askchapo

I also took several years of Spanish in school and have never had anything close to an understanding of Spanish. The thing is, if you're anything like me, you weren't trying to learn Spanish. You were trying to pass your tests, which means memorizing what you have to memorize and nothing more.

To learn a language, you have to seriously work for it. You need to be proactively seeking out conversations with native speakers, you need to be studying vocabulary, you need to be consuming media in that language, ideally you should be utterly immersed in it and interact with the world through your native language as little as possible. There is absolutely nothing a teacher can do to teach you Spanish in 45 minutes a day, before and after which you're immersed in an English-speaking environment. Simply isn't possible.

Teaching language in high school is stupid they should be teaching it as early as possible.

Language classes in most of the USA are based around memorization but more and more evidence is backing up the "language acquisition" model of language learning. Rote memorization is wholly insufficient and most of us learn language first and foremost by simply listening to "comprehensible input". By hearing this comprehensible input enough we sort of just absorb it naturally. Like we were built for it. Or more because we evolved exactly to be able to do this.

But how do you structure a class around that and test students for it when you need at least 3 months of basic comprehensible input for at least an hour or two a day (the more the better) like this to acquire enough language to start to grasp basic sentences and common words? When using this method you aren't expected or even encouraged to try and speak the language during those first few months. And for most kids who take this for one semester how can you show progress when you shouldn't expect even basic fluency until you are a year or two out using this method? Yet people who stick to this method do actually learn languages and really internalize this in about 3-5 years to full conversational fluency. We all learned at least one language language this way: our first one.

Our school system is simply not designed to handle learning that works this way. If you want to learn Spanish look into Language Acquisition Model stuff. Dreaming Spanish on YouTube has tons of beginner comprehensible input videos. Once you watch one, you'll understand exactly what it is trying to do and it becomes obvious why it would work. You aren't supposed to understand immediately. At first you kind of get the jist a little even though you only understand like 10% of the words. Then you start recognizing structure and more words and understand more. In a few months it starts coming along better. Then you take the next step and move onto videos that aren't designed for this method, just people speaking Spanish and it suddenly gets super hard. But if you stick with it, you can and will really learn any language this way.

EDIT: As an aside I'm forever mad that we have a true all-American language here in the USA and it's not taught to every child in school: American Sign Language. It's not just spoken words signed with your hands. It has its own grammar and rules and It provides accessibility to the deaf. It is useful even for those who can hear. If I ruled this shithole ASL would be a standard class from Elementary to High-school. In two generations everyone would know basic ASL.

I'm stupid and went with French in HS, then went to work in factories for a few years in northern Indiana that has a large Mexican population that works in factories. I don't remember any of the French I learned. Like at all. But I probably could have at least used broken Spanish to communicate better with my co-workers during that era of my life.

I hate my brother but one thing that impressed me about him is that not only did he take Spanish in HS, but he is actually fairly fluent in it now because he never left the factory life.

The point of language class in school is to assign grades, not to teach you. We know how humans acquire new languages: immersion. Listen to music in Spanish, watch Spanish shows, etc. but also need lots of practice actually communicating in Spanish with other Spanish speakers. It's really hard to do unless you up and move to a different country where they primarily speak Spanish.

The only way to learn a foreign language is through a lot practice and exposure. This is not something that language classes in school can provide unfortunately.

Try reading some children's books in Spanish and you'll learn more Spanish than you ever did in school.

Ok but can we talk about how US schools teach Spanish Spanish instead of Latin Spanish? I got put in the native speaker classes because I'm Mexican and even I had to talk like a European and learn a bunch of useless regionalisms.

Americans don't teach ESL students British English so idk why they can't teach the version of Spanish that's actually spoken in their country.

I'm a combined spanish/Spanish education masters student and yes, public school foreign language instruction in the US is fucked.

Classes are usually less than an hour which greatly limits the size of lessons students can have. Bush's children will be left behind act defunded schools so foreign languages got a cut.

A lot of Spanish textbooks they give out in these schools are too structured and also move too fast. The emphasis on memorizing and testing on grammar rules is just part of the ableist test culture pedagogy. Kids are naturally anxious and want to succeed but the foreign language curriculum is designed to only let the very top succeed while everyone else languishes behind.

Summer break also has a very negative impact (also other long breaks). Summer break should not exist (hot take I know) as it disrupts the educational flow and makes even more redundant work for teachers. Schools have ACs! But maybe with climate change kids wouldn't even make it to school alive anyway which is always a nice thought. Also in the US teachers don't get paid in the summer. Summer break is where the poor kids and rich kids get separated.

