QUOTE (Cosmin Lupu @ Jan 16 2012, 08:31 AM)
I agree with Ben and I must add that theory is actually the grammar of music
if you don't know grammar you can't use a language properly, am I right?
nope!
I dont know anything at all about english grammar but I KNOW if something is correct or not WITHOUT having
to think about it! grammar would really slow me down to the point of nonfluency.
the correctness is determined entirely by whether it sounds right, NOT by applying any rules at all, no rules whatsoever.
I instantly know if something is wrong, far faster than trying to apply some lousy grammatical rules.
the modern approach to language learning is in fact to de-emphasise grammar because for example the
best learning of language is by children who have no idea at all about grammar!
also for energetic communication of english you need to push the grammatical rules a little bit
beyond the breaking point,
basically if you follow english grammar too carefully the language loses its power of expression,
english is only powerful if you know when and where to break the rules
this is why slang develops eg "it sucks bigtime", because the grammar book just cannot
express such intense meaning.
you have to basically surf the grammar, and you can only do that if you learn from usage
and throw away your grammar book!
the BEST courses on learning languages are the "Teach yourself" series by Hodder and Staughton,
each lesson begins with a dialogue, you hit the road running,
and its totally contextual. They cover all aspects of a language including nonstandard scripts,
and they de-emphasise grammar.
A good example of what goes wrong if you use grammar, is that english uses a different tense (I ate) from german
(I have eaten). Because of this, people from the one language always get the tense wrong for the other language.
I only learnt this when I spent a lot of time in Germany, and started to learn when I had used the language incorrectly
from peoples reactions.
where the english person says "I ate some bread today" the german says "I have eaten some bread today"
(heute hab ich etwas brot gegessen)
in english you would only say that under special circumstances, eg if I asked:
have you eaten a lot of bread today?
you could reply:
no I have only eaten some bread today
but if I asked:
what did you do today?
you would reply:
I ate some bread
you would NOT say: I have eaten some bread,
this kind of subtlety can only be learnt from listening to usage, not from a grammar book.
basically grammar is a theoretical artefact and is NOT real, furthermore linguists have found that
grammar basically changes gradually with time, people start preferring a different tense to express the
same meaning. most languages start to move towards using participles (eating) in preference to declension (eats),
eg english prefers a participle for the present tense "I am eating" where german prefers
a participle for the past tense: "I have eaten" (ich hab gegessen), also german tends to
use passive tense where english uses active:
in english you would say: the medicine cured my illness
but germans NEVER say that, because technically the medicine's action is passive,
although technically incorrect the english usage is far more powerful,
which is exactly the point that you have to break the rules to get the power!
eg you could say: this music is melting my brain,
which flouts many rules of german, english is a very direct language,
some languages in fact only have 1 form of the past tense,
also languages like russian and latin dont use articles, they use relative pronouns instead of
the definite article which is more efficient.
where english uses: "I saw a cat, the cat was in the garden"
russian will use: "I saw cat, it was in garden"
latin will use: "I cat saw, it in garden was"
(something like that!)
english uses a participle for the present tense: I am going
german uses a declension: I go
english has many forms of the past tense:
I ate, I was eating, I have eaten, I have been eating,
you cannot tell from the grammar which is correct, because different languages use different forms
for the same usage,
you can only learn correct usage of english from hearing and reading the language being correctly used.
One further point: usage is far more sophisticated than grammar,
EVERY example usage involves MANY rules of grammar.
eg:
"I went to school yesterday"
that involves many rules of grammar:
word order: subject verb object adverb
verb declension: I went
personal pronoun: I
tense: past tense
case: I is nominative, school is probably dative
adverb: yesterday is an adverb of time (I think!)
you would spend an hour trying to say that from a grammar book!
eg the adverb "yesterday" is at quite a distance from the verb it qualifies "went",
I dont even know how you would explain that grammatically, dont know, dont care!
but I know which places you can use the adverb, simply because correct usages sound right,
incorrect usages sound wrong, thats all there is to it. actually the secret to correct english is
that it sounds right, if incorrect usage sounds better than correct usage you should use
the incorrect usage! It also depends on the accent, something which sounds good with one
accent sounds bad with another accent, which is why british english is different from american
english. its very important when learning any language to learn the accent well, because
once you have the accent correct a lot of stuff is determined just from the accent.
By the way all this grammatical terminology is from learning german, we were never taught english grammar.
anyway, the person who learns via REAL examples experiences far more grammar than the
person who tries to learn grammar
one other thing, if you visit Germany one of the most useful expressions is:
ich moechte
which is the polite way to ask for something in a shop, but grammatically that is quite complex
because it means "I would like", if you said "I want" that is regarded as rude,
its some form of conditional future tense, "would" is the past tense of the future verb "will"
which is very complicated grammar,
but you need to learn a lot of grammar before you learn "I would like",
the person who disregards grammar would learn this right at the start and not think about
the grammar,
some people say "ich haette gern" instead of "ich moechte" but that is also
equally complex,
How does this relate to music?
well, all that matters with music is that it sounds good!
the reason why a lot of the best pop music has been made by amateurs is because
they arent sidetracked by theory and focus just on whether it sounds good!
eg I found when practising the boxes of A minor pentatonic that sometimes I
would accidentally fret a note outside the box and sometimes this would
sound REALLY interesting, like something from some all time classic track.
it pays to think outside the box!
You are at GuitarMasterClass.net
Don't miss today's
free lick. Plus all our lessons are packed with
free content!
This post has been edited by richardb: Jan 17 2012, 04:36 AM
richardb Can Chords Be Replaced By Single Notes? Jan 13 2012, 01:58 AM
