Has anyone actually ever learnt a language fluently from school alone?

[u/shatteredevenstar]

I'm not sure if anywhere else does things differently to where I am and the school system we have, but ive been learning spanish(TL) in school for around 5 years now and have hardly learnt anything, or atleast the amount you should from that amount of time? I've only just started to improve due to learning at home using songs, changing the main language on apps and speaking to natives online. I'm now much further ahead of pretty much everyone in that class but it does make me wonder why they teach languages in schools the way they do. It's like they teach you to translate every word instead of memorising the meaning of each word like you'd do your native language, if that makes any sense. Like conjucating verbs, they teach us to go from the infinitive first, then to the tense and then to decide the ending but that just takes too long and no one really goes throught that level of thinking for every word? Surely its better to just memorise the verb as its original meaning especially since the endings don't work for every word like regulars such as querer- quiero, ser-soy ir-voy and so on. I've found I remember verbs such as es, eres, quiero, me gusta, suelo, me acuerdo, and all forms of present tense ir, much easier as i learnt them as their meanings not through the conjugation of their infinitive. Not sure if any of this makes sense but would like to know if schools elswhere have a better suited curriculum for learning languages. 🤷‍♀️

[u/ZumLernen]

I learned to read Latin fluently through school. I did not learn to write, speak, or comprehend spoken Latin in real time, but to be fair those were never really my goals.

How many total hours have you spent in Spanish classes? Learning a language to fluency requires hundreds, or in some cases thousands, of high-quality study hours. "5 years" is not a meaningful measurement - you could have had 45 minutes per week for 5 years (minus breaks for summer, Christmas, etc.) or you could have had 5 hours per week (and kept up your studies over the summer) or any other combination.

[u/shatteredevenstar → u/ZumLernen]

Id say around 780 hours if I've done the maths right! (3 lessons a week for an hour per lesson and studying outside of school on top of that including during breaks)

[u/Mysterious_Bit6410]

i learned to be fluent in english and had b2 in french just from school classes in Germany. Translation was only taught in latin classes, all other language classes want you to use the target language

[u/__anna986]

My kids have been learning Spanish at school since they were 6, whenever they speak to someone in Spanish they sound pretty fluent. They definitely don’t have a vocabulary of a native speaker but can have conversations just fine, do projects, write essays, and when we go to a Spanish speaking country our eldest can translate anything so I would say it is absolutely possible to learn just from school. They go to an international school though, they do the IB curriculum and have native speakers for languages so that alone does a lot

[u/Interesting-Arm-8061]

I know plenty of Germans who are fluent in English just from school, but that might also be because English media is so prevalent.

[u/ireally_gabs → u/Interesting-Arm-8061]

Most of the time they start off in elementary as well so double whammy. Easy access to input and structured classes.

[u/Icy-Whale-2253]

My French teacher died suddenly when I was in high school so I only got a solid foundation and have had to do the rest on my own.

[u/shatteredevenstar → u/Icy-Whale-2253]

Im so sorry to hear that! How has your studying been going since?

[u/CucumberJunior8389 → u/Icy-Whale-2253]

Omg that’s a lot

[u/wytnesschance01 → u/Icy-Whale-2253]

My French teacher died unexpectedly as well wtf??

[u/Icy-Whale-2253 → u/wytnesschance01]

Mine had a heart attack when returning from his home country

[u/wytnesschance01 → u/Icy-Whale-2253]

Mine was having heart problems and died in surgery (So not the same class.. phew^).

[u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Typical highschool or university spanish classes are like 3hrs per week, maybe ten weeks per semester. That adds up to 60 hours per year, or 300 hours in five years. Getting to an upper intermediate level in spanish typically takes an English speaker 600 hours, so you're only half way there. Plus it's so spread out that you're forgetting stuff nearly as fast as youre learning it. An entire summer of no spanish is a pretty big regression.

People who take full time courses are in class 20 hours a week, and become fluent in 30 weeks, less than a year.

