Give grammar another chance I consider that you'd better give grammar another chance.(and I'm straight in saying my opinion.) As far as I know, it's exactly an analytical mind that make adults distinct from children ( and this actually give extra strength for an adult to learn a foreign language. Otherwise it would take them far more times of effort and repetence to achieve fluency, and that would somehow exhaust them ). There are crucial differences between a baby and an adult learner, though there are also critical identities. The idea of lexical chunks is valid, and we should pay full attention to it. Your method of 'chunking ' is amazing. What I argue is that language is just a code system that is made up by a mass amount of separate 'patterns'--these refers parallely to grammar, vocabulary, collates, and lexis. Language is just a system to 'transform' inner logic of the common human mind to the outer 'parameters'. And absolute fluency is based on every parameters being set up correctly. You will be floppy and disjunctive if any of these 'transformations' failed to be established clearly. I think the failure of conventional teaching is mostly due to the method of teaching patterns, e.g, grammar, vocabulary, idoms, phrases, etc. If you initially or proactively recognize a pattern in a context, and immediately give a lot of sentences or examples in the same way these patterns fall in, you will figure out the whole sense of them easily, even without knowing the names of the rules or definition of the words. The latter ones are actually not valid in setting up transformations--thus can be bypassed, but taking a sound grasp of a specific pattern cognitively is important. We can achieve this by intuition, but nevertheless you still need to work on it.