Hey mr sir I was wondering if you had any idea how to understand syntax. I am in a class and I am SUFFERING and the only resources I was given was the teachers notes. And they don't make sense. I am so close to failing and no one knows what the hell they're doing (not even the instructor)
Syntax is analysis. Always remember that. It is, at best, tangentially related to language. It is a representation of a theory (and there are multiple such theories) about why the words in a language are arranged in the order they are in order to produce a meaning. It is an attempt. It's not necessarily true. It is not a representation of something real. It is a representation of something that IF it were real, wouldn't that be cool? It doesn't actually say anything about language.
The important thing to remember about studying syntax at the university level is that you are not studying syntax: You are studying a specific theory of syntax. Your job is to learn that theory and how it works. You are NOT learning how a language works: You're learning how that theory works. It doesn't matter if anything you're doing makes linguistic sense: It matters if it makes sense within the context of the theory. That's it.
I say this because based on the way you've worded your question, it's pretty clear that this is a point you've missed. If you hadn't, you wouldn't be saying "I was wondering if you had any idea how to understand syntax", you'd be saying "I was wondering if you had any idea how to understand XXX theory of syntax". Because that is what you are doing.
If you are studying an older X-bar theory of syntax (for example, Principles and Parameters, or Government and Binding), I can help you with that. If you're studying a modern generative theory like the Minimalist Program, I can't help you with that, as I never learned it. I also can't really help with Head Phrase Structure Grammar or Construction Grammar, because I never studied it; I just have some exposure to it. I do understand Relational Grammar, because I had to learn it to go through some older Austronesian papers, but I find it unlikely that you'd be learning RG, as it's been mostly abandoned.
If it helps you, though, everything you're learning is, to put this in the most controversial way possible, the equivalent of learning astrological star charts. It's like, you tell your friend, "Dude, I went to work today, and my coworker was sick, so I had to cover her bathroom shift, but as a thank you my boss said I could have Friday off!" and your friend is like, "And that makes total sense, because Virgo is in ascension, and the moon is in its third phase, with Libra in retrograde!" and you're like, "Uhhhh..." *headpat* In linguistics, that's, "Wow, in Finnish most indefinite objects take the partitive, but you can also have a partitive subject with a paucal reading!", and then, "That's probably because of object to subject raising required in order to check features generated in D-structure when…" etc. Thus, if you think of it like some sort of game, it might help to put it in its proper context.
If you do have some transformational grammar questions, though, I'm happy to try to help explain.
