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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] 8 points 3 months ago (1 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 3 months ago

Honestly it's just really hard to do in the classroom. It's not really a "subject" that you can sit down and learn through lectures and tests, it's a skill you need to actively train your brain for for an extended period of time through real-world practice. 20 kids sitting down while a teacher instructs them isn't going to be effective for most people to learn a new language