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.

Teaching language in high school is stupid they should be teaching it as early as possible.

I’m stupid and went with French in HS, then went to work in factories for a few years in northern Indiana that has a large Mexican population that works in factories. I don’t remember any of the French I learned. Like at all. But I probably could have at least used broken Spanish to communicate better with my co-workers during that era of my life.

I hate my brother but one thing that impressed me about him is that not only did he take Spanish in HS, but he is actually fairly fluent in it now because he never left the factory life.

Language classes in most of the USA are based around memorization but more and more evidence is backing up the “language acquisition” model of language learning. Rote memorization is wholly insufficient and most of us learn language first and foremost by simply listening to “comprehensible input”. By hearing this comprehensible input enough we sort of just absorb it naturally. Like we were built for it. Or more because we evolved exactly to be able to do this.

But how do you structure a class around that and test students for it when you need at least 3 months of basic comprehensible input for at least an hour or two a day (the more the better) like this to acquire enough language to start to grasp basic sentences and common words? When using this method you aren’t expected or even encouraged to try and speak the language during those first few months. And for most kids who take this for one semester how can you show progress when you shouldn’t expect even basic fluency until you are a year or two out using this method? Yet people who stick to this method do actually learn languages and really internalize this in about 3-5 years to full conversational fluency. We all learned at least one language language this way: our first one.

Our school system is simply not designed to handle learning that works this way. If you want to learn Spanish look into Language Acquisition Model stuff. Dreaming Spanish on YouTube has tons of beginner comprehensible input videos. Once you watch one, you’ll understand exactly what it is trying to do and it becomes obvious why it would work. You aren’t supposed to understand immediately. At first you kind of get the jist a little even though you only understand like 10% of the words. Then you start recognizing structure and more words and understand more. In a few months it starts coming along better. Then you take the next step and move onto videos that aren’t designed for this method, just people speaking Spanish and it suddenly gets super hard. But if you stick with it, you can and will really learn any language this way.

EDIT: As an aside I’m forever mad that we have a true all-American language here in the USA and it’s not taught to every child in school: American Sign Language. It’s not just spoken words signed with your hands. It has its own grammar and rules and It provides accessibility to the deaf. It is useful even for those who can hear. If I ruled this shithole ASL would be a standard class from Elementary to High-school. In two generations everyone would know basic ASL.

The point of language class in school is to assign grades, not to teach you. We know how humans acquire new languages: immersion. Listen to music in Spanish, watch Spanish shows, etc. but also need lots of practice actually communicating in Spanish with other Spanish speakers. It’s really hard to do unless you up and move to a different country where they primarily speak Spanish.

The only way to learn a foreign language is through a lot practice and exposure. This is not something that language classes in school can provide unfortunately.

Try reading some children’s books in Spanish and you’ll learn more Spanish than you ever did in school.

I’m a combined spanish/Spanish education masters student and yes, public school foreign language instruction in the US is fucked.

Classes are usually less than an hour which greatly limits the size of lessons students can have. Bush’s children will be left behind act defunded schools so foreign languages got a cut.

A lot of Spanish textbooks they give out in these schools are too structured and also move too fast. The emphasis on memorizing and testing on grammar rules is just part of the ableist test culture pedagogy. Kids are naturally anxious and want to succeed but the foreign language curriculum is designed to only let the very top succeed while everyone else languishes behind.

Summer break also has a very negative impact (also other long breaks). Summer break should not exist (hot take I know) as it disrupts the educational flow and makes even more redundant work for teachers. Schools have ACs! But maybe with climate change kids wouldn’t even make it to school alive anyway which is always a nice thought. Also in the US teachers don’t get paid in the summer. Summer break is where the poor kids and rich kids get separated.

It really depends on your instructor. The Spanish teacher I had in my first year of HS was complete dogshit despite being a native speaker while my next two teachers were great (we even had a trans flag in our class).

My take is that grammar is literally just a booklet you give to students and you should just focus on cultural immersion and history. Spanish should be a slam dunk in terms of cultural study but the textbook companies and capitalist educators want to remake their same shitty textbook so they can squeeze more money from our schools.

Seriously they teach Spanish like we are CIA infiltrators who have 6 weeks to grind a language before dropping a golpe de estado on poor indigenous tribes.

Unfortunately there’s only so much that can be done even with high-quality and comprehensive language education that doesn’t take up a large portion of school hours - overcoming the hurdle of getting enough exposure to the language without having any interaction with it outside of a few hours per week can never really let you get past A1/A2, especially in output. Lots of parents will also just balk at their child being bilingual for reasons of either racism or a desire for control (or both!) so that avenue is also pretty hopeless for a lot of people. Honestly, outside of having proper bilingual education and schooling, if there was a way to introduce tools like Anki to kindergarteners in a way which wasn’t overbearing or shitting on their natural curiosity it probably wouldn’t work half-badly lol

Spanish 1 we had a great teacher. He couldn’t avoid the boring constant conjugation, but he added a cultural element that was great. We got to make some clay pots, he taught us to make chorizo and eggs, took us to the local mission. Then spanish 2 we got Ben Stein from Fastimes. Had better luck in college, aside from the fucking gusano who lectured me for an hour in english because I brought up the terrorist attack that killed the Cuban fencing team. After that, the whole class hated me.

Three high school semesters in any language is not going to be enough to learn a language. You either gotta learn it young when your neurons are still nice and plastic or put in lots and lots of work and maintain it

i think it also depends on what type of classes you took. my freshmen year class was ezpz mostly basic vocab, but after that they started breaking out the more advanced conjugations that still make my head spin thinking about them

I’m having to take four quarters of Spanish for my bachelors, and my high school Spanish classes left me feeling entirely unprepared. Worse still, I only took it for one abbreviated semester in continuation school. Wish me luck everybody, I’m totally screwed!

Edit: I tell a lie, I also took it in the 7th grade. Suddenly feeling much more prepared.

Mine were actually super helpful and left me conversationally fluent in Spanish. Unfortunately not having anyone to speak it with in rural Canada in the years since have meant that I’ve lost the majority of that fluency.

I went to a really bougie school though, so my experience is likely not the norm.

i dont really know anyone who learned a foreign language in school. those who did learn it did it on their own, outside of school. mostly with the internet, or by going abroad to work a bit.

this includes my parents’ generation learning russian in school and my generation learning english in school.

I had French and English classes in school. Although I only had French for 3 years and had English classes since primary school until 11th grade.

I’m fluent in English but I’ve retained little of French (maybe I can read and understand it a bit).

I think the English classes helped with basic vocabulary and grammar, but most of it I got from watching English media and playing games (including MMOs when I got to middle school), and then reading books in English since high school

In a similar boat. I decided I wanted to actually learn spanish, so a couple months ago I got serious about watching Comprehensible Input (Dreaming Spanish). Between that and self study and speaking practice I’m already well past where I was in high school, though I still have a long way to go to fluency.

It’s frustrating that I have to find this all out years after my education. But I feel that way about most subjects I learned in school, so this is no different.