That's one of the reasons I prefer to read about the grammars of languages on Wikipedia, Language Gulper, etc. and ask people for help on forums, etc. rather than doing courses/lessons. There probably are high-quality courses that give a dozen example sentences for every grammatical feature with glosses and a detailed breakdown of the ways it differs from other grammatical features, but they're likely not free and paying for something that you can't count on being helpful is kinda risky.
Probably a part of the problem is that no language's grammar is 100% neat and regular (maybe with the exception of some conlangs), so explaining only one grammatical feature is difficult if not impossible as there's bound to be at least a little bit of overlap with another, which means there are several ways to divide the grammar into lessons; purely functional, morphemic/orthographic, each abstract case individually, etc.
I really wish it was standard practice to include several example sentences with glosses and an explanation as to why you use X instead of Y in Z context, etc. If all lessons were like that, at least for me it'd be much easier to learn languages. But thankfully that's something a lot of the free online lessons for Japanese do, and also tend to be broken down into grammatical "functions" rather than going strictly case by case like most lessons on the grammars of Indo-European languages that I've come across, which is nice because Japanese is the language I'm most interested in learning.
vijayjohn wrote:I'm totally the kind of person who would walk 1000 km on foot just to avoid learning to drive a car.

Same. Considering how more people die in traffic accidents than pretty much any other activity, even those considered traditionally "dangerous", I wouldn't even try to get a driver's licence under any circumstances.

Since I never even learned to drive a bike and somehow managed to fall with training wheels when I was little, it's probably good for the safety of myself and others that I have no intention to ever get behind the wheel.

Linguaphile wrote:I've studied several languages for which there aren't native speakers or even non-native speakers or learners on this board.
This is like the main reason I've pretty much given up on Mongolian. It's still a language I wish I could learn, but I know that's never going to happen seeing as I still struggle with even the most basic things in Japanese, Turkish, Russian, etc. and have already forgotten half of everything I learned about Spanish and French, and literally most of Latin even though I was getting pretty good at it at one point.

Also, it seems a bit rude and selfish to always ask for help without ever helping others in return, but I have no idea why in some cases a certain illogical case is used instead of a logical one in Finnish, etc. so I generally can't help much when people have questions about Finnish grammar or something... and if I don't even learn the things others help me with, or forget them, it feels like intentionally wasting their time and I don't want to do that, but at the same time I do wish I could learn various languages...
Is it seen as rude here? Asking everyone, not just you.
linguoboy wrote:I was well into adulthood before I learned there was a rule on the alternation of the /ðiː/ and /ðə/ pronunciations of the.
I still don't know what the rule is, only that sometimes one sounds right and the other one sounds wrong... but I'm not a native speaker and I don't think I'd ever say it with a long [iː] but rather just short [i~ɪ], so...
voron wrote:Guess how much input a learner would require to internalize it
Hmm, I'm not sure if I'd internalised that. I think I had, but at the same time I think that's giving myself too much credit. Maybe I'd learned it subconsciously since I'm pretty sure I'd use the accusative in such contexts, but if I'd have had to say whether that's a thing or not, I almost certainly would've been like "wtf I have no idea".
voron wrote:Turkish has dozens of syntactical quirks like that.
Now I'm really interested. Is there any site that explains them, or if you could arse to post some?