.au/f-10-curriculum/learning-areas/english/foundation-year_year-1_year-2_year-3_year-4_year-5_year-6_year-7_year-8_year-9_year-10?view=quick&detailed-content-descriptions=0&hide-ccp=0&hide-gc=0&side-by-side=1&strands-start-index=0) [UK National Curriculum - English](https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-curriculum-in-england-english-programmes-of-study)

I was taught grammar throughout my schooling (preschool-high school). I learned about nouns, verbs, adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, etc. I also remember learning compound words, plurals and contractions. This would all be very early learning. In later grades it would switch to more writing focused learning, like how to structure an essay, how to properly use commas and semicolons, making sure to stay in the same tense when writing, and how to site sources. I wasn't specifically taught things like word order as far as I can remember.

I went to a Catholic grammar school in Southern California from kindergarten to 8th grade. We spent a fair amount of time on grammar. It was a long time ago, so I don’t remember many specifics. I do remember a lot of diagramming of sentences both on the chalkboard and in our notebooks. There was also a lot of homework and tests of grammar. I then went to a Jesuit high school for four years. We had a grammar textbook freshman year. We studied grammar and literature that year.

I don't know why the other Americans (US) are saying they didn't get taught grammar. I definitely did, some school systems are better than others obviously. I will say it wasn't touched on past 5th grade or so unless it was being addressed as a deduction in work that I turned in. It's largely intuitive and that can come from just watching children's television. I recommend looking up teacher resources or homeschool grammar curriculum. That will help you find books intended for native speakers. I found "Scholastic Teacher Resources Grade Success Workbooks, 1st Grade, Set Of 4 Books" and it included Grammar, Writing, and Reading Comprehension.

On Monday take ten words randomly On that day take those words and define them On the Tuesday take those words and put them In alphabetical order On Wednesday take the words and use them in a sentence On Thursday write a paragraph with the words in it On Friday give yourself a spelling test using those words Repeat for 7-10 years This is the average American English learning experience

Back in my day we would diagram sentences to learn things like clauses, phrases, subjects, objects, predicates, prepositions, etc. It was grueling as a kid but then I had to do it again in college for an advanced English class and it was kind of fun. [https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/diagram-sentences](https://www.yourdictionary.com/articles/diagram-sentences) There's an example of a sentence diagram. Basically you look at a sentence and splice the whole thing apart with the subject and predicate (verb) on two sides of a line. Then you draw lines branching off from the subject and predicate to add the parts of the sentence that modify them. I'm a teacher now and I've never seen anyone diagram sentences anymore, but students are taught different concepts at different levels. Kids learn about nouns and verbs quite early, at around 6 or 7. Then more concepts are added like adjectives and adverbs, clauses and phrases, conjunctions, prepositions. Like you might have a lesson on conjunctions and teach them the FANBOYS mnemonic (for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so) and practice writing them properly in sentences. Since most students are native speakers and English grammar comes naturally to English speakers, a lot of the lessons are 'you are already know instinctively how to do this, but here's the reason and here's the formal rule'. We have to spend more time teaching things that aren't instinctive like punctuation and spelling. In higher grades you get into things like tenses, usually starting simple with past, present, and future. Eventually you can introduce perfect tense. I remember subject-verb agreement was a big one that my students struggled with one year because many of them spoke African American Vernacular English and subject-verb agreement is treated differently with that dialect than in standard English. In that case you can't say 'it's just what sounds right' because no one actually says it the same way and you just have to be honest that this how 'the standard' has been decided and it's what colleges and formal settings will expect.

Begrudgingly

not exactly a native speaker but our country teaches English in all levels of education. pre-school - Letters and numbers, basic words (parts of the body, house, etc), common greetings and expressions, common action verbs, comparing adjectives (bigger vs smaller, beautiful vs ugly, etc) grade school (maybe up to 4th grade) - basic grammar, conjugation, parts of speech. simple half-page essays grade school to high school - essays, book reports, movie reviews, poetry, presentations, public speaking, etc. but even outside of school, kids already got exposed to English cartoons and programs. I grew up with Sesame Street and Saturday morning cartoons.

