I teach French.
I am not a native speaker, but I have studied the language for many years and have, over time, with effort, wrangled myself into fluency. And the process continues. I pride myself in not being perfect, because there is always so much to learn about the French language. And what is more, the language is always changing.
Many issues I see language students come up against come up after the initial wave of language learning: the brilliant light of connecting between two things, like a secret code has revealed itself. But when the immense wave of that language rises it can feel like a student must learn a whole new world. When they are just learning the proper usage of tense in English.
The long and impossible task of rote memorization looms. Lists of words emerge from text books (some of which I do swear by). But we never completely learn our mother tongue by looking at lists. We learned through slow, deliberate integration into a world of it. Language is a relationship. For anyone who knows another language, you know some words that only exist in that language, they are immersed in its culture. And so to learn a language is to wear life just a bit differently, to understand it more deeply for the differences the languages illuminate.
And so, in my approximation, the less verb and vocabulary lists, the better (which is not to say never). But there is a whole world of the language to explore, and the best way to do this is to dive head on. Speak, listen, speak, listen. Allow the student to feel, not like they are learning endless lists of words, but they are learning how to interact with the world in which that language lives. Language comes with a place and a culture. Let that shine through, so that the student falls in love. Then they will always return to it, long after the class ends.
Bending Tree Education 