“Hey kids, don’t forget to prepare for your French exam next week.” You know for a fact that I won’t study for a silly willy language test. That’s the problem with schools, they can’t teach a damn thing without a test. Sure tests force you to memorize your vocabulary, but tests don’t make learning fun. How about we forget about learning from school and do out own thing?
When I left my school, I didn’t know how I was supposed to learn German because I didn’t know about other means (which are even better) of learning. Then this one time I saw a video from Nathaniel Drew in which he shows how he learns languages, and I was like shit this is better than school. it took me about 5-ish months to learn A1 German which is enough to greet people and join a couple of basic sentences. If I were learning at home, I would have been fluent in A1 in a few weeks (depending on consistency). Saying that schools make you consistent in learning is not true with learning languages because it’s not compulsory. Portuguese won’t land you a job, but it’ll help make friends.
I use Duolingo for vocabulary (too much Duolingo becomes repetitive and boring), I read comprehension passages from german.net, my dictionary is wordreference.com, I have a podcast that I can listen to and a YouTube channel that teaches German. Sure this is a lot of stuff to learn from, we still need to learn the basics. To start, I found and wrote down the most common verbs, conjugations, adjectives, etc. You can find sites for other languages too!
Video that I saw: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fxAaBZNduQs&ab_channel=NathanielDrew
