| "learning a language is hard" I don't agree here. First off, your two years of high school German, like my two years of high school Spanish, were likely a waste of time. I had the highest grade in class and couldn't speak a word of Spanish, although I could write simple sentences in present tense quite successfully. I moved to a French speaking country when I was 23. Initially, like most Americans, I thought that learning languages was hard so why bother. After one year abroad I basically spoke 0 words of French. Once I decided to stay long-term I took a French class, it was once a week for two hours for about 7 months. I was teaching physics in French a few months later. Granted I wasn't fluent, but it was good enough and my students were incredibly patient. By the time my own French course started up again it was unnecessary, I was learning more than enough during the day so I quit. The key part was that the French class was only in French from day one. You could not ask a question in any language other than French because the teacher couldn't understand you (in reality she simply feigned incomprehension). Amazingly, a good teacher can make you understand a language you don't speak by speaking to you in that language. For the life of me I don't understand why high schools in the US don't adopt this system. Babies are great at learning languages and you have a massive advantage over them, you have the power of reason. You also have the massive disadvantage of people refusing to speak to you like a 2-year-old. My advice, if you really want to learn German, is to spend the next 6 months speaking to someone in German for an hour everyday (there are some websites that let you do this remotely). Same time investment as before, but I'm guessing you didn't spend so much time last year actually speaking with someone. Babies don't learn to speak through books, they listen for a year and then start saying extremely simple things. Learning to read in German will do wonders for your vocabulary, but it won't allow you to have a conversation. As someone who is quite anti-social, I find this unfortunate, but the wiring required to speak another language gets put in much faster by speaking said language. Also, don't bother learning how to speak in present tense, learn how to speak in the past and future. You want to be able to say what you did yesterday and what you are doing tomorrow. People ask you how your weekend was and what are you doing for vacation, they know what you are doing right now because you're talking to them. Surprisingly, I can't think of a language where it is harder to speak in the past or the future than in the present due to verb conjugations becoming largely trivial. I want to emphasize that I was not an especially gifted student in my French class. We were all total beginners and by the end of the course most people were functionally speaking French. |
But it still seems to me that countries where students learn foreign languages successfully at a high rate start those students before they're 12. My two years of high school was a waste, as you said yours was. But Germans (and Dutch, and Norwegians, etc.) have much better success in their schools, and they all start before the age 14 that's common for starting here in the US (though that's starting to change).