Mostly occurs in English / English Language Arts classes. We had brief units on verbs/adjectives/nouns, but never learned about the names of the different tenses. We started learning more about different literary and grammatical elements like appositive phrases and participles and stuff in high school.

Poorly

I was taught a few relatively basic things over the years, but most of it was learned through immersion. That being said, there are college-level grammar courses that really dive into the mechanics for those who are interested.

I went to a private school where we had explicit grammar courses in elementary. I don’t remember the order of learning or the textbooks, but I would say I still have a pretty good technical grasp of English grammar.

At my private school we were taught [sentence diagramming](https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sentence_diagram). It’s one of those things that felt ridiculous when I was learning it, but now I can see how it helped us learn to analyze complicated sentences.

they sadly didn’t and don’t… they can’t manage basics such as homophones (your/you’re, their/there/they’re, it’s/its, to/too/two, would’ve/could’ve/should’ve they say would/could/should of, etc)…

I'm from Canada and now that I think about it I'm pretty sure we didn't really learn grammar at school. It was all about the spelling because, you know, English orthography is whack.

We diagramed sentences. It not a widely used way to meant but I believe it’s a wonderful way to learn grammar

I had about two weeks of formal grammar instruction in fifth grade (California). Most of my grammar knowledge is from studying other languages.

In elementary school in Michigan (Midwest US) we had like a language arts hour and we had a textbook, kind of like any second language learning textbook, with vocabulary and exercises, using it in a sentence, learning what part of speech it was etc. we had spelling tests and we had like these activities to practice spelling and one was writing our own sentences with the vocab word or writing a little story with them.

We had grammar in English class every year from elementary through high school in the schools I attended (American, I'm 48). We started with parts of speech and just identifying nouns, verbs, adjectives, etc. and gradually processed through more advanced grammar rules. It was a long time ago, so I don't remember all the details, but I remember in high school we had these exercise books with a lot of chapters that would teach a grammar rule and then there were a lot of problems we had to complete to drill the concept (fill in the blank, choose the correct or incorrect sentence out of several, etc.). Then periodically there were review chapters with combined exercises covering all the previous concepts. We also had to do a lot of various writing exercises, including essays, short stories, instructions, and things like that, and the teacher would correct grammar and spelling errors when they graded them.

Very well thank you very much

I learned more about English grammar and syntax by studying foreign languages than I ever did in the classes I took in elementary called RLA (Reading/Language Arts). Those focused mostly on reading, writing essays, and vocabulary. Otherwise, just the basics of "verbs are action words" and "adjectives describe things." It was in French class that I learned about subjects, objects, and the other various pronouns.

That varied a lot from teacher to teacher. In the 8th grade, I had an English teacher who was also fluent in Spanish, but he would lay out sentences and break them down by components. Dependent vs. independent clauses, when to use a semicolon to separate two related independent clauses, etc. I would give him credit for my ability to understand when to use proper punctuation, and he's probably a part of the reason I got my baccalaureate in English. I do think that being bilingual provides an advantage in understanding how the language works, because you can often compare the syntax and structure of the languages and see similarities and differences in just about every language; I would like to ask him about that and just get his thoughts on the matter. As far as spelling, they made us do spelling tests every week from 1st-5th grade. I won my school spelling bee in the 8th grade, but I lost at the regional level. I do want to add that I often do not use proper grammar on the internet or texting friends. It carries a more formal tone and I'm being informal in those circumstances because sometimes proper grammar can come off as dismissive, passive-aggressive, or condescending, and they are usually people with whom I am comfortable. At work, I will always use proper grammar because it would be unprofessional not to do so. In this subreddit, I try to use proper grammar so that English learners do not pick up my bad grammatical habits and increase the clarity of what I am saying.