It really depends on your instructor. The Spanish teacher I had in my first year of HS was complete dogshit despite being a native speaker while my next two teachers were great (we even had a trans flag in our class).

My take is that grammar is literally just a booklet you give to students and you should just focus on cultural immersion and history. Spanish should be a slam dunk in terms of cultural study but the textbook companies and capitalist educators want to remake their same shitty textbook so they can squeeze more money from our schools.

Seriously they teach Spanish like we are CIA infiltrators who have 6 weeks to grind a language before dropping a golpe de estado on poor indigenous tribes.

Unfortunately there's only so much that can be done even with high-quality and comprehensive language education that doesn't take up a large portion of school hours - overcoming the hurdle of getting enough exposure to the language without having any interaction with it outside of a few hours per week can never really let you get past A1/A2, especially in output. Lots of parents will also just balk at their child being bilingual for reasons of either racism or a desire for control (or both!) so that avenue is also pretty hopeless for a lot of people. Honestly, outside of having proper bilingual education and schooling, if there was a way to introduce tools like Anki to kindergarteners in a way which wasn't overbearing or shitting on their natural curiosity it probably wouldn't work half-badly lol

I'm having to take four quarters of Spanish for my bachelors, and my high school Spanish classes left me feeling entirely unprepared. Worse still, I only took it for one abbreviated semester in continuation school. Wish me luck everybody, I'm totally screwed!

Edit: I tell a lie, I also took it in the 7th grade. Suddenly feeling much more prepared.

Spanish 1 we had a great teacher. He couldn't avoid the boring constant conjugation, but he added a cultural element that was great. We got to make some clay pots, he taught us to make chorizo and eggs, took us to the local mission. Then spanish 2 we got Ben Stein from Fastimes. Had better luck in college, aside from the fucking gusano who lectured me for an hour in english because I brought up the terrorist attack that killed the Cuban fencing team. After that, the whole class hated me.

i dont really know anyone who learned a foreign language in school. those who did learn it did it on their own, outside of school. mostly with the internet, or by going abroad to work a bit.

this includes my parents' generation learning russian in school and my generation learning english in school.

Mine were actually super helpful and left me conversationally fluent in Spanish. Unfortunately not having anyone to speak it with in rural Canada in the years since have meant that I've lost the majority of that fluency.

I went to a really bougie school though, so my experience is likely not the norm.

This crash course on comprehensible input made by the ppl over at dreamingspanish goes over all the problems of non-immersive language learning, and also why it continues to be perpetuated even though we know it doesn't work, and that comprehensible input is the only thing that does work.

I grew up in the US, and took years of foreign language classes in highschool and college, but we mostly just spoke english and tried to memorize vocab and grammar rules. Totally useless. Then after I tried to use notecards (anki) and apps... those also don't work.

Finally after many years, I discovered the comprehensible input method to learn spanish and mandarin, and finally am making progress.

Three high school semesters in any language is not going to be enough to learn a language. You either gotta learn it young when your neurons are still nice and plastic or put in lots and lots of work and maintain it

i think it also depends on what type of classes you took. my freshmen year class was ezpz mostly basic vocab, but after that they started breaking out the more advanced conjugations that still make my head spin thinking about them

I took two years and the full time teachers I had both years were basically Peggy Hill, then partway through the second year, that teacher went on maternity leave and our long term sub was a native speaker who grew up in Baja California and immigrated, and it was crazy how quickly my fluidity and pronunciation/accent improved over that span, and I pretty much totally lost those gains afterwards and now I can't even roll R's right.

I still remember enough to follow along to Spanish broadcasts of Dominican/Venezuelan Winter League baseball in the MLB off-season when I'm itching for some but I can't even hold simple conversation in Spanish anymore and there was a window where I felt like I was approaching fluency rapidly when I was a teenager and that just bums me out now

In a similar boat. I decided I wanted to actually learn spanish, so a couple months ago I got serious about watching Comprehensible Input (Dreaming Spanish). Between that and self study and speaking practice I'm already well past where I was in high school, though I still have a long way to go to fluency.

It's frustrating that I have to find this all out years after my education. But I feel that way about most subjects I learned in school, so this is no different.

I took two or three years in high school, and upon graduation I also could not really speak the language. Neither my parents nor anybody else on my side of the family speaks any Spanish. But out of personal interest, I continued learning it on my own, mostly by using music and movies. If anybody is interested I could detail some things that I did which I think most helped me.

Later, I met my first wife who is a Spanish speaker, we were married for several years and spoke mostly Spanish at home because her English wasn’t that great. I also spoke Spanish with people in the community all the time and still use it all the time at work and in my personal life (I’m remarried and the main language for communication at home with my wife and children is Spanish). I’m completely fluent now at a high level. Ive spent time living in several Latin American countries and the Spanish I learned while I was in the U.S. allowed me to understand and be understood by everyone without problems.

