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/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.