When I was in high school, I learned both Spanish and Korean. I have to say that those were not good and useful learning experience for me personally. I learned Spanish in class and the teacher was a Brazillian. She was a nice person except that she started the class by only teaching grammars and told us to memorize all the words and phrases that we learned during classes. This ploy is undoubtedly not wrong and those who follow the instructions strictly can definitely learn something more about Spanish. Also, is not that I don't like learning languages which is one of a few ways to interact with the rest of the world more easily and comfortably. However, this class to me was just tedious and monotonous since the teacher never talked about anything else other than the textbook and all the class activities were about recitation and presentation using the words we learned. The same situation happened for the Korean class as well. It was a free online course I took and I watched the recordings of the teacher telling me the structure and grammar of Korean from the beginning, which was stressful for me. It is not that I don't consider grammar as an essential part of a language but is more about the ways teachers pass on the knowledge that discourage me from the beginning.
For me, I mostly enjoy learning languages in an environment that is more conversational, less stressful and the topics I'm more familiar with. For example, regarding Korean, it will be more intriguing for me to talk more about something like, Korean dramas that are popular and Korean songs that most people listen to, and gain knowledge from those topics.
According to the FIRE model, factually I excel at memorizing facts and prefer objective tests. Also, I excel at organizing structures and ideas insightfully, I dislike instruction which seems rigid and didactic and I dislike learning which is competitive, purely theoretical. However, I think I should expand my learning activity by learning more about formal writing except for purely reading and conversational speaking.
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