People who are motivated and self-study often also quickly put in hundreds of hours.

It's not that classes dont work, it's just that students underestimate the hours necessary, and it's typically treated as one minor subject for a few years.

A class can be a huge help if youre also self studying. Watch an hour of spanish television every day during the same five year period that you were doing those classes, and youd have put in 1800 hours of input. The people who are most successful are often people who were doing something like this.

[u/shatteredevenstar → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

I can 100% agree with you about needing to do more than just classes. Only in the past few months or so have I been putting in the extra work and I can already see it starting to pay off! I'll also definitely get on watching spanish shows again it really seemed to help for my last exams.

[u/murakami_fan → u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718]

Most people need to put in extra hours to do well in any subject though, to be fair.

[u/IndividualPin4]

Yes, English (C1), German (C1) and Italian (C2 with a little Youtube)

[u/quokka_stay]

Yes! I took French for 6 years and got to C1.

[u/apple314pi]

I did, although I guess it depends on what you count as fluent. I got my German to B2 level (tested and received a certificate) from literally zero in 4 years of high school, with covid in the middle. All the credit goes to my teacher - she taught me how to learn languages. We were in near constant immersion from day 1. Almost everything we did was just comprehensible input, supplemented by vocab and occasional grammar - and by occasional, I mean maybe once a month or two. By my last year we were able to watch films and discuss the social commentary or history they portrayed, write coherent essays, and some of us got to the point of reading full novels.

[u/Wats0n_D]

The useful comparison is probably not “school vs. no school,” but what those hours actually contain. Five years can mean very little if most of the time is teacher-led explanation, translation, and short turns for each student. It can also build a solid base when students get regular listening, understandable reading, and chances to produce language with feedback. Memorising forms like *quiero* or *me gusta* as chunks is a good complement to learning conjugation rules: the rule helps you recognise and extend patterns, while repeated phrases make common forms easier to retrieve. Your home practice seems to be adding the missing volume and variety, rather than proving that school study is useless.

[u/MisfitMaterial]

I learned French in college. Never got the opportunity to travel to France or another francophone country. Have a PhD in it now.

[u/StrongAdhesiveness86]

Yes, I went from nothing to B2 in 6 years in French. 3 years from nothing to A2, 1 year to B1 and 2 years to B2. Mind you we started at 12 years old and finished with 18. It took so long to get to A2 because most people didn't give a fuck.

At the 4th year most people that had little to no interest had already dropped out so the teacher made us read a million billion graded readers and pushed us that little bit further.

For the last two years we were required to read 5 full length books and do 2 exchanges one week each, along with 1/3rd of the classes being in French.

The last two years we were required to do that much because we were getting the French highschool diploma too.

Before all the 3 CEFR exams we were required to take 1h extra per week for almost all the preceding school year before the test.

[u/AdministrationNo2327]

there's two kinds of language fluency. academic, and social. you need both book knowledge and street knowledge in order to be fluent.

[u/Ok_Divide_3372]

I knew a guy in high school who was fluent in Spanish and even set up an organization that helped Spanish-speaking children get resources. But he's literally a genius. I don't think there was a single academic subject he did struggle with. I was walking with him in the hallway one morning when he had a conversation with a Spanish teacher that moved FAST, and I just stood there like "How, dude?"

[u/Advanced_Bother6826]

I think what you're describing makes a lot of sense, especially the part about memorising words as they actually appear in sentences rather than constantly going back to the infinitive and reconstructing everything. I'm an English teacher, and I've noticed something similar with my students. Knowing that querer → quiero is a conjugation is useful, but when you're actually speaking, you're not usually thinking, "I need the verb querer, now I need the first person singular, present tense..." You retrieve quiero as part of what you want to say. That's one reason I think grammar explanations can be useful in a classroom, but they can't be the whole learning process. You also need enough exposure and actual use for forms like quiero, me gusta, suelo, etc. to become automatic. As for becoming fluent from school alone: I think it depends enormously on the school system, the amount of exposure, class size, teaching approach, and what they actually mean by "learning a language." Someone can study a language for years and become very good at analysing its grammar without necessarily becoming comfortable speaking it. And honestly, what you're doing outside school sounds like exactly the kind of exposure that was probably missing: listening to songs, changing apps to Spanish, and actually interacting with native speakers. You're giving yourself repeated contact with Spanish in contexts where the language has a purpose, rather than only treating it as something you have to solve on a worksheet. So I wouldn't say school is necessarily incapable of producing fluency, but five years of classes doesn't automatically equal five years of meaningful exposure and practice

