Grammar and learning grammar

What is grammar?

This a great question to ask ourselves. The term grammar has always been mystified to the point that we think is an ability that only some people born with, but the true is that grammar is something more close to our lives; it is the way in which we order our thoughts, ideas and actions. A more formal definition of grammar is the following one:

“Set of rules that allow us to combine words into larger units” (Greenbaum and Nelson 1).

In this sense we can think of grammar as a puzzle or as a Lego set, we have different pieces and we assemble them in a specific way to create meaning, for example given the following words:

cat, the, sat, mat, on, the

           We can rearrange them forming the next sentence:

The cat sat on the mat.

The words alone are not enough to communicate more elaborate thoughts. The value of the words arises when we are able to use them in meaningful constructions. Grammar is interested in the way in which we organize such constructions.  

Why I should learn grammar?

There is a variety of reasons to learn grammar, in my particular case I am trying to learn more about grammar, because an internal curiosity arose in me, and as an English teacher I feel a greater duty in learning about it, but there are other practical reasons to study grammar: it helps you to organize your thoughts, the formal knowledge of the grammar of our native language provides us with a working framework to learn other languages, thus we can distinguish between structures that belongs to our native language and those of the foreign language we are learning, it also help us to understand and interpret a wide variety of texts.