In most parts of the West High School student are free, sometimes obliged, to pick a language to study. Which is great. I always loved languages, however I always felt the way it was taught in school was the absolute worst way of teaching there possibly is. I took French for 5 years and can barely keep an everyday.conversation with a native speaker, yet I always recieved the highest grade. If one thinks back at their childhood and how they learned how to speak it is easy to conclude that the way it is taught at school is nothing but waste of resources and time. The grammar and spelling fetish outnumbers the act of actually learning and the only goal of language classes seems to be creating repetetive parrot-robtos and not talking people. In reality it should not take much longer than a year to- more or less- fully master a language, yet there are plenty of people out there who- like me- took years of French classes without learning sh-t. All these ridiculous "vocabulary tests" the stuents are put on are stupid and do not help any one to actually learn the words. Never do you get the chance to actually use the words in a sentence and most of the times you have to memorise completely and utterly useless words that you will never ever have to use in your entire life, words that are useless in everyday-conversations. Furthermore, a lot more importance is put on spelling than pronounciation which is just odd as hell. And then we have grammar. Oh, sweet sweet grammar. Another fetish of the School Board. I grew up with three languages and never ever did I have to practise the grammar. It came automatically and got better as I grew older. Grammar is something that an individual eventually develops as he gets to speak the language in question. In the beginning you will make mistakes, but this is nothing that will make you impossible to understand. I remember back in High School when some ex-change students from Belgium were coming to school and our French teacher said; "Remember that French-speakers are very picky about grammar. So be careful when you talk to them!" Do you think any of us dared to even say "Hi" to them after that? Something has to be changed in this matter and that is now.