From my mother. I switched high schools and in English class, which like others have said it really about reading books and discussing them, they had a grammar test you had to pass. They said it would be easy because you learned everything last year. Well, my previous school had not taught us any grammar. So my mother, who is a teacher but in math/physics, tutored me. It took me a couple of tries (we had multiple chances to pass the test) but I did pass.

Nobody of my generation in the UK learned any English grammar at school because there wasn't any in the national curriculum. In English class we just analysed books, poems and plays, and learned about different writing styles. We only learned about grammar while learning foreign languages. The only English "grammar" a lot of English people even know about concerns common spelling mistakes made by native speakers, like it's x its. Anyway, I can recommend Larry Trask's "Penguin Dictionary of English Grammar", it's a good reference.

Never formally taught much grammar. It's something you pick up just by using your native language.

Through Mad Libs

We didn't do much grammar (US). It was long ago, but I think we were taught rules here and there, double negatives are bad and such. I know a lot about grammar mostly because I've studied many other languages.

Went to school in Ireland in the 2000s, we didn't cover grammar. Only when I learned French in secondary school and our teacher tried explaining adverbs, subjunctives and such for the French language did he realise we didn't know what they were in English and needed a crash course.

"Basically not at all". Which is why lots of native English speakers are surprised when non-native English speakers say theres something like 11 or 12 tenses in English. Nobody ever thinks of it in that way. I'd say there's 3, which is what we were taught at school (two with verb conjugation and one that adds "will/shall"), and then different ways to construct them with auxiliaries to add nuance.

There is not one standard curriculum in the US but when I was in school ages ago we would do assignments where we would highlight or underline things like adjectives or verbs. It wasn't though until i started learning other languages that I started hearing phrases like "past perfect" etc. Couldn't tell you what those are in English.

That's the neat part: we didn't (much). Beyond what we needed for learning how to read in elementary school anyway. Sincerely, A veteran of an American school system

Cambridge course books are the best and most recommended in schools. They gradually work through grammar and vocabulary in lots of detail.

American here! We learned about subject and predicate in English class, about making verbs agree with the subject, and about “you and me” vs “you and I”. Also punctuation. I learned more about English grammar in my foreign language classes than in English class or elementary school.

When I was at school we had lessons in grammar (1 hour a week) but this doesnt happen any more. We would analyse sentences into the different parts of speech and learn rules on punctuation, use of the subjunctive, forming plurals, tenses etc. We didnt have a reference book that I can remember - the teacher did everything on the board and we copied it all down. We were tested though using Nelson's English Progress Papers. These are still available but I am pretty sure the grammar sections have been dropped.

I really don't recall learning much in school. I remember learning basics in elementary and some middle school, and then 1 unit on grammar sophomore year in HS. I was an early reader and was always good at language stuff so it wasn't an issue, but all of the intricacies and technical terms that I know I learned from studying a foreign language, where I'd learn a structure or the name of a certain thing and discover that it existed in English, too, or that we did it a different way in English and it had a term, etc. Followed by lifelong independent study.

We had English Lessons split into ‘English Literature’ and ‘English Language’.

Our education systems taught me 🤣 even before i can speak

in the US in the 80s and 90s we had “english” or “language arts” class in elementary and middle school, where we learned grammar and spelling. by high school we were analyzing literature and poetry and writing our own.

We were taught grammar in elementary school. At the time it wasn’t so much.learning to speak," as being taught "these are the words for the things you do when you speak." If no one teaches you terms like noun, verb, gerund, particle, past perfect tense, subject object, and so on, how can you analyze writing, or learn how to other languages are structured? However, my experience is that children continue to speak the way they learned at home. If your parents say "Them cows has went out," and your teacher tells you to say "Those cows have gone out," you’re going to grow up saying "Them cows has went out."

