When learning a new language, some people can end up impatient. I’ve known more than a couple of people who tried skipping lessons, jumping immediately to more advanced stuff. Needless to say, they failed miserably, actually taking them longer to learn than their peers who followed the course religiously.
Fixed Sentences
One of the lessons I’ve seen a lot of beginning students try to steamroll through are memorizing fixed sentences. When you’re starting out in a new language, it’s common to integrate it into your patterns by memorizing sentences, such as how to say things like “Good evening” and “Thank you for help.”
Almost every language training software I’ve seen required students to memorize a lot of these types of common phrases. Many students find the process inane, thinking it’s much better to teach them to formulate sentences than to memorize pre-made ones.
Actual Learning
While it is, indeed, better to learn to string your own statements than spout them off memory, language learning just doesn’t work like that. The reality is that memorized phrases, for the most part, are all that anyone who’s new to a language can handle. Vocabulary is best assimilated through this process, as well as certain amounts of grammar.
Instead of shocking you with grammar constructs you don’t have a clue of, language courses are designed to build off from these memorized phrases to teach you actual sentence construction. Without them at the foundation, you’ll have little to refer to, making the process of learning all that much more difficult.
Put simply, never underestimate the value of memorized phrases in language learning. It can help you in more ways than you probably expect.