How to learn grammar?

tl;dr learn grammar to do well in exams, impress with your knowledge, or because you like it. It's perfectly possible to learn a language well without consciously studying grammar, so don't feel bad if you decide to skip it.

Let's get to the most important thing right off the bat! Do not spend time with grammar at the very beginning. Let's examine what erroneous arguments people make in favour of the early study of grammar:

☝"Unless you know grammar you don't know what you are doing." One of the most pernicious effects of school education is to inculcate this belief deep inside people's minds. Conscious knowledge doesn't equate good language usage . Some of the greatest writers didn't have a formal education almost at all. Mark Twain left school after the fifth grade. The Russian novelist Maxim Gorky (nominated five times for the Nobel Prize) became an orphan at 11 y.o. and started to work shortly afterwards. Now, if memorizing grammar rules is a necessary condition to speak a language well, how exactly did these people write so well?

In reality, grammar books are a recent invention. The first English grammar was written in 1586, while other languages didn't have one until the 19th-20th century. It's only reasonable to assume people who lived before this date knew how to speak and write regardless (a certain William Shakespear finished school before any English grammar book was written).

✌"It's part of the A1 curriculum." Yes, but this is a curriculum designed for exams not for learning. Here's what is part of the curriculum for A1 in English (based on this source): present simple, present continuous, past simple, future, -ing and the infinitive, possessive 's, at, in and on for space and time, word order and much more.  Considering that tuition for A1 is supposed to be between 80 and 100 hours, my question is: even if these 100 hours are spent exclusively on grammar, will it be enough?

But the most important part is this: you can't even use all this grammar well as a beginner. Grammar rules are about form, but forms are empty when you lack vocabulary. You are supposed to learn how to speak correctly at a stage when you can't speak at all. Consider this, when finishing A1 you will know 700-1000 words (a native speaker knows between 15 and 20.000). But if you follow the above list you will know half of the grammar tenses. Why should your grammatical knowledge be so far ahead of your vocabulary?

What is then the purpose of studying grammar? I don't want to suggest that grammar is useless, there certainly is a place and time for it.

👍Quite obviously, you'll need grammar to do well in exams. Simple as that, you won't pass language exams without a good knowledge of grammar.

👊It's also handy to make a good impression in job interviews. Good grammar is associated by people with a good education and will make you sound smart.

💥It's imprescindible for some jobs: obviously to be a teacher but also for secretaries, translators and other people who work with language.

So, how to learn grammar?

💣Realize that you learn grammar anyway, whether you like it or not. When you watch a movie or read a text in your target language you are also absorbing grammar unconsciously. This explains why people who were not formally taught grammar can still use the language correctly; especially if they spent lots of time reading. This is exactly what people like Gorky and Twain did: they learned grammar not through deliberate effort, but rather through exposure to the language (warning: this takes a lot of exposure).

🙀 Turn to a grammar book only after you've had enough exposure to a phenomenon. Don't study grammar to memorize rules but to understand better something you already have a grasp of. This is a great way to speed up your learning, but remember that the gains might only be short term.

😏When you solve exercises check your answers immediately afterwards. If you wait a few days you will forget what you were thinking when you made a mistake.

💭Go for quantity not quality: easy exercises you don't have to think much about combined with a bit of theory. The American publisher Schaum is great in providing books that follow this model.

👽Don't try too hard to understand and don't ask why. There is nothing "deep" to understand here. As long as you can do it correctly, you know all there is to understand.

😎Study the structure of your target language with genuine curiosity and from a bird's eye view. Wikipedia articles and langfocus videos are great for this: does your target language have genders? How many tenses does it have? How does it compare to other languages? This will help you understand particular rules better by placing them in a wider framework. And (if you are the kind of person who enjoys grammar, a big if indeed) it's also lots of fun!