## Informal grammar over formal grammar
THis book aims to discuss grammar from a practical perspective rather than a formal perspective. From a formal perspective, a 'grammar' is a mathematical construct to define parts of speech rigorously by their syntactic function and devise a set of rules that determine how grammatically corect sentences can be constructed.

Formal grammars are important in their own right; when the parts of speech are populated by some lexicon (dictionary), formal grammars can be implemented in computers to calculate whether any sentence in a language is grammatically correct! Even so, formal grammars can verify grammatical correctness, but have no way of determining the semantic interpretation (the actual meaning) of a sentence.

Humans and native speakers of a language do not think in terms of formal grammars; they are pure-syntactic, mathematical construct used to discuss grammars in a theoretical, academic environment. They are useful structures for analysis by a computer, but are infeasible for understanding the language from an intuitive sense since people aren't consciously calculating with a \emph{grammar construct}, they are sequentially employing familiar \emph{grammar patterns} to discuss a certain flavour of 'idea' they want to convey.

We will instead discuss through the use of informal grammars; a higher level view where intuition and semantic interpretation is substituted for absolute syntactical formalism. Not only does this allow us to translate complicated formal structures into simpler yet intuitively similar ones, but also allows us to understand how different grammatical structures are used to convey different meanings, like how 'you are ready' has a different meaning to 'are you ready'.

By using informal grammars, we can consider usually less than 10 parts of speech, understand a language through less rules, understand how to apply certain grammatical constructs to communicate specific types of ideas and context, and learn how to actually use a language in practice, and it reflects the way in which native speakers actually think in their own language.


## Breakdown of this book

- Fundamentals
- Advanced
- Patterns

'Fundamentals' aims to discuss the parts of speech in the language along with the fundamental syntax and morphology associated with them that is required for an elementary understanding of the language.
'Advanced' extends upon the fundamentals, discussing more complex syntactic-morphological functions of parts of speech that build upon those learnt in 'Fundamentals'. By the end of this part, one has a basis of grammar from which they can develop an advanced understanding of the language.

'Fundamentals' and 'Advanced' follow a pathway through core grammatical concepts, however it does not offer the ability to discuss a wide range of concepts. A repository of grammatical words and grammatical phrases are necessary to, in conjunction with the main grammar constructs, represent more specific concepts that the standard morphology of the language doesn't cover. 'Patterns' lists a range of grammar patterns one can use and will encounter that can be used to master one's command of the language. Although they often require little explanation as they are either non-inflectional or are used in conjunction with main grammar points already explained in the previous 2 parts, they tend to be great in number.