When I was around 9 years old, I would try to learn languages through Rosetta Stone. My first inspiration for trying to learn a new language was because a close family friend of mine was Italian, and I wanted to learn how to speak with them in Italian. Another language that I tried to self-teach through Rosetta Stone was Spanish. It was amazing, to me, seeing how similar certain words were between the two languages. Though I enjoyed going through the modules on Rosetta Stone and learning new vocabulary, I regrettably didn’t practice speaking the language outside of the program and didn’t take the initiative to watch shows or read books in the languages that I was attempting to learn.
In high school, I took three years of Spanish classes to complete my language requirement. Throughout those three years, I was able to really learn what methods of teaching a language that I benefited from best. When I first began Spanish, I took it in a CP course. I enjoyed the model that my teacher utilized in that we learned Spanish through making up stories. The teacher would often include the names of students and make references to popular culture of the time. Periodically, we would view parodies of current trending songs that were made in Spanish. We were encouraged to practice speaking to one another in simple sentences using the terminology that we were exposed to. This professor practiced mostly immersion and spoke in Spanish throughout the majority of the class. The following year, I enrolled in Honors Spanish with a different teacher, and the style was different than I had encountered in the previous year. This class focused more on grammar and sentence structure, which I soon found that I struggled with. However, one difference in this teaching style that I particularly enjoyed was how we were exposed to Latin American culture through the literature we reviewed in class.
After taking my Spanish courses, during my senior year, I decided to enroll in a German class online. I was inspired to learn German due to how my school had a foreign exchange student program, and many of my closest peers were from Germany. This was my first experience trying to take an online language course that was mostly self-paced. Each week, we had a session in which we would gain live instruction from the teacher over materials we had learned in the past week. This live session also granted participants the chance to practice speaking the language. I’ve found that I really benefit from repetition and hearing others speak in the language that I am attempting to learn.
If I had the chance to go back to when I first started exploring other languages, I wish that I had taken more of an effort to learn more about the cultures of the languages that I was learning. As someone who is very much a visual and an auditory learner, I would have greatly benefitted from reading books or watching television series that communicated in the language that I was seeking to learn. This realization of how I best learn languages is what makes me excited as I study American Sign Language more this semester. I plan to be intentional with communicating with members of the Deaf community, as well as spend time watching deaf or HOH YouTubers to continue learning more about their culture. I think that engaging with members of the community is especially important, as I’ve learned while self-teaching how some resources online are truly teaching SEE or PSE, rather than ASL.
Comments
Hi Faith, I also took Spanish in high school and did not use Rosetta Stone but tried out Duolingo. I definitely agree with these resources the best way to continue developing language skills is with the practice since those help you remember the words and use them more naturally rather than just saying a couple of phrases and vocabulary in the target language!
I also remember trying to use Rosetta Stone to learn English. It definitely can be a great resource for language learning, but you definitely need to supplement it with other resources that will allow you to practice speaking the language in a conversation rather than just saying a couple of phrases.