Thread: Do you agree on the following analogy?

Learning linguistics and syntax when it comes to learning languages, is as useless as learning physics in order to learn how to ride a bike.

Edit: Point being that grammar and pronunciation comes naturally regardless of learning linguistics and syntax first.

I think it is useless when learning your first language but in learning second languages it is extremely helpful to have learned proper syntax of your mother tongue. I don't need to know what a noun or a verb is or what it means to conjugate a verb in English. I don't need to know about sentence structure either. But because I know the underlying patterns of my own language I can fine the underlying patters of other languages. Like, it didn't take me but about 5 minutes to realize that in Spanish the adjective comes after the noun it describes whereas the adjective comes before the noun it describes in English. This was a pattern variation between the two languages that I picked up immediately. In English the subject tends to come before the predicate and prepositional phrases tend to follow the verb in a predicate. In Urdu the prepositional phrase usually comes at the beginning of the sentence and the subject with its predicate comes at the end. Remembering parts of speech and recognizing the variances in patterns from one language to the next helps in knowing how to structure a sentence when all you have is vocabulary.

I am a bit suspicious of all analogies.