How To Remember New Grammar Patterns

3 simple steps and one schedule to make them stick for a long time

Photo by Mike Enerio on Unsplash

Whether you like studying grammar or not, you’re going to have to master many patterns if you want to learn a new language. There are many different schools of learning methods, some of which tackle this through pure ingestion of context so we naturally learn them, just as we learned our mother tongue as children.

While this method obviously works, it has an important flaw at its core: it ignores the advantages you have as an adult with knowledge and skills already.

Children come to this world malleable and with a clean slate in their brains. Yes, that makes them prone to learning quickly by experience, but it also works because it’s the only option they have after all. And it takes a whole lot of time. Years.

As adults, we don’t have the same patience — nor should we for this matter — so we want to learn to be able to use new grammar patterns more quickly.

Luckily, we already know our own language’s grammar so we are aware of types of patterns we could encounter and can directly look for them.

For instance, when I start a new language, one of the first things I study is how to say “to want to do something”. This is important for me to be able to express wishes and, as such, I focus quickly on this pattern.

Through years of practice and experimentation, I have come to find a simple way to retain new patterns. It might seem rather stoic but I can attest it works really well.

A) Read an explanation

Well, I know, this seems obvious but to really become able to retain a new pattern, you need to understand it. Encountering it many times has the same effect except that it takes a whole lot more for the brain to make the right connections.

So look for patterns you want to know and read one, two, three or even more explanations along with examples.

The examples will allow you to make sense of the explanations you encounter and the higher level you get, the more crucial they become.

Let’s say you want to learn the difference between “due to” and “thanks to” in English (obviously for a non-English native!), they have the same meaning overall, but “thanks to” cannot be used in negative settings. This can be easily understood but the higher the level you reach, the more precise nuances become.

B) Make your own examples

After you’ve understood how it works, and seen it in use, you should create your own sentences. This is important to change passive knowledge into active knowledge. After all, you don’t just plan on knowing what it means and never be able to use it, right?

However, you cannot expect all your examples sentences to be correct. You just learned it so mistakes are bound to happen. It’s a good thing as we learn better from mistakes too.

To learn from those, you will need to get feedback on your creations. If you have a language partner, ask him or her. If you don’t, use a platform like HiNative or a language-learning platform specific to the language you learn (there are some for pretty much any language on earth if you search well-enough).

Try to get as much corrective information in the feedback you receive. Not just a correction on what it should have been, but why it was wrong. You will progress faster this way. Of course, if you can only get outcome feedback, it’s better than nothing!

C) Dive in Google

After you’ve had some practice, it’s time to dive into deep water. Through reading explanations, creating sentences and analyzing the feedback you got, you should have gained a rather good understanding of the pattern. You will also have noticed interrogations emerge.

• “How would it work in this context?”
• “Would it stay in the same form in a different place in the sentence?”
• “Can I couple this with that other pattern I learned?”

To find true understanding, you need to look for the pattern in random internet pages made by and for natives of the language.

For instance, when I learned how to say “to want to” in Burmese (ချင်), I just typed it into google and when straight to page 4 or 5 to be sure I was “in-deep”. I then opened a bunched of random webpages and looked for this ချင် in the page with CTRL+F. From there, I tried to understand the sentence I saw.

Again, the higher the level you have, the more context you will need and the more long articles on random webpages will be useful.

A Schedule to rule it all

Now, if you were to do all the above in one sitting and call it a day, never to work on it again, then you would certainly end up forgetting it all soon enough. To retain this knowledge, you need to come back to it regularly. At least until it is set in your long-term memory.

You can, of course, extend the length of time per step in the below schedule, but this has always felt like a strict minimum to follow:

1. Do steps A and B on the same day — take as long as you need
2. The very next day, do step C only — minimum of 10 minutes
3. Repeat steps B and C every single day for the next 2 weeks — minimum of 10 minutes per day, better to do 10 per step though
4. If during this period, you start forgetting nuances, devote one of those days to doing step A once more
5. Repeat steps B and C twice a week for another 2 weeks — Length of time similar to 3.
6. Repeat steps B and C once every two weeks for the next 2–3 months

After this, the new grammar pattern should be stuck in your brain for quite some time. Of course, having a quick reminder every few months would be even better.

Now, you might say it’s impossible to keep up as you learn a language from scratch because there are just too many patterns to learn and this takes time.

Of course, this method isn’t to use for every single pattern. When I learn to say “to want to” in Burmese, I did each once and moved on, knowing the pattern would reappear quite often due to its commonness.

You hold the key to how you want to approach your study and it’s important to keep it fun! If the above seems like a pain, just do it for patterns you keep on forgetting.

And now I can ask you for your wish, what do you want to do?

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Mathias Barra is a French polyglot living in Japan and who has learned 6 languages and dabbled in numerous others. Being a curious child full of wonders is how he keeps on learning and can’t stop sharing about every tiny idea, even non-language-related.