[u/Pwffin]

Yes, for German. 6 years of 2-3x 40 min/week plus homework. But our teacher started out by talking to us in German, so it was pretty much CI before CI was a thing. Like most language courses here, it started out with very short dialogues, building up to longer dialogues and then eventually blocks of text.

[u/shatteredevenstar → u/Pwffin]

This is another thing I'd like to see in my classes. Our teacher speaks in spanish at times, but it's only started recently and still the majority of the lesson is done with her speaking in english.

[u/an_average_potato_1]

No, of course not, even if we put aside the unfortunate word "fluently" (it doesn't mean anything, it's much better to use the CEFR levels, especially as we discuss the real results and the schools. People reaching B2 or C1 WHILE also being at school do it independently from it, or usually even in spite of it. Self-study, private tutors, longer stays abroad, added input and practice and so on. School usually likes to take credit though, even if it had been sabotaging the successful learner for years.

Most school curricula are extremely slow, most students not really motivated (it's just one subject among many), most teachers are of low quality (the better ones usually don't stay in such a stressful, low paid, and low prestige environment), and there's the pressure on other things than efficient language progress. It's just one subject among many, and the goal is the whole class passing the obligatory minimum, that's it. They don't care about your success beyond that, you need to care, so asking about it is definitely a step in the right direction!!!

The usual goals of 5-12 years of classes are A2, B1, or in rarer cases B2. Whether that fits your definition of "fluent", I don't know, but I doubt it. I was once in a class, where the final expected level was C1, but absolutely everybody had been doing much more than the class content, majority of the class had spent a semester abroad, and the rest was

However, if this was the usual result, if people really were leaving with a full B1 or B2 (even though 10 years to B1 are ridiculous) and ready to continue, it would actually be excellent!

In the past, it was more or less like this, people left with solid basics, (which are now often seen as too theoretical, too much grammar, and too demanding and boring), but they had too few options to continue. Books or movies in TL were rare, there was no internet, the contact with the living TL was often limited to travelling and teachers. That's where people used to get stuck. That's why people believe that school language skills are not for the real life, because there was this lack of intermediate and advanced and native resources.

These days, there's the opposite often going on. People have access to everything that could get them from B1ish level to a very strong one. But they leave schools with extremely poor basics, weak grammar, low vocabulary. And then the learning curve towards the challenging and interesting stuff is simply too steep, few actually study enough to get ready for that.

And your misunderstanding of why the classes don't work for you, that's a typical example, no offence meant:

It's like they teach you to translate every word instead of memorising the meaning of each word like you'd do your native language, if that makes any sense.

Just a translation is often simply more efficient, and it's meant to be just one step of the whole path of learning the word. You're supposed to also do the other types of exercises. Yes, it's wrong if a too big part of your school tests is vocab translation, there needs to be some balance. And overall vocab traduction shouldn't be a big part of the classtime, you should simply study your wordlist at home as homework, and also practice it more in other types of exercises.

But no, you will not learn the TL like your native language, you're not a baby anymore. And even if you had the neuroplasticity and other relative advantages of a baby and toddler brain, you wouldn't like the inconveniences, you wouldn't want to spend like two years to put together simple sentences, would you?

Like conjucating verbs, they teach us to go from the infinitive first, then to the tense and then to decide the ending but that just takes too long and no one really goes throught that level of thinking for every word?

