I did. I live in an area where virtually nobody speaks Spanish. We don’t even have a very big Latin American descent population. I was forced to take the class in my senior year of high school, when I had no interest. So thus, I then got even LESS interest in learning the language.

I can correctly identify when someone is speaking spanish, unless they’re speaking portuguese, and ask where the bathroom is. Educational victory!

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.

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 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.

Lo mismo hemos podido llegar a pensar algunos hispanohablantes acerca de nuestra experiencia como alumnos de lenguas extranjeras, incluyendo el inglés.

Primero se debería de mejorar el nivel hablado, a base de conversaciones que partan de situaciones cotidianas. Después ir mejorándolo e introduciendo la enseñanza del idioma escrito, con sus normas.

Pero no, pretenden que aprendamos todo simultáneamente, aún encima dejando de lado la conversación.

I think they should do language classes in elementary. Your mind holds on to those far better. I had mine as electives in High School and it was brutal. My mind doesn’t work that way and I really tried. We did end up going to Mexico for a month and it only cost the families $800. One of the best experiences of my life.

Unfortunately it was 20 something years ago and I barely remember things. I have some reading comprehension and some very basic conversational spanish but not much remains to be fluent at all.

It’s the same as every other high school subject. It exists to create a bare minimum level of skill widespread across society. Just like Math or Chemistry, you can follow up on it afterward and become proficient at it. You can even make a career out of it. But most will forget it (because they chose something else instead).

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.

It somehow stuck with me and I genuinely hated my Spanish teachings in HS

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.

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

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 4 or so years of Spanish throughout various levels of school and never felt I learned much at all. I jammed Duolingo for a month or two before going to Mexico and was really surprised by how much I still remembered. I was able to test out of a lot by having a solid foundation that somehow had stuck with me, I felt pretty cocky going into my trip.

Unsurprisingly, my lack of practice speaking and listening made real time conversations nearly impossible even though I could still read and write well enough. That really didn’t help much with day to day stuff, you can always pull out your phone to translate what a sign says but there’s no substitute for being able to immediately understand and respond to someone. Several others have mentioned it but an academic setting is not a very good way to learn a language, the best is just continuous exposure to how it’s actually used. I taught myself Korean primarily from watching a lot of Korean shows with some supplemental grammar and vocab lessons, it was SO much more effective. I was conversational from the start and was able to connect on a lot of cultural references, after 6 months there I was pretty damn fluent (and even won the grand prize for a speech I gave entirely in Korean).

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.