Briefly, what are the fundamentals that make up any given language?
Our brain is automatically programmed to take words and put them together. It differs from language to language, but not as much as you’d think. Every language is cut to so close a pattern, that some linguists regard them basically as dialects of one language. So, in other words, you already have in your brain a machine that is ready and waiting for language. What do you have to do? You have to learn the sound system of the language, which may different from yours. Then, you have to learn the words. And when you’ve done that, you have to learn what the particular properties of the words are, because the properties will tell you how to put them together in a sentence. You do this by hearing them used correctly in sentences, preferably, by a native speaker of that language. That’s all you need to know. You don’t have to be given a lot of elaborate grammatical rules, because your brain’s already equipped to figure them out for you.
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