Did anyone else find their Spanish classes in High School entirely useless?
I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain.
My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.
Immersion only works well with acquiring a baseline through which to understand the experience. You can listen to a conversation all day long but without context through visual, audio, previous knowledge or other means you won't actually learn anything.
I know this may come off as pedantic but it's important for people who are trying to learn a language to not expect to pick up on things without having to put in a bit of book learning, even if it's just at the beginning. Jumping off into the deep end doesn't really work.