I was in. a bilingual school in Mexico. For me, there was no that much grammar. Just the basic structure of the sentence, some verbs, and a lot of reading and writing. Doing essays from the readings. I guess that's what is missing on the way that languages are taught to foreigners. Of course the main grammar was in kindergarten or 1 and 2nd grade of elementary school, where you learn the basic way of how to make sentences by playing and drawing...

A lot of Americans here are saying they didn’t, but I guess it varies by state and school district (I would also guess a lot of people here did but don’t remember). In elementary school we learned basic grammar like parts of speech, and subjects and objects of a sentence, clauses, etc. in middle school we went more in depth about rules of grammar. I can attribute most of my “advanced” grammar knowledge to my sixth grade language arts teacher who wanted to make sure we all knew all of the rules of English. Someone else mentioned Schoolhouse Rock, which I think most of us watched in elementary or middle school and was a fun way of teaching, there were videos for English, history, and the American political system. I also want to give a shoutout to MadLibs lol, it’s a game we all played when we were young they taught us the parts of speech. I think most of us learned what a noun, adjective, verb, and even adverb was from playing MadLibs

The school I attended was a little different. You worked on your school work individually (not in a group setting, though you were in a group of kids in the same grade) with oversight from a teacher that would help one on one as needed. We had courses in various subjects that would progress at a gradient. We’d have a history course, math course, science, spelling, and grammar. The grammar course would break it down and you’d learn it that way. Didn’t retain much of it though because my grammar is for shit. 😂

As an American, I was taught what the basic parts of my language were in the 1st grade. I was then never taught those things again, nor was I ever taught more advanced things in a classroom setting that wasn't the "Conjunction Junction" video. The people who really instilled in me a love of language were my German teachers. They are the reason I'm involved in communities such as this one and can identify more parts of language than nouns, verbs, and adjectives. This is also why I look at an English degree as having the same value as a piece of toilet paper. My English teachers failed me consistently.

Good question! We do learn grammar, but it's more about refining what we already know. Early on, it's basic stuff like sentence structure and parts of speech. As we get older, we get into more complex things like tenses and passive voice. Textbooks explain the rules with examples and exercises, but it’s not as formal as ESL learning. A good book for working on grammar is "The Elements of Style" by Strunk and White. It’s all bout applying grammar correctly, not just memorizing rules.

I went to primary school in NZ in the 1970s. My class was taught nouns, verbs and adjectives. I figured out adverbs for myself. My husband's class didn't even get that. Then at high school I took Latin and Japanese. It took a couple of years for me to get nominative and accusative, and subject and object, straight in my mind. I'm still not sure what a predicate is - and I'm an English teacher!

In my area we had "English" classes starting in elementary school and continuing through high school. They started with things like spelling, and a few basic things like what verbs and nouns are. Then as we got older, the grammar lessons got more complex. By the time I was in high school it was expected that we had a good handle on nuanced English, like specific rules about comma usage, understanding metaphors and similies, and other literary tools. By the time I was in my final year of high school we were learning technical English like that used in academic papers, as well as how to interpret symbolism in literature and formally cite research sources. From what I gathered in college, my school may have had an unusually strict curriculum, though. There's a difference between speaking a language and knowing the formal rules of a language. There's also a difference between the language you use at home with your friends and parents, and the language you use at work.

I went to a decent public school. I learned to read and write in pre K first of all. We went over the sounds of each letter and used them to read full words. My teachers would read to the class and we’d also read very basic children’s stories on our own. After getting more comfortable with writing, we were taught that verbs, nouns, and adjectives were the main 3 types of words. This is also where we were taught basic punctuation (periods, commas, exclamation marks, question marks, and apostrophes to be specific.) By this point, we’re in 3rd grade and can write actual paragraphs. Most reading assignments are about poems and 1-5 page short stories and we have a spelling test of 15 words each week. Not much changed from there, it pretty much just got harder and harder. We did 3 paragraph essays in 4th grade and from 5th grade on, 5+ paragraphs was the standard.

