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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] 14 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (2 children)

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.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I was under the impression I learned Mexican Spanish at my school with a sprinkling of Latin American slang supplemented by my teachers.

[–] [email protected] 7 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I'm jealous. Though if you ever had to use vosotros then it wasn't Latin Spanish, at least not completely.

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

We learned it but we were explicitly told it was Spain only. You would want to know how it works whether or not you plan to use it.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 3 months ago

I guess but I've never once used it or heard it used all my life and I speak Spanish on the daily (outside of class and video games that weren't localized to LATAM). It's just weird how much emphasis my class put on it, it's like insisting that English language learners practice cockney rhyming slang just in case they come across a Londoner or something.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 3 months ago (1 children)

I think it depends on the instructor. It's just an issue with how poorly the textbooks are created where they cast a wide net over all of spanish without giving enough linguistic context.

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

True, even within Latin America there are many big differences in dialect. Though I'd obviously prefer Mexican Spanish, I'd still take any of those over the Spanish that's regulated by the literal, actual crown that still exists for some reason. (la Real Academia Española)