One of the things I noticed when I started learning French is that there is a huge wall of linguistic jargon I had to get through that I had never really been introduced to before. When learning English as a child you learn the basic grammatical terms. Nouns, Verbs, Adjectives, Adverbs and the rest. As you advance in school you start talking about past and future tense, but you never really get beyond that in terms of learning the names of things in English grammar. What are conjugations? What is the Genitive case? The Nominative? What is Lenition? What is Eclipsis? What do we have and not have in English and how do we learn these things even if we don't know what they are called?
The fact is that in America we are only taught the very basics of English grammar. We use many more aspects of English Grammar than we know the names of. The best example of this, or maybe the most extreme case of this is in a tweet I saw a few years ago.
This is an actual grammar rule that is part of English but we never actually learn it. It just sounds right to say the great green dragon and not the green great dragon or the french large cafe. Then there are things we learn the basics of but not the full rules. How many verb tenses are there in English? Before I learned a second language I would have said 3; Past, present, and future. Now, before the actual linguists start writing angry emails to me let me say that this is kind of a tricky thing because there are different ways to classify them. The most common answer is that there are Twelve verb tenses in English.
Past simple Present simple Future simple
Past continuous Present continuous Future continuous
Past perfect Present perfect Future perfect
Past perfect continuous Present perfect continuous Future perfect continuous
Surprised? I was too. When we learn English at home and in school, these generally get boiled down to the three basic tenses. I don't remember learning a specific tense for the sentence "I will have been running..." but that is Future perfect continuous.
We don't learn about conjugating English verbs either, not with that word "Conjugate" anyway. When I started learning French I had to look up what the word Conjugate means. We learn about conjugating verbs in English like this "When you talk about something you did yesterday you have to change the verb into the past tense." Conjugate = Change in elementary school. So when we move on to learn another language we have this big scary word shoved in our faces
"You must Conjugate your verbs!" I remember high school peers agonizing over conjugating verbs, when really we have all been conjugating verbs left and right since we started talking! English even has a super irrational system of conjugating verbs because there are so many exceptions. Latin based languages have pattern and ending that apply to most all verbs with a handful of exceptions. Because of this I never stress about verb tenses. I don't break my head trying to learn every tense and form. Instead, I learn the patterns and let the rest sink in through usage. In most languages you can bet the most commonly used verbs will be irregular, but 90% of the others will follow the patterns. So don't stress! Own your mistakes and learn from them.
But back to weird linguistic jargon. My main learning language right now is Irish (Gaeilge). One term I have come across that I had no idea about is the genitive case. This is a case dealing with nouns that exist in English, but unlike English we have to conjugate (Change) the noun.
So The Genitive case is defined as:
"(in certain inflected languages) noting a case of nouns, pronouns, or adjectives, used primarily to express possession, measure, or origin: as John's hat, week's vacation, duty's call."
https://www.dictionary.com/browse/genitive
As you can probably see, we learn this case in English as the Possessive case. However what it really does is establish a relationship between two nouns. "Week's vacation does not mean the vacation belongs to the week, rather that the vacation last one week. It establishes the measure of the vacation. All these genitive phrases in English with 's in it can be re-written in a way that sounds strange to English ears, but in both French and Irish possessive sentences work more like "the hat of John", "the mother of Suzie", or "the call of duty" In Irish the genitive case is indicated with Lenition, which is a topic for another time. However you can see that knowing exactly what the genitive case is makes it much less scary.
This is just one of the Linguistic/grammatical terms I have had to deal with in my language learning that has thrown me off. I will go over more of them as time goes on. The problem as I see it is that there seems to be an assumption that you do or should know what these terms mean, and maybe you do and I am just weird because I never really took formal language classes, but I doubt I am the only one who would really like this jargon defined before it gets thrown around. In the worlds of health care and Psychology we are taught how important it is to ensure that jargon is defined before it is used casually; I wish the same were true of languages.