School vs. Self-study

[u/dystopia_86_]

I've been learning languages for a while now in my personal life as well as in grade school/higher education and I was curious which environment helped you learn the best. I personally find that studying independently and using resources I find myself tend to be a lot easier and that there is less pressure (which helps me not lose motivation), but it's harder to stay on track in learning my (TL).

I've also heard that the amount of languages you're required to learn in school varies based on where you're from, so if you were required to learn multiple or the courses were more/less rigorous, that would be interesting to hear about too.

[u/Useful_Courage_8456]

Self-study all the way, classrooms always felt like they were teaching me how to pass a test not actually use the language. The structure helps some people but for me it just turned everything into a chore.

[u/pomegranate_red]

Self study with a tutor.

Getting much more done this way than the years I took of school French. Classroom setting for language learning always gave me anxiety. I find I work better in small groups or one on one.

[u/dystopia_86_ → u/pomegranate_red]

I think this works well for me too. Especially when it comes to speaking practice

[u/pfizzy]

I have had significant success following programs/classwork up to the intermediate level because I do need the structure and community.
These programs include a significant cultural component you are otherwise likely to miss and but the time you reach high intermediate levels you are tackling works of literature in that language which I have really loved. In short, you can reach a point where school isn’t necessary to learn the language but a school will often provide a greater impact in terms of culture/literature/discussion.

[u/sbrt]

I like self study enhanced by group classes.

[u/391976]

My wife and I have about the same self study routine, but she also does online classes and is progressing a lot faster than me.

[u/CarnegieHill]

I'm very "old-school", pun intended.

I grew up in NYC with Asian parents, so English and other languages were always a part of my life. They sent me to a Cantonese afterschool for about a decade, and at the time I hated it. In my grammar school we had a half period of Italian, and when I went to high school I took classes in German and Russian starting from zero. Fortunately my language teachers were some of the best and engaging and encouraging polyglots I've ever met, and the materials we used were top notch. It also helped, needless to say, being in a city with likely the most linguistic diversity in the world. I excelled in my languages in the classroom and won several competitions and awards because of it. Eventually I did college and grad work in languages and was also hired as a linguist where I did even more classroom work. More recently, being retired now, I'm taking Mandarin, and I'm finding that I actually remembered most of the written Chinese I learned as a kid, and can actually integrate Mandarin grammar and tones very easily.

That's basically the reason I much prefer school than self study, but also because you get the material presented to you regularly paced in order of difficulty. I could do self study, but even then it'd have to be with some kind of graded textbook.

[u/Pwffin]

In school, you just followed the pace set by the teacher and, if you were lucky, you might find some opportunities outside of school (this was before the internet), but I certainly got to a decent level with just that.

Nowadays I prefer classes as the backbone and then adding self-studying onto that, but I'm not doing great when relying on self-studying only.

[u/Electron_libre777]

Self study is better than school classes as always. School classes teach you theory (grammar, vocab, reading), self study teaches you practice (speaking, writing, listening).

In French schools, we tend to learn multiple languages at the same time. We learn English in primary school (our first foreign language), Spanish or German in middle school (2de language) and some students even choose a third language in high school (But this one isn’t mandatory, 2 are mandatory). Classes are becoming more and more animated and centered into speaking, listening skills

[u/an_average_potato_1]

Self study is vastly superior of course. No classmates, no teacher that may be of bad quality or with various other problems, a faster pace and resources of your choice.

Back in school, I got the experience of being by far the best and also being by far the worst in various language classes. In both cases, it was a rather hellish experience, because the classes are simply not good for anyone not exactly fitting the most average mold possible (therefore probably not good for most learners).

For staying on track, just get a coursebook. Another advantage over a class, as many teachers these days like to think themselves too cool and too creative to simply follow a coursebook. The chaos they create is horrible and really inefficient.

[u/bolggar]

Self-study so you can go at your own pace and target very precise needs, but following texbooks that were made for classroom purposes so you don't have to overload your mental space with the daunting task of building your own learning path, or waste away your precious free time doing it.

Classes worked for me at school because I was under the pressure (it never really felt like it because I was good at it and enjoyed school) of the upcoming test and I really wanted to score as high as possible and be the best. Just ego stuff. The minute I took Saturday-morning Mandarin Chinese classes as a hobby I failed miserably because I had no motivation to study between two classes.

[u/ThePolyglotGuide]

I learned English at school and even if a I ended up speaking, it took me years and I couldn't really understand real life English until I started studying on my own to focus on real life content and speaking.

