Things you learnt at school you have never used - ever.


Ah, also, to actually respond to the thread: I had an English teacher who was obsessed with Alexander Pope.

Fuck that guy. Uh, both of them I guess. The teacher and Pope, that f***ing windbag of awkward rhymes and poetry without any subject other than his own navel-gazing.
 
There are some languages that are hard to learn as a teen or adult without understanding the grammatical structure (Russian and other Slavic languages, for example). But that's not the case for any of the Romance languages, especially Spanish. There is nothing so fundamentally different about Spanish grammar and syntax that you can't learn it just by doing, as long as you're willing to take your lumps along the way.
To make it worse, I'd never been taught grammatical terms in English, so trying to learn them in French wasn't helpful. Anything beyond nouns, adjectives etc.

Learn by doing was the biggest thing that helped. In lessons you might say it out loud a couple times but you'd never have to put together a sentence after being given the tools to do so. (Why I got on with Michel Thomas stuff)
 
Ironically, "thou" is a vestige of Romance language influence on English. It's the familiar form of "you," just like the "tu" form (add or remove accent according to linguistic preference) in Spanish and French. If we still used "thou" in English, Spanish would be even easier to pick up.
I do wish we had a command tense but I'm grateful that we had such contradictory rules on gendered words from our hodgepodge of languages that we scrapped them. The speed is where I struggle most. I can mostly be understood in basic stuff but struggle to follow much.
 
How to buy a box of tabs and sell them as singles and make a profit whilst also not getting taxed by the hard lads.
 
Spinning my own wool from some sheep fleece, dying it with natural materials and weaving it into a pattern sampler thingy.
 
I hate how it's taught. I picked up English without knowing what a past participle was when I was 2, why the fk do I need to know it to understand French? I learned more from Michel Thomas tapes in a month of commutes than I did in 5 years of school French.

Totally agreed about Spanish mind.

Indeed. Nobody ever learned a language by being able to recite verb tables about the past subjective
 

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