Many students have a thirst for learning Chinese grammar. They often grab a grammar book, which normally contains dozens of grammatical points, and, starting with the first point, they work their way through the entire book. 

They read the explanation of one grammar point. After understanding it and also the sample sentences, they start doing the exercises, all written exercises, in which this particular grammar point is used repeatedly. The answer sheets are normally at the end of the book. Some students will check the answer sheets, while some don’t. Occasionally they would make some mistakes, but most of the time, they can get everything right. 

However, some time later, when they are participating in a conversation in Chinese, or writing an essay in Chinese, it seems that they always forget to use some advanced grammar points which they have studied. Many students feel that they have forgot everything already.

It’s not students’ fault. 

Although all the grammar books and the exercises seem very useful at the time when students are working on them, these books seem to have an inherent quality of amnesia. 

If it happens to you, don’t blame yourself for being forgetful.

While there is nothing wrong to explain the grammars as clearly as possible, the weakness is in the exercises. They are not effective. 

Exercises are really important for moving knowledge from a simple “understanding” to “remember” them (Read more here: Use Chinese Learning Pyramid to make learning more effective). However, exercises provided in the grammar books fail to do that.

I have summarised the following problems:

The first one is that, when working on all the exercises, students already know which particular grammatical point they are going to use. It’s like that the author of the book is giving them a big hint.

The second one is that all the exercises are formulated and tailored to fit in the framework of all the sample sentences. When students are doing these exercises, they already have some ideas of what correct answers look like. Another big hint from the author.

The third one is that only written exercises are provided. Other body parts, such as the ears or the mouth, do not get any stimulation. 

The fourth one is that the format of exercises are all very simple and repetitive. Your mind turns itself off quickly. 

Therefore, working on these grammar books is to do repetitive exercises in a single form, which does not stimulate the brain very much. No wonder students forget them. 

Having pointed out their problems, we should also talk about their usefulness.

Having a very good grammar book as a reference book is a very good idea. All teachers and learners of Chinese should have at least one book, and flip through it from time to time. If that is done, people would know that 了 (le) does not indicate past tense in Chinese in Chinese, and 的 (de) - a structural particle in Chinese, is not possessive.

The next best use for Chinese grammar books is for test preparation. In a written test, the multiple choice questions and fill in the blank questions are basically testing two things, vocabulary and grammar. This is where vocabulary books and grammar books work the best. Students get a crash course, memorising pages and pages of new words and grammars while doing many mock tests, and they can improve their test score quite a bit, provided that we all know deep down in our heart that students are going to forget everything quickly after the test is over. 

My opinion is to take tests, but not study for them, and definitely not the end goal of learning. 

The reason that students want to study grammar books is that they want to speak good Chinese or write Chinese well. They want to have their Chinese language error free, and have their language well structured. 

Unfortunately, grammar books, as analysed above, do not speed things up in these aspect, neither do they guarantee students that they won’t make mistakes any more.

To learn grammar well is actually the other way around, a result of speaking more and writing more. These exercises are complicated process which brings out amazing brain activities and are the only way for students to improve their Chinese proficiency, grammar included. 

When you are speaking or writing something, mistakes will happen. Our concerns is how to deal with them when they occur, because that’s the golden opportunity to learn grammar. (Read more here: Learning Chinese is also to learn how to deal with mistakes)

Reading more is also an excellent way to learn grammar. Re-read stories, essays or articles that you like and study their sentence structures and the way they arrange their words. Try if you can emulate these writings in someway. 

You’ll learn a lot!