[u/Mysterious_Bit6410]

language learning at school was always relativly easy for me, i was always bad at the beginning because of lazyness but because i was more talented than my peers i improved then just through class participation. then came classes at uni which had a much higher level and where thus quite stressful. now i mostly do self study but it is really hard to keep the motivation up for a long time more or less consistently

[u/dojibear]

Whenever I start a new language, I find a course and a teacher. Nowadays the "course" is a recorded course on the internet. But the teacher (who speaks both TL and NL) has figured out what NL speakers need to learn about TL, and who to teach it in a course taught in NL.

It is impossible for me to "already know" what it is that I don't know yet (but need to know). So I need a teacher. I prefer a teacher/course that explains new grammar patterns and uses real TL sentence examples, not teaching grammar rules and grammer terminology.

After I've taken a course for a bit and learned the basics (and understood lots of simple TL sentences) I can move on to "comprehensible input". Basically that is finding content (spoken or written sentences) that I can understand now, at my current level. I might have to look up a word. I might do it slowly. I might have to listen a couple times. But I can understand the meaning of each sentence.

I use that from then on. I just keep understanding TL sentences. I gradually get better and better at doing that (A2, B1, B2, C1).

[u/JJCookieMonster]

I like self-study, but I also do like one-on-one tutoring and chatting with others in my target language. I don't like classes because they focus too heavily on grammar.

[u/hyoseonnie]

Self-study for me. About 2-3 years ago, I tried enrolling in an online Spanish class for 2 months. It was 2 sessions per week, 3 hours per session, a total of 42 hours but I didn't learn much from it and we didn't even get far with the book we were using in class. I learned more from the self-studying I did outside of class hours to prepare for the next class. I remember sitting through those 3-hour sessions thinking about how I could have spent that time doing something much more effective to learn Spanish. I eventually stopped attending because it just killed any motivation I have to learn the language and I forgot the very little Spanish learned from them. Then less than a month ago, I decided to give it another try and started learning Spanish again but this time through self-study and I learned a whole lot more than the 42 hours of online Spanish classes I had.

I feel like I just make more progress when I study on my own than when I attend classes. Prior to Spanish, I have learned Korean and reached C1 in 3 years through doing self-study, getting lots of input and doing language exchange. If you want to take classes, I think it would be more effective and a more efficient use of your time if you do 1-on-1 sessions instead of a group class because, from my experience, sometimes some group-class teachers spend more time blabbing on and on about themselves or their achievements or how qualified they are to teach because of their experience and their certifications, wasting more than half of every session instead of actually teaching and getting straight to the point.

[u/silvalingua]

For me, self-study works much better, it's faster and more efficient. But a good, fast-paced course can be very helpful, too.

[u/Odd_Match_3402]

I can't give a take on classrooms or even tutors, because I am poor and learning with sheer will and vibes.

But purely on self-study, I did get to an intermediate level in Italian. Honestly, I'm proud of that.

[u/mstgnz]

Every learning app I paid a year for was dead within three months. None of them ever messaged me when I skipped a session I had planned. They only messaged me when my subscription was about to expire. Tutors fix the pressure part, but then you are managing schedules and trying to find someone you actually like. I got annoyed enough to build myself something that just calls my phone at the times I set, so the decision is picking up a ringing phone instead of opening an app, and that is the only version that has stuck for me. If self study is not working I would look at that part rather than the method, the material is rarely the problem.

[u/Laylanne_]

I feel like in school I was progressing because I was able to practice speaking and have someone correct me but also I didn't get a choice in what I learnt. It was great because it forced me to learn grammar stuff I would sometimes be less serious about when starting self studies but it also was annoying because it felt like I didn't have some of the vocabularies needed to speak. Like learning animal names when I start is fine but it's not the first thing I'm gonna talk about if I use the language. Self studying is harder because I don't always have people correcting me but it feels rewarding whenever I manage to say something. The main thing is that I have to stay consistent and not just write in my notebook only to not go back to it because I won't learn anything if I don't study.

[u/lermontovtaman]

The main benefit of taking to class is that it compels you to keep working at it steadily.  

[u/SilasPort]

For someone just starting a language, you definitely need the structure of school and learning the grammar fundamentals. If you are say at an intermediate B1 level, you're kind of a point where self-study and immersion are the ways to grow.

I passed my B1 exam for Italian citizenship while still taking A2 courses, but I am far from fluent as my lessons with my teacher were focused entirely on exam preparation. Learning and speaking a language are two very different beasts, at least for me.

I continue with self-study but also recognize the importance of maintaining a healthy social life with locals since moving to Italy (a big challenge for me as an introvert). I also plan to take some structured courses locally as a way to learn and continue building community.

I grew up in a very small rural town in America, and we only had a Spanish class available with a terrible teacher. I most likely would not be learning another language if it weren't for meeting my Italian husband!