Lingotopia

As a teacher myself, I'm a difficult student. I have my own ideas and methods for language learning and I'm not easily convinced by the ways others teach and learn. The easiest way to scare me off is using a boring textbook. Yes, textbooks are important in language learning.They cover the most important topics of daily life and also all the basic grammar. But the problem is, that I only learn well when the topic is relevant to me. When going by car on holiday to another country, knowing how to talk to a doctor or a car repair shop, is very relevant to me, so I make sure that I learn about this topics right before the trip, but in my daily life in Germany, I don't need to know, how to call a tow service in any other language than German. That's why I prefer to learn vocabulary and expressions when they are relevant to me and not when I happen to reach lesson 8 in a textbook... Also, I don't like to learn grammar structures in a certain order, just because that...

Normally I don't like setting goals for learning languages because for me the process of learning the language is much more important than fluency or any other goal. Also, I dip my toe in way too many languages recently, but I have started learning Spanish around five months ago and I enjoy the language so much, that I decided to pursue it to fluency. At first I just started by writing little texts and uploading them on italki for correction. Sometimes I would also do a little translation of a Spanish text into German. Then I bought a textbook, which I found too boring and wasted two months by mainly working with Duolingo. I don't understand why it's so popular. It's boring, you don't learn much useful content and you actually only reach like A2 at best, if you finish all exercises. I finished them and learned such useful phrases as:  ¿Tocaste un elefante? (Did you touch an elefant?) ¿Has tocado un elefante? (Have you touched an elefant?) La tortuga perdió...