I just read a 2006 entry into my class log about a third year student who remarked to me that he had picked up a first year book and looked at the grammar. He found it quite simple and straight-forward. Yet we had studied no grammar. It was testimony to the way grammar is acquired as we use the language.
If grammar is studied before the learner is using the language, it makes no sense. Yet the grammar folks insist that to use the language, you have to learn the grammar first. They just don’t get it. No meaning, no acquisition