Previously, when I was in middle school, we only had one option. Either Spanish or
Spanish. I had no option to choose whether I wanted German (The language I wanted to learn at
the time). I already knew this language since I was only allowed to speak Spanish in my
household. “No Ingles,” my mom would yell. My video games were in Spanish, the movies I
watched were in Spanish, the music I was allowed to listen to was in Spanish, and the settings in
my iPad were in Spanish. Everything you can think of was in Spanish and no other language.
The border was drawn immediately when I got home. Even my friends I brought home with me
had to speak Spanish. This law was applied to everyone who entered the house. From books to
the newspaper to the TV and the shows I watched. I had to watch Blue's Clues in Spanish, which
I thought was uncool at the time.
With this in mind, Spanish class in middle school was no fun. High School was different;
I only took Latin for my language prerequisite because once again, it was either Spanish or
Spanish and I did not want that again. So I picked one of the two options, which was either Latin
or Spanish. I chose Latin and got to learn about the many cases, such as nominative, genitive,
dative, accusative, and ablative. During this time, however, noticed that a lot of the vocabulary
that I learned was similar to Spanish. Then I learned about the different languages that derive
from Latin. With this in mind, I had a fun time learning the language, which is now dead but still
useful. However, to this day, not all of the language is stuck in my head because we never spoke
it. We never really applied any of it apart from prefixes and root words that are used throughout
English, and translating them. I enjoyed not doing Spanish, but I did not really learn the
language. Used flash cards and Quizlet to cram what I needed the night before the exam. But that
was all I got from the class.
With all of these experiences in mind, and after taking the surveys and I concluded that I
am an auditory learner. Throughout my entire life (my childhood), the only thing I have listened
to is Spanish. I read it, I spoke it, and most importantly, I lived it at home. But most importantly,
every day I had to listen to my mother, father, uncle, aunt, cousins, and the neighbors speak it
constantly. I could just not escape it. After taking Russian in the first semester of college, I had
trouble with the class because this time we had to actually apply it via reading, writing, and
speaking it. I tried to remember it via the Quizlet and flashcard method, but that only works for
the multiple-choice component. The rest was writing it and speaking via an oral test. With this in
mind, I decided to actually learn it and do the same thing I did with Spanish. For 3 hours a day, I
could not do anything in English. Only in по-русски. I also listened to it via music and TV
shows that I had already watched. With this in mind, I ended up remembering and still able to
count from 1-10 in по-русски.
In short, the ways I personally can effectively learn a language are by listening to and not
being able to escape it. You have to be in prison with this language. The longer the sentence, the
better you become accustomed to it, thus learning its patterns and the ways it works. Afterwards,
you start to build a fun relationship, and after a while, it is part of your life. Being an auditory
learner is something I did not know until now, in will help me incorporate more listening and
interactive exercises, which will in the future help me learn future languages.
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