Understanding of your native language
In terms of grammar and correct language structure, how well do you feel you actually know your own language?
I ask this because since I've started to learn Spanish I've realised just how poor my English really is. I hope I've not confused any Spanish speaking people trying to learn English if they've read any of my posts!
In fact, I didnt fully understand what a verb, noun, pronoun, object etc was until I started studying Spanish - emabarrassing I know! I can understand all these perfectly well now, so as a by-product of learning Spanish I'm learning better English lol. I cant remember ever being taught much grammar at all at school. Yes, we touched on it, but either I wasnt listening, or we actually did very little - possibly the former 
One of my motivations for learning Spanish is because you hear foreigners speaking English all the time and I feel a little ignorant that, as a nation, we seem to put very little emphasis on teaching our kids\adults other languages. Now I also realise that, actually, we put little emphasis on teaching our own language properly lol.
9 Answers
I think I have a reasonable grasp of how my language works, but I still have a lot to learn. Ironically, it takes longer to understand how a language works that to learn how to speak it correctly, and since most people in this planet can speak their own language without any grammatical knowledge, learning about this fascinating topic is definitely not essential.
My high school english teacher was so sexy I could not concentrate on my studies. I think she passed me anyway because I was such an admirer , and learned absolutely nothing Nada! So here we are, late in life learning grammar structure Ufff! better late than never!
I once heard a comedian say " I went to Mexico on vacation, and those Mexicans are pretty smart. Even the little kids can speak Spanish". A person can speak a language very well, and have no idea what a verb or a noun is.
I know very little about the technical aspects of my language, and have learned more here in a month than I have in sixty years. Sometimes I post things on here and am corrected with language that I do not understand. When someone says I must use the subjunctive instead of the participle, it is as if they had written the correction in Chinese.
I will keep reading, and maybe one day it will make sense to me. I often edit my posts, as told, but have no idea why it is wrong. At first I found it very frustrating, then I remembered the words of Ten Bears from Dances With Wolves when he said "There is nothing better than a warm fire". I will still try to learn all I can, but my priorities have changed.
Learning how to teach English has made me 100 times better at learning languages than I was before.
The more you learn the less you take things for granted. For example you don't try to translate phrasal verbs, you don't assume you can form a conditional by translating word for word from English, you don't assume that words like "time" and "occasion" will be the same as each other. You don't try to use a noun where you need a verb. You can learn a grammar rule extremely quickly (though remembering to use it when you speak and write isn't always so automatic!) You try to find out how a word is used when you look it up instead of just assuming it's the same as its English counterpart. I could go on and on.
Of course you can learn to do all of this without learning about the grammar of your own language 
But I think it's faster and easier to learn it about your own language, because you always have countless examples to draw on. And it's easiest to learn the grammar of your own language by teaching, because students will ask questions about things you'd never even considered.
Oh dear, not knowing nouns and verbs does really sound embarrassing 
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Even in my own language I am not that good at naming the grammatical position of every word in a sentence, but I have always been good at grammar and languages at school. I am one of those people that need an example and if that is given, I "get" what is asked / explained.
I guess I'm more of an intuitive learner than anything else and have always learned quickly by watching, listening, copying, repeating and practising rather than reading explanation. It's just something that works for me.
I didn't have any English grammar in school after the 6th grade. We diagrammed sentences in the 5th grade, but I thought it was pretty useless and don't remember how to do it.
I had a similar experience, learning Spanish in 7th grade taught me English grammar. We happened to study how to diagram sentences in English, and that was the point where I got the clearest understanding.
We never diagrammed sentences in Spanish, by the way. Spanish sentence structure was always kept too simple to bother trying to dissect it. Or maybe English relies excessively on prepositions, phrasal verbs, word order, etc., that diagramming helps understanding.
I think that I understand my native English better than many other people do, probably because my mother taught me to read at an early age. Also I'm homeschooled, and the curriculum we take is very strong on English grammar. I found, when I started studying Spanish a year ago, that it is vastly helpful to have a good understanding of your native language before trying to learn a new one - it helps you to note similarities and differences in grammar and makes rules a lot easier to remember. I'm very grateful that Mum was such a great teacher!
I am in total agreement Billygoat my English lessons at school comprised of comprehension(read the story,answer the questions below)I have posted on here before and been told "please use proper grammar and punctuation on this site"I have re-read what i have written and can see nothing wrong(now that my man is sad)
