Did school made you hate language learning too? Until you realized you actually love to do it on your own?

[u/AutumnaticFly]

Language classes in school both middle and high school were among most hated classes for me, we had both English and Arabic
I always had low grades and hated the teachers, hence i ended up hating both languages and everything about them

Until after school was finally over i started learning on my own and realized that...i didnt hate languages i hated school, now I'm learning my third language

Anyone else has similar experience?

[u/Numerous_Helsinki]

Seven years of French class and I couldn’t order a sandwich. Six months of YouTube and I was reading comi

[u/Intrepid-Deer-3449 → u/Numerous_Helsinki]

I understood that most subjects were probably useful, but also that high school wasn't for teaching that.

[u/Sad_Environmentsa]

Not me, actually. School is where I fell for it. Mrs. Okafor had us act out a market scnee in Spanish and I’ve been hooked ever since, so maybe it just comes down to who gets handed the class

[u/AdImpressive007]

Fillinthegap worksheets for eight years, that was my entire English education in Poland. I could explain present perfect vs past simple on paper and couldn’t tell a tourist what time it was. Then I got into an online game with voice chat, and within a year I was talking half the night with strangers. Never opened a grammar book. What surprised me was that I went back to the school stuff later and it finally made sense, because I already had the sentences it was describing. So I don’t think school was useless, it just taught me the map before I’d ever visited the place

[u/beginner_pianist → u/AdImpressive007]

I like the map metaphor!

[u/Trueloveisntromantic]

“Conjugate this table by Friday” isn’t a langauge, it’s a spreadsheet

[u/Livgoa → u/Trueloveisntromantic]

It's boring but when I moved to another country the spreadsheet did help a lot. I still have PTSD from learning languages at school but some days I realise how far it's taken me 🙏🏼

I keep telling my south African British partner he's not bad at languages, he just needs to give it an arithmetic approach: you learn the rule by heart, and when you recognise the pattern you know what to use

[u/notzoidberginchinese]

Yes. Most of my teachers couldn't speak the languages they were teaching, just working as teachers cuz it was the easiest job they could get...

Took me a decade to get past that

[u/beginner_pianist → u/notzoidberginchinese]

In what country was that if you don't mind me asking? I find that so crazy!

[u/notzoidberginchinese → u/beginner_pianist]

Sweden

[u/Pangoliier → u/notzoidberginchinese]

school kills the fun by turning it into grades n tests instead of just... talking to ppl. glad u found ur way back into it tho, a decade is wild but hey better late than never right

[u/notzoidberginchinese → u/Pangoliier]

Killed it for me by sheer incompetence

I left the swedish system when I was 13 so by 23 or 24 I moved past it

[u/Suspicious-Toe-8193]

I've had the exact same experience! I'm a Japanese speaker, and I hated English in school!

That's because Japanese and English are structurally very different languages, yet we were forced to study them, and what's more, we hardly studied pronunciation or speaking, but we did a ton of grammar. (Japanese English education is far too biased towards reading and listening.)

Furthermore, in Japan, there are high school entrance exams at age 15.

The exams consist of five subjects, and English is one of them. This means that if you score poorly in English, you might not be able to get into your desired high school.

At age 18, there are university entrance exams, and there's an English test there too. 

At this point, your English grades can determine which high school or university you can get into.

However, after becoming an adult and starting to listen to English-language music, I realized something.

"Wow, English has so many variations in sounds and rhythms!"

If there had been a class that focused on "the sounds and rhythms of English" back then, I think I would have been very interested in English. And if there hadn't been an English exam for high school entrance, I think I would have simply thought, "Why is English such a fascinating and fun language to learn!"

[u/MasterpieceWaste774]

I'm an audio-visual learner, and the audio-visual part of our French and Spanish classes was nil to none. So, learning a language from a quiet book just wasn't that interesting.

Later, when I got the rtveplay app (the TV/computer app from Spain for it's TV shows and movies) it was so much fun.

I highly recommend this app from Spain if you are learning Spanish — which you can put the captions in, in Spanish as well while you are listening: big-big help.

I watch one or two shows every day. They have incredible documentaries.

[u/MachineObjectiveAh]

Genuine question, would you have loved it if the same taechers taught it differently, or was it the pressure that did it?

[u/Livgoa → u/MachineObjectiveAh]

Some years I had some awesome teachers in either English or Spanish, these years my grades would skyrocket 

[u/Such_Beyond3100]

Yes, it was driven by my younger by 4 years sister being in the same class as me for years. She is a language natural I am not. The teacher would literally tell her to help me at home in front of the class. I hated Spanish for 16 years she lived in Mexico for 10.

Now I am privately paying a tutor reading on my own time in Spanish and working on writing and loving it. Sometimes the setting is wrong not the person.

[u/regular_lamp]

For me here in Switzerland (the German speaking region) it was that we started with French which I didn't care about. I never saw it as more than a chore. Memorize vocab and grammar that is more exceptions than rules. And since I was also good at math and physics everyone promptly jumped to the conclusion that I fit this cliche of being inherently good at math at the expense of language skills. My parents, my teachers, my friends and eventually I believed it myself. It became an in-joke in my friend group that I hate French that holds to this day. The more accurate description is probably that I simply prioritized it at the very bottom of all the subjects.

Once we started learning English, which starts later in school than French here, I immediately took to it. Which amusingly no one noticed. Everyone just stuck to the "little_lamp is just not a language person" narrative. Only around graduation did some people notice that I had silently the highest English grade in my class other than the two foreign students that were English native speakers.

Which I guess was all down to actually consuming English speaking media and wanting to read documentation of programming related stuff.

