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Did anyone else find their Spanish classes in High School entirely useless? (hexbear.net)

submitted 3 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain.

My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.

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[–] [email protected] 26 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago

Yeah, I get that. I wish public school education would take it more seriously and not relegate it to just a couple years in High School, because it's really important for people to be bilingual, and we can't expect children to recognize how important it is on their own.

That said, I should not have gotten an A every semester with the level of fluency I had. I definitely put in enough effort to receive a passing grade, but that was only enough to ask simple questions like "where is the restroom?" or being able to pick out a few key verbs and nouns from a spoken sentence. Had I received a lower grade, I may have recognized I needed to try harder.