Purpose of "Notes on grammar"?You are now at the point of embarking on an adventure: Learning a language that in many ways is remarkably different from probably any language you may have learnt so far. The differences you will notice as you proceed are not limited to the sounds and to the words and their combinations that serve to express concepts and to describe situations. Many times the concepts themselves seem to reflect a different and perhaps - to the beginner - a puzzling way of viewing man and his natural and social environment. Important differences are also found in the way ideas are connected to form discourses, and in the rules which govern dialog sequences even in ordinary everyday interaction. Learning Akan is a bit like "reinventing the world". Akan grammar - in the widest possible sense of this term - is the key to this experience. This part of the course is designed to help you "cross the line" and become a competent hearer and speaker of Akan. (Notice that in Akan, the one who masters a language is the one who 'hears' it!). The aim is to hear and speak Akan as the Akan themselves hear and speak it, rather than to continue to depend on the native speaker's willingness to adapt to the foreigner's lack of adaptation to the Akan way of constructing lexical and social meaning. How to reach this goal? Some methods focus on learning a language simply by using it. With this method, so it is said, you do not have to worry about grammatical explanations and rules. The Akan course follows this line to some extent: natural dialog and exercises are the preferred means of introducing new material. Yet experience shows that nobody can hope to gain expertise in a language whose structure is so different from the more familiar structures of European languages unless he or she acquires some degree of explicit understanding of how its grammar functions. This course therefore is based on the double principle of learning by doing and at the same time of understanding what one does when one learns. Notes on grammar have to do with the second point of the principle. They draw your attention to differences and thus alert you to areas of difficulty; give you glimpses of the regularity behind apparent peculiarities, and of the economy behind the diversity; show you exactly what it is that is to be learnt (or 'unlearnt'!) and thus enable you to monitor the language learning process yourself; provide you with useful methodological hints and shortcuts in areas of potential difficulty, e.g. by pointing out regularities. In order to discuss matters relating to grammar in a meaningful way, a number of grammatical terms will be introduced. Becoming familiar with these terms will help you to think of the key elements of the grammatical structure of the Akan language in a meaningful way. Some of these key elements will be presented now and illustrated from Unit 1. |