introduction to language learning 4

 Dear Erik,

I am glad that you are still following my blog, and this time I want to share with you my experience in learning Spanish. Spanish is the language I like the most and I am about to tell you why. In high school, we have a language class and every student can choose whichever language they want to learn; there are French, German, Spanish, and Vietnamese. It is a one-semester class and I chose Spanish, and this is the first time I learn Spanish. I have always been a huge fan of Latin American and Spanish culture; their passion, vibe, architectures, and food are all fascinating to me, and I’ve always wanted to visit Spain or any Latin American countries (even though I still haven’t got the chance to go there). This is why I choose to learn Spanish; I always believe that by learning the language, you can better understand the country's culture and have more fun. Anyway, I have a one-semester class of Spanish, but I have to say I really did not learn anything from the class. The learning experiences I previously wrote about in my blog are all good experiences but this one is a bad one, and I think this is also a precious experience for me since I learn what kind of learning method suits me and what doesn’t. As I said before, this is a one-semester class, and there are only 40 minutes of class per week and I think that is far from enough. Our teacher is Taiwanese and he started teaching from the alphabets. His pronunciation is not perfect (which I didn’t know at the time), but I think that is totally fine because you don’t have to sound like a native speaker to be a teacher. When he is teaching the alphabet, he used a website to show us how native speakers pronounce the sounds, and I think that is good. However, he used almost half of the semester to teach us the alphabet and I think that is unnecessary; he repeated the alphabet again and again, hoping that we can memorize them. But he did not teach us how these alphabets sound like in “word”, and after one semester I still don’t know how to pronounce any Spanish word (except for hola). After he finished the alphabet, he jumped right into grammar, and I think that is too difficult for new learners like us. We don’t even know how to pronounce a word and we have to know every tense of a verb. To me, learning a language is about a sense of achievement and fulfillment; we need to know that we really do learn something and we can use it in our life; therefore, I think for beginners like me, we can first learn about how to pronounce the words, and then learn to do self-introduction or order a meal instead of grammar (something that we can practice in everyday life). I am not saying that the teacher’s way of teaching is not good, it just doesn’t suit me. Grammar is definitely important, but for a class that only has one semester, teaching Grammar is too much. To me, grammar is a thing that needs a lot of time to practice and master. After a semester of learning, even though I only learn a little Spanish, I still gain something from the class. This is a good lesson for me to know my way of learning a language, and if I want to be a teacher in the future, I will try to find the teaching method that best suits the students. In my next blog, I am going to talk about learning Spanish at university, which is probably the best course I’ve ever take in college.