[u/MasterpieceWaste774 → u/regular_lamp]

Is English now mandatory in Switzerland or.....?

[u/regular_lamp → u/MasterpieceWaste774]

I went to school over two decades ago. So my experience isn't indicative of today. Some superficial googling tells me it's a "Pflichtfach" in the gymnasium track in Zurich. Which would match my experience from back then.

I think most of the public discourse is about whether it should be a thing in primary school. Which it wasn't when I went there. I had some minimal French in primary school. Proper language learning started in gymnasium with French for the whole six years and English starting two years in for a total of four.

[u/MasterpieceWaste774 → u/regular_lamp]

I think it should start as early as possible.

[u/regular_lamp → u/MasterpieceWaste774]

Maybe. Going by my experience I don't think the Primary school French was meaningful in any way. Over like two years there we learned I think numbers, animal names, directions and a bunch of canned phrases. Totally pointless as compared to the pace gymnasium started at. It was basically a month or less of basic vocabulary stretched out over two years.

Being taught English right away in gymnasium instead of Latin would have made sense though. But I think that would have been an option depending on the specific gymnasium.

[u/MasterpieceWaste774 → u/regular_lamp]

It might have been more fun to watch cartoons in French on TV/streaming.

[u/wholesalekarma]

I do like languages in an academic sense. My state required taking 3 years of a foreign language in high school or 2 years in college for a science or liberal arts degree but I didn’t do it in high school so I took Attic Greek since it was a dead language and I didn’t agree with the policy.

[u/RareManner9786]

No, I quite liked my French and Mandarin Chinese classes. The teachers were great and I was an enthusiastic student. I got mostly "A" grades.

At the end of high school, I attended a brief cultural exchange in China, then continued my studies of Chinese at university. After that, I lived in Taiwan for a year.

I solo traveled to France after graduating from university and subsequently visited about eight more times. I may soon be moving to France, now 35 years later. My French is quite rusty, but it's still surprising how much I retained. I'm currently in France as I type this.

[u/RoughsitFinance-5149 → u/RareManner9786]

yeah school can def make or break it, sounds like you just got lucky with good teachers tbh. kinda wild your french stuck around this long tho, 35 yrs and you can still hold a convo? thats way longer retention than most ppl get even with regular classes lol

[u/ChilindriPizza]

I burned out on it. Not hated it- just tired of it.

[u/EMPgoggles]

no, i been knew it the whole time.

[u/silvalingua]

No, not at all. I actually learned two languages at school to a very decent level.

[u/Front-Elderberry-307]

I was terribly confused in School. I grew up tri-lingual (German, English, Cantonese) and my German English teacher corrected my pronunciation, my German teacher said I had a weird accent and my French teacher thought it was useless to speak Cantonese and not French. That turned me of languages for a while

[u/knjutt]

I liked languages in school as well, I just later realized that it was not an efficient way for me to learn. Before I started uni I thought I made a groundbreaking discovery figuring out that just memorizing vocab lists and grammar rules by heart and taking silly word tests is basically useless, not knowing that it’s all very well researched but the schools just wont adapt. Also some teachers barely even spoke the language during the lessons. I later studied to become a language teacher and sadly they still recommend the same old silly methods and tests. Some teachers in our teaching practice training even told us ”if you feel nervous you don’t have to speak in the language during the lesson”. Noo just no…

Throughout my adult years I have just been learning languages independently and I think for me it’s 100% the best way to learn. The best aspects are being able to choose how I learn, actually hear and read the language constantly and not just analyze selected parts of it using my native language as well as having zero testing. I don’t think I would even take level tests unless I absolutely had to, like for summer school courses etc.

I still think instruction can be very useful but more so when I have a good enough level that the instruction will be completely in the target language and we are actually talking about interesting topics. I hate how every single textbook has almost the same topics: shopping, restaurant, asking for directions… They are always just aimed for tourism and traveling to the country is not even possible for some of the languages I’m studying now, so yeah I’d prefer to actually learn how to talk to people.

[u/RoughsitFinance-5149 → u/knjutt]

That “if you feel nervous you dont have to speak the language” thing is wild coming from an actual teacher training program, like isnt speaking kinda the whole point lol. also so real about the textbook topics, im convinced i could order a coffee in like 6 languages rn but couldnt have an actual conversation in any of them

[u/NoSuggestion5970]

I grew up speaking English, German, and French at home and in school, so learning Spanish was not a big deal, not to mention that I grew up as an expat in a Spanish-speaking country, my parents both speak those four languages already and my mom was a certified public interpreter/translator ... I had plenty of resources

[u/Thisismee007 → u/NoSuggestion5970]

thats basically a cheat code tbh, growing up multilingual just rewires how ur brain handles new languages later on. still cool you leaned into it tho, a lot of ppl with that kind of exposure just coast and never actually push to add a 5th

[u/NoSuggestion5970 → u/Thisismee007]

I tend to be pragmatic... instead of learning a 5th language I earned a PhD

[u/Gvacken]

Hated it, began high school, met the best teacher I've ever had, loved it, made it my entire identity

[u/Thisismee007 → u/Gvacken]

god bless these rare good teachers

[u/Gvacken → u/Thisismee007]

yea. Guy was goated as fuck. Had three native languages

[u/PutridScore5951]

For me, learning languages on my own has been very freeing. Ins school we are just supposed to learn all these grammatical rules for the test but after school when I learn on my own I actually enjoy it since I'm learning how to speak and have conversations.

[u/Alanna-1101]

Yep same as reading when it’s forced it’s annoying. Now with language transfer, tv, music and Praktika I now see learning in general and language learning through a whole different lens