Ask a Turkish student what they find hard about English and most will say grammar. Tenses, conditionals, the endless prepositions.
Watch the same student try to describe their weekend and grammar is rarely what stops them. They stop because they do not have the word for the thing they want to say.
What each one buys you
A student with vocabulary and no grammar can be understood. Yesterday I go cinema with friend is wrong in three ways and perfectly clear.
A student with grammar and no vocabulary is stuck. Perfect tense control and no noun to put in it produces a beautifully formed sentence about nothing.
This is not an argument against grammar. It is an argument about order and proportion, and about which one is quietly neglected because it is harder to schedule.
Why grammar dominates lessons anyway
Grammar is teachable in a way vocabulary is not.
A tense is a rule, explained in twenty minutes, practised with an exercise, marked objectively. It fits a lesson, a worksheet and a mark scheme. It feels like teaching.
Vocabulary has no equivalent. There is no rule to explain, just hundreds of individual items each needing several encounters spread over weeks. It does not fit neatly into a Tuesday, so it becomes "learn these for Friday", which is not teaching at all, just delegation.
The result is that the harder half gets less attention precisely because it is harder to organise.
The exam argument
Before a test, students revise grammar. It feels productive: rules are finite, and you can tell when you have "done" the present perfect.
But look at where marks are actually lost. Reading questions fail because of an unknown word in the passage, not an unfamiliar tense. Writing loses marks for repetition and vagueness, which is a vocabulary shortage. Listening collapses when three unknown words arrive in a row.
An hour on vocabulary in the week before an exam usually returns more than an hour on rules, because the rules are mostly recognisable already and the missing words are not.
Where the balance sits
Roughly: vocabulary early, grammar increasingly later.
A younger student needs things to talk about far more than they need the machinery to arrange them precisely. Vocabulary gives them something to say; grammar makes it accurate later, once there is something to be accurate about.
By the exam years the two need to be closer to equal, but vocabulary rarely gets there on its own, because grammar has homework structure and vocabulary does not.
What this changes in practice
If a student has one spare hour a week, spend most of it on words rather than rules.
If they are stuck mid-sentence, notice which thing failed. Nine times out of ten it is a missing word, not a missing tense.
And do not treat vocabulary as the thing you do when there is time left over after the grammar. That is how it becomes the neglected half, and it is the half that decides whether a child can actually say what they mean.
Related: vocabulary memorisation techniques
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