Learning new languages is awesome, it allows you to communicate with more people, allowing you to get a better understanding of the whole world. But I really don’t like the way schools teach new languages.

In our school, I took Spanish. At first, my teacher focused on written words, and made me remember the correct spelling, and had spelling tests over it, with very little emphasis on the pronunciation. When we learned about answering questions (in Spanish), we first learned how to do it on paper, and did very little practice of saying the answer. At the end of that year, I was very good at answering stuff on paper, but my recognition of spoken words was terrible.

Now the way I think would be better for the student is more about understanding the words, and being able to start and hold a conversation, instead of learning how to spell them. If you know how to say it, spelling would be a lot more easier, instead of students just pure memorizing spelling with English translations.

Another good way is to just listen to tapes. Instead of written homework assignments, there should be listening assignments, where you just listen to a story, and the next day, start a conversation about it. Students could write notes for help on memorization, and the teacher to look at those notes to make sure the student had actually listened to it. And by mastering the spoken language, you must also understand the correct sentence structure and verb form, and makes writing so much easier.

So, in a language, speaking it is the first step to success.