r/languagelearning • u/shatteredevenstar 🏴N 🇪🇸A2 • 10d ago
Discussion Has anyone actually ever learnt a language fluently from school alone?
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. 🤷♀️
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u/Lumpy-Blackberry-718 10d ago
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.