Teaching and learning experience

          First of all, I would like to say that I mostly have learning experience with foreign languages than teaching experience. My experience with languages started when I was born. I know I was born in Romania but my first language is Hungarian. So I grew up speaking this language with my family, with my friends, at the nursery and at the school, but I had to learn Romanian too, because if not, it would be impossible to go shopping, or pass all subjects at school. For me sometimes it was tough to speak Romanian, because the accent is absolutely different, and some of my neighbors were laughing at me when we were young, so gradually I lost my curiosity to improve my Romanian fluency.

             Secondly at school I had English and French lessons.  I have to recognize, that my experience was not very nice.  I was only an 11 year old girl, with eager to learn many things, but the methodology was very unfriendly and rather boring, only memorizing words and the verb tenses. I remember that before going to baccalaureate exam, I told the French teacher, that if she wanted she could fail my exam, because it didn’t matter to me!!

            Nevertheless, thanks God, my life changed, with those bad experiences. After finishing my studies I worked 4 years, as a primary school teacher, where I tried to use different types of methods (games, songs, poems, visiting factories,…) to teach Hungarian and Romanian languages too. 

            After that for personal reasons I started to learn Spanish for 3 months before deciding to move to live in Spain. I have to recognize that when I got to Spain I only understood something but I couldn’t speak. For the first months as I wasn´t working, I went to Spanish lessons for adult people, where the teacher was very charming and helped me a lot to improve my fluency. She was patient, she gave me many photocopies with exercises, she spoke slowly and repeated the times that were necessary. I think the best way to learn a foreign language is living in the same country and being surrounded with people who speak that language. So as I was living in Spain and as I started to work, my fluency greatly improved. Five years ago I bought some Spanish School books and I prepared on my own at home for the exams. It was an extremely good experience for me, because I passed the highest level exam at first, at the Official Language School in Spain. 

            In spite of speaking three languages fluency three years ago I decided to retake my English studies again. Now I finished B1 level, what makes me feel very proud! 

            I strongly believe that over the years the methodology has changed (there´s internet in the classroom and the digital board helps a lot). Today our children have different kind of possibilities to learn any language they want. New technologies help us to learn easily, and develop our knowledge.  We are able to listen to music, news or lessons whenever we want, so in this way the languages ​​ are closer, only depends on us how we use all our means to become familiar with them! (Anna - from Spain).