Before the daily routine starts, I spend a few days on three things: grammar terms in English, the alphabet, and a quick skim of the grammar.

English grammar jargon

The language learning community seriously underrates this step. Almost every explanation for “why did this word just change form?” is written in grammar jargon, so knowing what I know now, I’d learn the jargon in English first. Learning these concepts for the first time through a language you don’t understand yet is inefficient. This takes a day or two at most.

For example, do you know why we say “he gave it to me” and not “he gave it to I”? That difference matters a lot once you’re learning a whole new set of pronouns.

What I’d review

• Parts of speech: noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, article/determiner.
  • Why it matters: Romanian learners often ask what the difference is between bun (good) and bine (well). It seems daunting without any grammar background, but you already know the answer intuitively. Which sounds wrong: “he runs so good” or “he runs so well”? The first one, because you describe a verb with an adverb, not an adjective.
• Sentence roles: subject, direct object, indirect object.
  • Why it matters: grammatical cases (nominative, accusative, dative, and so on) are just markers for these roles. Once you see which pronouns go with which case, the picture is already complete.
• Person and number: 1st/2nd/3rd person, singular/plural.
• Gender and agreement: English barely has these, but many languages make adjectives, articles, and verbs “agree” with a noun’s gender and number.
• Tense vs. aspect: tense is when something happens (past, present, future). Aspect is how it unfolds: finished or ongoing (perfective/imperfective), progressive, perfect. English has a mind-boggling number of combinations.
• Mood: indicative (facts), imperative (commands), conditional (“would”), subjunctive (wishes and doubt, as in “if I were”). The subjunctive catches a lot of English speakers off guard, because English uses it in odd ways that don’t map well onto other languages.
• Verb types: transitive vs. intransitive, auxiliary and modal verbs, reflexive verbs (“I wash myself”).
• Non-finite forms: infinitive, participle (present/past), gerund.
• Clauses: main vs. subordinate clauses, and relative clauses (“the book that I read”).

It’s the most boring step, but it’s also one of the highest-ROI ones, so I don’t overcomplicate it. I’d paste this list into an AI chat and ask for a short explanation of each topic, with a couple of example sentences for each.

Quick tips

• “We” is 1st person plural. This one surprises people.
• “Y’all” is the closest English match for a 2nd person plural. English has no dedicated one, so if your language has one, use “y’all” when you’re running a phrase through Google Translate.

The alphabet

My method involves a lot of reading, so the first real study session goes to memorizing the sounds of the alphabet. The details vary by language, but I look for a video that goes through each letter one at a time and then shows plenty of example words. This one is a great example of the format.

Why I don’t learn from sound tables

What I avoid is learning from a table like this:

The “approximate sounds” are exactly that: approximations. Some sounds don’t exist in English at all, and the table gives it away when the explanation gets complicated:

What I do for sounds English doesn’t have

1. Look up the letter on Wikipedia (for example, ы) and find its symbol in the IPA, the International Phonetic Alphabet. The IPA has one symbol for every sound in human speech. For ы, that’s ɨ.
2. Play the audio clip on the Wikipedia page for that IPA symbol.
3. If I still can’t get it, I watch the University of Glasgow’s Seeing Speech MRI videos, which show exactly where the tongue and mouth go for each sound.

I wouldn’t skip this step and just let LingQ’s text-to-speech read every word to me. As a beginner, it’s hard to tell which sounds belong to which letters, which is why I give this a dedicated session or two.

Skimming the grammar

How I handle this step can make the difference between sticking with a language and quitting. I don’t study grammar intensely until I’ve had a lot of exposure to the language. Without a baseline, grammar rules have nothing to attach to, and trying to apply them anyway just leads to frustration. This is where high school and college courses lose a lot of people. This video looks at whether college language learning is actually backed by science.

Instead, I skim the beginner (A1) grammar guides on elon.io, and I mean skim. If something doesn’t click after one or two reads, I move on to the next section. The goal isn’t to learn the rules. It’s to train myself on what to notice: which parts of a sentence should stand out when I run into them later in LingQ. Steve Kaufmann, LingQ’s co-founder, calls this the ability to notice, and he’s the one who popularized the term in the language learning community. Two examples of what I take away:

Russian adjective agreement:

In the nominative, an adjective takes one of four ending-sets depending on the noun’s gender (in the singular) or simply on whether the noun is plural:

Agrees with	Ending	Examples
Masculine sg.	-ый / -ий / -ой	но́вый, ма́ленький, большо́й
Feminine sg.	-ая / -яя	но́вая, после́дняя
Neuter sg.	-ое / -ее	но́вое, после́днее
Plural (all genders)	-ые / -ие	но́вые, после́дние

(See how the grammar jargon shows up right away?) My takeaway is only the first sentence: adjectives change shape. Right now I only care that they change, not what they change into. The goal is to plant a seed of “I think I read about this once” for when I finally see it in action.

German adjectives:

An adjective in German does one of two jobs.

It can stand after a linking verb — sein (to be), werden (to become), bleiben (to remain) — and describe the subject from a distance. This is the predicate position. Here the adjective is uninflected: it takes no ending whatsoever, no matter the gender or number of the noun it describes.

Or it can stand before a noun and modify it directly inside the noun phrase. This is the attributive position. Here the adjective must take an ending.

I don’t remember the tiniest bit of German from high school, but my takeaway is that German adjectives sometimes take an ending. When and why can wait.

All of these questions will come up again. The difference is that next time I’ll have a real sentence to connect them to, and that’s the essence of grammar study: it has to be tied to what I’m actually reading.

I don’t spend more than a day on this. I’m not going to catch everything, and sometimes I’ll read an entire article and catch nothing, which is fine. I skim every A1 article and take whatever sticks.

Grammar usually comes back during my LingQ reading. When I notice something I’m curious about, I jot down a quick note, then ask AI about it while Aminte is importing that lesson’s cards.

<- Part 1: Before starting · Part 3: Reading and Anki ->