Never did grammar in Australia in the 2010s/20s, at least in high school (grades 7-12). I think it's because English grammar is very simple compared to other languages, and naming what different parts of the sentence does, like the object, subject, and knowing the accusative, nominative, etc. isn't really relavent for speaking the language you can already naturally speak, especially since English grammar is intuitive for natural speakers already. In English class, we pretty much just studied literature, and wrote in different writing styles.

From pretty much 1st grade through high school we had some form of English/Language Arts class. It would be some mix of writing and grammar study, with probably the biggest focus on grammar being in late elementary school (3rd-5th grade), then a bit more in high school. It usually wasn't super involved, but I remember learning about comma splices and how to properly split up sentences (ie when to use just a comma, a comma + FANBOYS, etc). Or we would learn about the parts of speech, needing to identify nouns vs verbs, subject vs predicate. This was often example based, like they'd show us an incorrect/unmarked sentence and ask us to fix it or identify the parts of the sentence.

We had both spelling and grammar units as part of the curriculum starting in 1st grade, how long it lasts depends on your state but anywhere from 4th to 5th grade for spelling and 5th to 8th grade for grammar. edit: and mine, at least, left out a LOT but I think that was more content related than timespan related and is rather a separate criticism

We had English class for every year of public school. In fact, it was the only class that required a class for all 4 years of high school.  I moved from one state to another as a kid and the curriculum for some grammar topics happened at different times between the school districts. So I fell between the cracks on some topics like adjectives, pronouns, adverbs, etc. and had to brush up on those myself. But even as an adult, I probably couldn't answer a question on them without checking to make sure I'm talking about the right one lol Anyway, random story

I don't think we really do, tbh. I only learned that there were different present tenses (present progressive, simple present, etc.) when I was in my 20s, haha... along with the names and rules of other tenses.

https://texreg.sos.state.tx.us/public/readtac$ext.ViewTAC?tac_view=5&ti=19&pt=2&ch=110&sch=A&rl=Y https://texreg.sos.state.tx.us/public/readtac$ext.ViewTAC?tac_view=5&ti=19&pt=2&ch=110&sch=B&rl=Y Here are the verbatim English and Language Arts grade-level requirements for the state of Texas through eighth grade if you want to read through them. It outlines what grammatical concepts students should know and by what year they should know them. But to go into detail here, generally children are first taught the alphabet and phonics between preschool and first grade. In second to fifth grade we learn most basic grammar rules, especially those regarding capitalization, punctuation, names of different types of words (subject noun, verb, object noun, preposition, etc.) and word order in sentence structure, although some concepts common in other language grammar educations that do exist in English like pronoun-based verb conjugation and subjunctive/interrogative statement sentence structure changes are briefly or never mentioned. And we generally consecutively memorize word spellings and learn to use dictionaries. MLA and other document formatting styles are generally taught in high school. If you want to know how, specifically, it’s a mix of classroom lectures plus homework, reading books, explaining things from a textbook, and lots of reviewed writing assignments.

14 years old. We are still learning new english, like infinitive verbs and A/BB/A rule

I was always in Honors English classes in Middle and High School, so we almost never had any formal grammar instruction in our English classes. We read novels, discussed and analyzed the texts, and wrote essays. We were expected to just know the grammar. Feel like I learned more English grammar from my German classes (and later from Latin in college) than I ever did from my English classes.

Yes. But many native English speakers on the internet clearly either didn’t have this or didn’t pay attention, lol

At school I remember learning about things like  hyperboles, metaphors, similies, euphemism, alliteration / assonance....  In other words how a language is used. It could apply to any language. We also learnt a lot about writing (formal and informal). For example when a semicolon is appropriate instead of a comma, when to start a new paragraph,  etc

In Ausralia in the 70's we were taught in primary school about parts of speech, tenses, phrases, clauses, that sort of thing. And punctuation.

I’m American. We didn’t 😂😂