I have been in formal language education for a total of four years now, learning Spanish for Brittish GCSEs, and this has led me to the unfortunate conclusion that language teaching and learning has been fundamentally broken by the modern day. This links in to an overall theme that the Brittish GCSE system is fundamentally broken, but that is a topic for a later date. In this instance, I would like to focus specifically on the twisted mess that has become of the holy mantle of passing language through the generations.

The job of a language teacher is to give students natural and intuitive access to a completely new tool of expression, and - just like any other tool - the core of learning how to use it is learning the core of how it functions. This is at the very heart of how we ought to be teaching languages. A language is a formal system of rules above anything else. The specific vocabulary are simply auxillary tools of expression. The core of the language - including its core grammatical structures, generic tools of expression (words for “this”, “it”, “that”, etc.) and its general style are the absolute essentials. Common words which are used in every other sentence should be the top priority for the learner. This is how I started out. I wanted to learn structures and words which had the widest possible application. Words such as “how”, “place”, “way” and “what”. Words such as “I am”, “I go”, “I think”, “I have”. These words are generic parts of most languages. However, in many (arguably most) courses and schools, these parts of the language seem to take a back seat. Rather than learning these core features of expression, students are instead expected to memorize vast banks of vocabulary. What is the use of knowing for the word for an airport if you cannot understand the bulk of any sentence referring to the airport? The goal of any linguist should be to be conversational and expressive in the language without having memorized immense amounts of vocabulary. This suggests that you truly understand the underlying language and its function.

Now, does language learning, especially in modern schooling, achieve this ends? Absolutely not. Not only does the classic “drill this into your skull” mentality seem to be preserved constantly, the absolute inaplicability of some of the content that I was expected to learn is just staggering. Among other highly useful phrases, I was expected to learn:

• “It produces a strong physical dependency” - “Produca una física dependencía fuerte”
• “I am concerned about the economic crisis” - “Estoy preocupado de la crisis economica”
• “The greatest problem in my area is the prevalance of joints being smoked” (my personal favorite) - “La problema más grande en mi zona es las cuentas de porros que se fuman”

Applicable? Teach the core of the language? No! This is nothing but intentional word salad which is designed to just pass an exam. This is an emerging pattern in Brittish secondary education, given that the entirety of schooling at this stage is defined by exams which take place across two weeks in our summer term. All of this time is simply dedicated to what will be written on a paper by some arbitrary organisation which doesn’t care about us and which doesn’t represent the real world. Because some beurocrat working for the Associated Qualifications Board (or whatever they’re supposed to be called) decided that the Spanish have a drug problem, now I have to spend over three weeks writing sample sentences (don’t forget to include your four tenses, even when it makes no sense!) about how I used to smoke fictional joints (porros) behind the fictional bikeshed (cobertizo de bici) with my fictional primary school friends (amigos de mi escuela primaria). Because some different beurocrat decided that the words that the Spanish use extremely often are way too easy to learn, instead we have to learn over-complicated replacements for these words that are rarely used in spoken Spanish. How do I know? Because I, unlike the beurocrats, actually learnt through experience. I was taught by a Spanish woman in my primary school on how she spoke the language in practice. I listened to how native speakers in the Canaries spoke their language and what types of language was used, and you can be damn sure it wasn’t predecated on using “tengo la intención de” instead of “quero” or “tengo ganas”. We are constantly being reminded that we are learning this because the “examiner will do this” or the “exam will contain that”, rather than “the Spanish like to say this” or “native speakers would do that”. In other words, modern language learning has fallen down the same trap as most GCSE subjects: we are taught to pass an exam, not to go into the real world. I have wasted four years of my life just so I can be slightly more qualified to fill in a piece of paper so that an underpaid teacher half way across the country can mark it in five minutes and so that AQA can make more profits through remarking.

Just for context, I can translate pretty much every word in this article into Spanish with only marginal difficulty (as I write this realising that I do not know the word for marginal). I am not inexperienced in this language. What I am inexperienced at is the AQA game. I am inexperienced at knowing the hyper-specific sets of overly specific vocabulary that whoever writes my exam felt like including this year. I’m half convinced that GCSE languages courses are designed partly do drive up the youth suicide rate so that some billionare like Bill Gates can achieve his world depopulation goals. In any case, this exam will be the bane of many children’s lives, just as it is for me. I am never going to need to talk about “economic consequences of drug addiction” in Spanish ever again. I am never going to need to explain using four tenses at once how my summer holiday was (because the exam markers apparently wet themselves whenever they see somebody who bothered to learn grammar rather than the sixty words they gave us).

The solution? Michel Thomas. He understood how languages worked because he was a polygot. He understood the core of how humans communicate and how our langauges were formed naturally. Not by a beurocrat or an office worker. Not by a scientist or a designer. They were designed by humans speaking and communicating the way that humans like to speak and communicate.

But, of course, that doesn’t look good on a grade spreadsheet. So AQA ignores it. Instead, we turn back to our list of four tenses we have to unnaturally cram into a piece of writing and looking up synonyms for perfectly good words like “además”. I’m sure Michel would be proud.