The high school class only served to provide a basic foundation of grammar, conjugation rules etc which my later self study and purposeful use of the language could fill in.

I had French and English classes in school. Although I only had French for 3 years and had English classes since primary school until 11th grade.

I'm fluent in English but I've retained little of French (maybe I can read and understand it a bit).

I think the English classes helped with basic vocabulary and grammar, but most of it I got from watching English media and playing games (including MMOs when I got to middle school), and then reading books in English since high school

I took six years of Spanish and I only learned about the subjunctive tense the very last year

I swear that there's gotta be something in human brains where some people just "can't get it". Mandatory two years of high school Spanish, I could kinda read it okay, but I couldn't really get the hang of speaking it.

Definitely doesn't help that I didn't have any Spanish speaking friends and public speaking (which was a big part of my classes) was very anxiety inducing.

(Anecdote time) I've got a sister-in-law who's not a native Spanish speaker but is pretty fluent, (maybe she majored in it college too, can't remember). She tried to teach her kids for a while but stopped after noticing that they would get so frustrated/confused at trying to switch between English and Spanish.

I really wonder what would have happened if there was language classes that just started in kindergarten and lasted until the end of high school.

You know how the country with the most English speakers is actually China? They got there by bringing in tons of English speakers with few other qualifications besides "speaking English" and making them teachers, because the best way to teach kids a language is to put them in a situation where their only option is to speak it. It doesn't have to be 24/7, but it does have to be fully immersive and regularly reinforced - they do the same thing in a dozen other countries, and it works pretty well.

In America we have the privilege of not needing to do that in order to interact with world trade, so language learning is treated as strictly optional and not taken very seriously when it's offered at all. I remember taking Japanese in high school - despite the fact that I lived in Japan I really didn't learn much at all. Even during class we were still speaking almost exclusively English, so the only people who learned a meaningful amount of Japanese were the people who actively sought out immersion (usually in the form of in-person chat groups with Japanese people who were themselves learning English).

Regarding exposure to the language, has anyone had success in learning a language with a language partner? I have a friend (native speaker) who I can practice with, but I'm struggling to get to the point where simple conversations are possible. I know some vocab and book grammar, but it doesn't really flow into real conversation.

We tried a few times, but it terminates too quickly:

Hello, what is your name?
My name is x.
How old are you?
I have N years.
Do you have a favorite color?
Yes, it is blue.
Good, see you later!

Hot take but America should have Spanish Tuesdays and Thursdays where all business is transacted in Spanish on Tuesdays and thursdays. Fridays alternate between regional indigenous languages and sometimes there's tagalog surprise day! Which is not announced in advance to keep people on their toes.

I feel like Americans would be better off if high school foreign language classes were replaced with cultural studies. As others are pointing out here, it’s really hard to learn and retain a language at that age in the classroom when you’re not immersed in it. But at least in my school, some of the Spanish teachers would try and do some cultural studies stuff (I even had an Argentinian teacher who brought a bombilla and maté for us to share every day, we loved that).

It's the same as every other high school subject. It exists to create a bare minimum level of skill widespread across society. Just like Math or Chemistry, you can follow up on it afterward and become proficient at it. You can even make a career out of it. But most will forget it (because they chose something else instead).

I took 4 years of college French and can't speak or understand a lick of French, but I can still understand basic Spanish (both spoken and written) due to one year of middle school Spanish. I remember going to Peru in college and being worried about how I was going to get around, then stepping out of the airport and realizing holy shit I know what all these signs say. Not sure why that is but I'm always surprised at how much Spanish I can understand having never really studied it save for one year in middle school.

It somehow stuck with me and I genuinely hated my Spanish teachings in HS

Sí

You need to learn languages by immersion, school can only do so much without it being reinforced.

I think they should do language classes in elementary. Your mind holds on to those far better. I had mine as electives in High School and it was brutal. My mind doesn't work that way and I really tried. We did end up going to Mexico for a month and it only cost the families $800. One of the best experiences of my life.

Unfortunately it was 20 something years ago and I barely remember things. I have some reading comprehension and some very basic conversational spanish but not much remains to be fluent at all.

I did. I live in an area where virtually nobody speaks Spanish. We don't even have a very big Latin American descent population. I was forced to take the class in my senior year of high school, when I had no interest. So thus, I then got even LESS interest in learning the language.

I took Spanish in middle school, high school and even two years in college. My dad is also fluent. I know a lot of words, but I can barely speak it. You really need to practice it to become fluent. Classroom learning will never be enough.