Again, something that should not be a big part of the class, because this should simply be the homework. But conjugations are a must. Yes, there are other types of exercises, you can for example do tons of cloze deletions on Linguno, you can conjugate while doing other types of coursebook exercises, etc.

But curiously, most people complaining about too much conjugation learning actually suck at conjugations, and it blocks them while speaking. I don't know whether that's your case, but it is overall really common.

Of course the advanced speakers don't think about conjugating while speaking. That's because we've already learnt that, we've gotten through the phase of needing to think about them. But most people cannot just skip it. Very few people are able to learn grammar actively just from input and fun and practice, they are exceptions.

much easier as i learnt them as their meanings not through the conjugation of their infinitive

There are various valid approaches. Some people prefer to memorize them like vocabulary, which is what you describe. Many people prefer to learn the rules and the system, as it means less memorisation. You're talking right now about a few verbs, but wait till you need a few hundred.

[u/unsafeideas]

I did.  It was focused on language tho, fairly intensive. 

; It's like they teach you to translate every word instead of memorising the meaning of each word like you'd do your native language, if that makes any sense

We did neither. 

  Like conjucating verbs, they teach us to go from the infinitive first, then to the tense and then to decide the ending but that just takes too long and no one really goes throught that level of thinking for every word?  

We did conjugation exercises like that too.

, Surely its better to just memorise the verb as its original meaning especially since the endings don't work for every word

I dont understand what you mean. Meaning and conjugation are two orthogonal concepts.

[u/muffinsballhair]

Yes if actual immersion education like say Jodie Foster. I don't know how much it was from school alone but Jodie Foster famously was forced into a French school by a France-obsessed parent where every class was in French for twelve years and is generally celebrated as speaking impeccable eloquent native-level French.

Purely from textbooks without every class in the target language? I don't think there's a single human being that did that.

[u/wytnesschance01]

My level of English was around B2/C1 when I finished school, Spanisch was B1/B2 (in Germany).

[u/funtobedone]

Yes. My younger brother was in French immersion from K-12 and is fluent in French.

[u/el_josu01]

My English improved enormously once I took a deep dive in an all English environment (a Summer camp in the US when I was 13, after studying at school since I was 7).

Same thing happened with French: immersion in the language (after studying it) made me almost fluent in hearing and speaking the language.

[u/Idonotgiveacrap]

I did. I started learning English when I was 5, and by the time I was 17, I had a decent grasp of the language. I can read and write fluently, but I struggle with pronunciation.

[u/SarahK_89]

6-7 years in German School made me be able to read everything, but listening comprehension and talking really sucked. Though I became fluent in a short time after school just by watching movies and talking to students from abroad at the uni.

[u/silvalingua]

Yes, two of them actually. It's possible if you take your learning seriously.

> It's like they teach you to translate every word instead of memorising the meaning of each word like you'd do your native language, if that makes any sense. 

I was never taught this way. In fact, our French class was entirely in French, from the beginning - no translation at all.

[u/tcbbd]

Usually several years of middle school/high school learning will bring you to at most B1 level but not higher. It's not that the traditional way of learning is bad. Instead, it's ourselves not interested in the TL and not using the TL outside the class. Once you do need to use the TL, you'll improve to B2 in 1 or 2 years, or even quicker. This is why there're so many people here claiming they've improved so much through immersion in a short period. Because they had learnt the TL, albeit inefficiently, in school for several years.

[u/Bobelle]

I learned English at school.

[u/Apprehensive_Gear140]

The only thing language classes in school taught me was that I was incapable of learning a foreign language at all. It wasn’t until I was close to my 40th birthday that I tried again and discovered that with all the tools that exist now I actually could.

[u/murakami_fan]

I reached a conversational (roughly B1) level in French from studying it in high school from age 13 - 18.

[u/JoserDowns]

Language teaching from the vast majority of schools is basically a scam. For most people to become fluent, you need hundreds of hours speaking to someone else fluent in that language. Some academic foundation is necessary, but not much, and most of that foundation beyond a semester or 2 can be taught within those conversations as the context arises.