[MmeBergerac]

Originally Posted by Quickquill

We didn't parse sentences in school, but I had a private tutor who believed in it. Personally, I hated it, and couldn't see the point, since I already knew how to construct a sentence in English.

I didn't like it very much at school either, but I found it really useful when I had to study other languages (specially Latin). Later I have been a tutor in English and I've found it very hard to teach the structure of a foreign language to people who didn't know the structure of their own. Specially because you English speakers have quite a definite structure (your adjectives always go before the noun and so) while we Spanish are quite free about where to place our words.

Posted by canismajoris
Now that's not what I was doing, as I'm only a mere beginner where syntax is concerned, but I feel linguistics deserves much more respect as a scientific discipline than being compared to rote memorization of grammatical terms.

Indeed.