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Comment by jobigoud | Hacker News Reader

> If you need help with English grammar while working through this textbook, we recommend, for example, English Grammar for Students of German

I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish?

I'm a French native speaker trying to improve my Spanish at the moment. Should I brush up on French shenanigans (yes even native speakers make mistakes and need reference material) from a Romance language point of view?

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Ha, native German speaker here. In our native language things like word order in sentences (e.g. subject-object-verb), gender* (is a lake female or male?), conjugating, tenses and Kasus (grammatical cases) come more or less natural to us.

Personally I think it helps if you understand your own Grammar in order to learn a different language. So it definitely can help if a text book points out how your _own_ languages Grammar works and how it differs from the language you are trying to learn.

Learning latin in school helped me a great deal understanding etymology of words in English, Roman languages and Grammar in general. When I took Linguistics in university it opened my eyes about the quirkiness of German (and English) grammar. We always used English for examples, as German has more exceptions.

> I find this surprisingly specific. A help book on the source language specific to the target language... What part of English grammar is only important to students of German but not students of Dutch or Polish?

Quite a lot, since even though English is a very strange Germanic language it is at its core in many ways still Germanic, so it has a large overlap with German that it does not at all share with Slavic languages like Polish. It also shares a lot with Danish (which I find to often sit somewhere in the middle between English and German) and I presume Dutch as well. So yes, that book might very well be helpful in learning Dutch too, it is just a way smaller niche.

Source: I could be considered a native speaker of both German and Polish.

There's a companion volume for Spanish learners, i.e. The publisher likely just tweaks a chapter or two for each specific target language, i.e. English Grammar for Students of $X.

The 'surprising specific' bit is in how concepts in German/Spanish map to their English equivalents. e.g. the German edition might try and show how English emulates declensions with prepositions, while the Spanish might explain how the auxilary verb 'have' has multiple uses covered by tener/haber.

I'm not a native Romance speaker but yes, knowing 'French shenanigans' would perhaps help understand the other - when I learned Catalan on duolingo (from Spanish), I made more blunders in my rusty Spanish than in mistakes in the Catalan I was trying to learn!

> how concepts in German/Spanish map to their English equivalents.

Yeah, if it has comparative grammar it's not that much surprising.

From the context of the paragraph I was assuming this would be a volume purely about English grammar. Since it's aimed at native speakers that already know the grammar of their own language, this would be an advanced text, for students looking to improve their knowledge of English architecture itself. And somehow improve this advanced knowledge in ways that are not generic, but specific to the fact that they are simultaneously learning X or Y language...

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