Yeah, the worst combo is when formal courses have goals that aren’t communicative, so you can have someone study for a year, get full marks, but still not be able to do anything with the language. That shouldn’t be happening in 2023, but it is.

As for language being a tool of communication, I agree 100% with this approach. When I taught English, I always told my students that they didn’t need to make perfect sentences to communicate, but that they needed to communicate if they wanted to get better and eventually make « perfect » sentences (there is no such thing, but I’m sure you get what I mean!)

The other part of your point is also true: it’s a lot more effective if learning doesn’t only take place in theory but also in practice. At my language school, we have monthly meetups to try and connect Mandarin learners and Mandarin speakers. But in the end, it’s the learner’s responsibility.

Interesting! My French teachers have been varied, but in junior high school I simply wasn’t very interested and didn’t really want to learn as much French as I could, I just found it interesting to learn the language. I don’t think it even occurred to me to go outside the classroom, even though the teacher wasn’t that good. In senior high school I had a great teacher, but I still had no interaction with real French for almost two years. Then I went to France and lived with a host family for a few weeks, but that wasn’t at all related to my French class. So, overall interaction with French people after seven years of French initiated by the teacher or the curriculum: zero.

In a strange way, it is a blessing that my experiences with learning French in the classroom was so bad. Because the teacher was awful, it was obvious to me that I’d have to reach outside the classroom if I actually wanted to learn French, so I ended up reading Le Petit Prince within months of starting my French class, and within a year I had had various conversations with native French speakers outside my formal studies (I didn’t have any consistent contact with native French speakers, but San Francisco gets its share of French tourists who are willing to chat with somebody studying the language). Ironically, if my French teacher had been better (but not so good as the integrate non-textbook French into the class) it might have actually taken me longer to break out of textbook French.

That really sums it up. Not just for Mandarin or languages, but for anything that is taught in a classroom. I’ve often started things while not knowing how to complete them, such as my business. It’s the most powerful incentive to learn. Too often I see people around me being hesitant to apply and take further what they learned in the classroom.