Imagine you are starting to learn a new language and a fairy grants you one wish to achieve your goal much quicker.

She'd let you choose between two options:

1) To know all the vocabulary of that language at once.
2) To know and be able to use all the grammar at once.

Discuss!

Interesting question. My answer would definetly depend on the language:

Take German for instance. Here I would go for the second option.

Take Chinese........ I take the first option given the fact that fairy throws in throws in how to write the characters.

Given that I'm far from knowing all the vocabulary even of my native language, knowing all of it in a different one would be awesome. But knowing all the grammar is probably more useful.

I'd take vocab. You can usually get your point across with the correct vocab and bad grammar. Vice versa, not so much.

I'll take 50% of each. :-)

For me, grammar is harder than vocabulary, so I would opt for grammar--it is the framework to hang vocabulary on. "Bread me want" is understandable, but what about "course events human the in when"? :)

Vocabulary

Vocab, with grammar you would have no vocab to use :P

In Japanese, I'd definitely pick knowing all the grammar. There are lots of cases where if you don't know the grammar in Japanese, you may believe a sentence or paragraph to have a meaning opposite to what it is really saying.

There are also cases where the grammar implies certain words that aren't in the sentence, so even if you knew the words, you would not know the meaning.

The best might be to have the fairy grant a wish for both Japanese and Chinese, in which case I'd take the Chinese vocabulary and the Japanese grammar. That way I'd still be able to read a good portion of Japanese without having studied words, and I'd understand a lot of classical Chinese, since modern Japanese seems closer to classical Chinese grammatically than modern Chinese is.

Chinese vocab. No question.

Chinese grammar isn't all that complicated. On the other hand, I know over 5000 Chinese words and there's still *tons* of words I encounter on a daily basis that I don't know. Imagine you only knew 5000 English words. Check out a frequency distribution for English and you'll be pretty shocked to see all of the common words that appear after the 5000 mark. If I had spent all of this Skritter time working on grammar, I think I could handle the vast majority of grammar that I'd encounter.

[Afterthought: I'm not sure where idiomatic fixed expressions fit into this dichotomy.]

greenteapanda, I didn't know Japanese grammar was so complicated. That said, how long would it take you to learn it all? Would it really take longer than learning all of the vocabulary of the average educated native speaker?

I agree with you, DependableSkeleton, that the time you have to spend studying grammar by the book might be shorter than learning a decent vocabulary, but I think that actualling getting the 'feel' for *all* nuances of *all* grammatic rules is something you can only learn through an immense amount of practice, whereas learning the vocabulary is something that comes rather naturally to us. So I've come to the conclusion that I'd pick the grammar.

Vocabulary is the obvious answer. The reason you cannot understand a foreign language is because you don't know the words, not because you don't know what the dative case is. Compare the thickness of a grammar book with a dictionary if this is still not clear.

Vocabulary applies to both input and output. Grammar usually applies only to output.

I'd take vocabulary. In many situations you would understand something without knowing the grammar, and often you could express yourself with your vocabulary even without the grammar.

Yeah, I guess it depends on your goal. Do you want to be able to communicate decently as soon as possible? Vocabulary! Wanna be mistaken for a native speaker one day in the future? Grammar!

I'd take grammar because chinese grammar is very different from western language and harder to use spontaneously.
Words are easy to remember and learn without the fairy's help.

I'd go with grammar. The reason being I like learning the vocab and the writing. It's easy to do especially with skritter and memrise. It's also easy to track. That may just be exposing my laziness though as I know I should focus more on my grammar which is lagging my vocab right now.

Easy, vocab. Vocab is infinite, grammar is finite. Although I'm probably biased because of being fluent in French, German, and Spanish. Il fallait qu'elles fussent confrontées à l'irréductible complexité de la langue chinoise, anyone?

I guess I'd say grammar, as that's usually what ties me up when I'm trying to generate long, complex sentences.

Evan, now that you mention it: Vocab is usually what ties me up when I'm trying to practice my grammar. :)

@DependableSkeleton

I am hardly fluent in Japanese, so I don't know how long it will be before I learn all the grammar.

While others may want to know all the vocabulary first, there are many instances where words sound the same or are written the same but have very different meanings. In Japanese, if you saw/heard "ならない" at the end of the sentence, it could be the negative conjugation of the verb なる, or it could mean "must not", "cannot help", or "must" depending on what came before it in the sentence.

It is also not necessarily true that you'd have to learn less if you were instantly gifted with all the vocabulary in a language rather than all the grammar. Knowing grammar increases efficiency. Even at a basic level, knowing how to change a verb to a noun, adverb, or adjective (or vice versa) means you only have to learn one item instead of four (or more) that you'd learn separately if you didn't know any grammar. The reverse, knowing lots of vocabulary, would not likely help learning grammar without lots of reading and practice.

While one can start with just vocabulary in a language, the amount of useful communication is quite limited, often to what could have been communicated without knowing any of the language at all (by using gestures, etc).