What was your first Spanish lesson like?

[efpierce]

I would like to hear form the rest of you out there on this one. My first Spanish teacher was a German woman with a very strong German accent that carried over into her Spanish. Already knowing German made it even worse for me because I would assume by the sound she was starting to make that she was saying something else. It really made learning difficult.

[mleocasas]

My first lesson in Spanish was actually duringt eh conventional junior high curriculum course I was required to take. The pros were that I was no more oblivious and confused about the language than every other student in the room, and I was definitely encourages to try and fail rather than not to try at all. The negatives though...I feel like most people start learning Spanish in this really 'hands off' way where you conjugate verbs in the present tense and construct random simple sentences. I think a better method would be to contextualize from the start- make the vocabulary real, conversational, and useful to the student.

[Anderson]

Mine was with a native speaker from argentina.

[LauraM]

My first lesson was in high school.  It was with a teacher I already knew in a different context as she was a longtime friend of the family. 

Although she was not a native speaker she had an excellent accent.  She was a very compassionate and caring teacher with a lot of enthusiasm for the language and its literature.  She inspired me to do my best. 

[Azalia83]

Ironically, my first exposure to Spanish was in eighth grade. I had absolutely no interest in it and failed it. I gave it another go in high school and I was interested enough to pass with all A's all four years of high school. Only to find out that I learned little to nothing when I sat through my first college-level Spanish class. The intimidation from the full-immersion Spanish class was exactly what I needed to motivate me into pursuing a career in Spanish education. I fell in love with languages, especially the Romance languages!

[altrouge]

My first Spanish lesson was back in secondary school. However, I already had some idea on the language even before that, so learning wasn't really that hard for me compared to my classmates at the time. I already knew a few sentences and the words were very familiar due to my mother's native tongue that I learned growing up. The only problem now though is for me to be fluent at it.

[cefmac]

My first Spanish lesson was in school, and our teacher was a multilingual British woman (kind of the norm for a British secondary school!). It was pretty relaxed, as we just learnt greetings and basic things like that, so we all felt at ease quite quickly.

[Gregor]

My first time was in Italy from an Algerian teacher using French as the medium of teaching. Okay it was quirky, but that was fine. It worked. Took it up properly a few years later in Ireland and I was amazed at how much I remembered.

[thekernel]

Mine was a great, big relief. My teacher was a funny middle-aged man with an endless army of one-liner jokes. I had just switched over from French, and heard from my older brothers that the Spanish teacher had a very simple course. Naturally, the first day he tells us all "You're probably all here because you heard this class was easy. You heard correctly. This class is very easy."

I managed to absorb way more about Spanish in one year than I did with French in several. I didn't have to work as hard to understand Spanish. On day one we learned the enunciation comes on the second to last syllable, unless there was an accent found somewhere in the word. And that there was no other function for the accent. Coming from years of French, where the accents are frequent and confusing, this was a humongous load off my shoulders, and set the tone for my learning.

[GetFresh]

My first Spanish lesson was in high school in Spanish 1.  Our teacher was born and raised in Mexico, but then moved here to the United States. I'm pretty sure she knew what she was talking about since she grew up learning the language.  She was always so passionate about teaching our class it prompted me to take Spanish 2 the following year.  It's too bad I don't even remember half the things she taught us.