Hello everyone,
Hopefully I do not come across as pretentious or petulant, but I thought I would advise those thinking of spending money to study a Spanish module or any other language at university not to bother, unless, of course, you require a certificate.
I had my first lesson last night and I must say I was horribly disappointed. Because of Lingq, I am used to listening to content that I find interesting, and content that teaches me something of interest. This class covered morbidly boring content which just resulted in me getting bored! I felt unmotivated and uninterested.
If you do not like working in groups or having to perform uninteresting dialogues then this should be another reason to stay clear of the conventional class room. I, personally, did not feel comfortable or natural performing any of these dialogues. The problem was that I had to stick to these rigid dialogues, and could not be creative and natural. Moreover, I just do not like working in groups and do not particularly want to meet new people.
The only interesting thing about this lesson was when the teacher’s colleague walked into the class room and they both briefly begun to speak their mellifluous Spanish.
An interesting side note: the teacher was teaching us ‘muy’ and ‘mucho’. For those who don’t know, both are roughly translated as ‘a lot’ or ‘very’. The teacher explained that ‘muy’ is used with adjectives and ‘mucho’ for verbs. I said “are there any exceptions to this rule?” (actually, I knew there were exceptions as one of Berta’s Spanish dialogues points out), but the teacher replied in English “there are no exceptions to this rule, ‘muy’ is with an adjective and ‘mucho’ with a verb.” After saying this, I heard a few sniggers directed at me from fellow students.
My disappointment wasn’t with the teachers lack of grammatical knowledge (from what she was teaching, It seemed like she had a good grasp of Spanish grammar), or her attitude (she was a very charming lady), but what disappointed me was the class room environment and conventional methodology of teaching foreign languages!
My humble advice, do not waste your money on Spanish classes, but look at the libraries here and elsewhere; read and listen to content that interests and stimulates you.
