My teachers, either in high school or in university, always emphasize the importance of grammar. I still analyze the article sentence by sentence even after I have graduated for more than 8 years. I am clear about the sentence structure, but I can make little progress. Would you show me the right way please?
不论我的中学老师,还是我的大学老师,都经常强调语法的重要性。毕业八年多了,我仍然是逐句分析文章。我其实对句子结构很清楚,但我却进步很小。您能给我讲授正确的方法吗?
It’s totally pointless learning grammar for its own sake. Grammar is indispensable as a support system to communication because most of the questions we have about a foreign language have grammatical answers. For example when to use some or any, when to use a/an or the, and so on. If by ‘analyze the article sentence by sentence’ you mean ‘read word by word’, you are going about reading in the wrong way. In order to understand difficult English, we have to grasp the syntax of each sentence: that is, the way each sentence is put together. Here, for example, is a difficult sentence from an article on George Soros, which appeared recently in the Financial Times:
Even before arriving in England at the age of 17 to study under him at the London School of Economics, Soros had felt the influence of Sir Karl Popper, the Viennese philosopher of science whose Open Society and its Enemies denounced Plato, Hegel, Marx and all historical determinism.
To understand this sentence (apart from the difficult references), you have to observe that him refers to Karl Popper and not to Soros. You have to break the sentence down in your head into the following sequence of ideas:
—Soros went to England to study at the London School of Economics under Sir Karl Popper.
—Before that, Soros had been influenced by Karl Popper’s ideas.
—Karl Popper taught at the London School of Economics but originally came from Vienna.
—Popper was a philosopher of science who wrote a book called the Open Society and its Enemies.