E64 We Quit! (...Our Language Lessons)

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[00:00:03.200] - Oliver (Host)

Welcome to English and Beyond, the advanced version of the podcast. The aim of the podcast is to give you either unusual topics or topics discussed from an unusual perspective. If this podcast is a little tricky to understand, you can either use the free transcript and vocab flashcards available online at morethanalanguage.com, or you could try out our intermediate-level podcast. My name is Oliver. I am an English teacher, but as you may know, if you've listened to previous episodes or my Spanish language podcast, I am not only a language teacher, but a language student. I've been studying French for a little over two years alongside my partner, César, who will be joining us shortly. And two months ago, in a burst of optimism, we decided to try something new that we hadn't done for French, or in fact, for any language in the last 15 years, really: proper in-person French lessons for a full academic year at a language school here in Valencia. A sort of motivational upgrade, we could say. A way to force ourselves into consistent commitment to the language. But, unfortunately, this leads us quickly and neatly to today's topic, quitting those French lessons. It's a bit embarrassing to quit a language course while literally working as a language teacher.

[00:01:26.680] - Oliver (Host)

And worse than that, it's up for debate whether our reasons for are really good enough. I'm a bit surprised by our lack of staying power, frankly. But maybe you can relate to that, listener. In fact, I'm supposed to be in my French class right now, but I've skipped yet another lesson. My teenage goody-goody self would be horrified. But César is doing even worse. He hasn't been to a lesson for weeks. And all of this despite our years of experience of actually working really hard on our languages. So, what has gone wrong? Well, the reality is, nothing really. As you'll hear in the dialogue portion of this episode, we have found any old excuse not to go to class. Nothing says committed language learner quite like abandoning a course after two months because the classroom is cold, the commute is annoying, and half the students look like they've just escaped an end of secondary school exam. César has already left the course entirely. I'm still keeping up the pretence that I might go back, but we both know at this point that it's basically a fiction. But perhaps the most ridiculous part is that in 2025, the age of infinite alternatives, we voluntarily signed up to these classes at all.

[00:02:48.160] - Oliver (Host)

We decided to commit to sitting in a fluorescent classroom with terrible acoustics, correcting workbook exercises with 25 strangers like it was 1999. And why? Nowadays, we have apps. We have personalised tutors on italki or similar websites. We have podcasts, literally designed for people who can't be bothered to sit in a classroom. There are YouTube channels, AI tools, spaced repetition flashcard systems, entire digital ecosystems, built so we never have to commute anywhere again to learn a language. There are comprehensive, engaging language courses available online for a great price - that is literally our job. It's what César and I do. As a result of improvements to technology, realistically, no modern language learner needs to carry a textbook heavier than a laptop. They never even need to leave the house. So what possessed us to do it? Was it nostalgia, a romanticised memory of being students, the fantasy that a classroom magically gives you discipline? Or did we just forget that the internet exists somehow? Either way, as I said, César has already jumped ship. I'm about one semi-cold evening away from doing the same. So today we're talking about how this all began and how two people who teach languages for a living managed to lose interest in formally studying one in less than three months.

[00:04:20.760] - Oliver (Host)

César, how are you?

[00:04:22.420] - César (Guest)

I'm good, thank you.

[00:04:23.520] - Oliver (Host)

Good? Yeah? (Yeah.) A little bit cold.

[00:04:26.180] - César (Guest)

It is cold.

[00:04:27.160] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah, for the first time in ages, because the problem with Valencia, obviously, is the weather is normally very good, so almost no one has any heating in the house. I'm wearing a jumper, which is unheard of, basically, for me in Valencia.

[00:04:41.000] - César (Guest)

Although we went for a walk before and you were just wearing your T-shirt on the street.

[00:04:46.250] - Oliver (Host)

When the sun shines on you, then it's totally fine. But when you're in your house and the house itself hasn't caught the heat, then I find it actually quite cold. And the cold is relevant for what we're going to be discussing today, which is that you and me, I, you and I, haven't shown the staying power that we maybe should have shown or should be showing.

[00:05:07.300] - César (Guest)

What do you mean?

[00:05:08.840] - Oliver (Host)

We're talking today about leaving French lessons. You have totally decided already, and I am on the verge of deciding to not go back to our French lessons that we started at the end of September. And the cold is relevant to this, in a second, which we'll get on to, to an extent, at least. I think that we should probably talk a little a bit about why we started doing French lessons in the first place. Do you want to talk about that? What made you sign up to these French lessons in a language school here in Valencia?

[00:05:39.760] - César (Guest)

Well, firstly, because I wanted to do things that were a bit social, for meeting people and things like that.

[00:05:47.840] - Oliver (Host)

So that we could finally have some friends.

[00:05:49.780] - César (Guest)

Exactly. Interestingly enough, the people in the French lesson were either very, very young for me or more mature. So basically, I think I was the only person in my 30s.

[00:06:02.440] - Oliver (Host)

In your 30s? Yeah. Okay.

[00:06:05.480] - César (Guest)

Which is fine. Obviously, I'm not going to hang out with people who are 18. It's also difficult to make friends with someone who's your mum's age.

[00:06:16.760] - Oliver (Host)

Because they see you as the 18-year-old as well. (Exactly.) They're like, this person has nothing in common with me.

[00:06:22.910] - César (Guest)

I get along with everyone, and they're very nice. But yeah, that social part is not going to be there for sure. Another reason why I wanted to do these lessons in a classroom was because I kind of missed being in a classroom, meeting people, having a teacher, going to the school, blah, blah, blah. So I think I romanticised that, and I forgot about what it takes to go to the school and the commute and the time that you are not... You have to stop working, in my case, to go to the lesson.

[00:07:02.380] - Oliver (Host)

Because you've been learning French for about three years now, and you've been doing so mostly by yourself. You've had an online teacher from time to time.

[00:07:12.420] - César (Guest)

Online courses as well.

[00:07:14.120] - Oliver (Host)

But one of the difficulties, obviously, and one of the things about learning a language by yourself is that you have to have motivation. You have to be self-motivated. You have to be quite driven to do it. You have to get into a pattern. And that's actually really hard when you're working full-time, obviously. And let's say you have commitments, commitments to your friends, commitments to your family, commitments to your health, like going to the gym, anything like that. I think that a lot of the time, languages can slip into that nice to have but not really necessary part of our lives. (Absolutely.) One of the advantages that I think we both thought was like, Okay, right. I know I need to just turn up to those two, two-hour lessons, so four hours a week of lessons. And then that's basically my my French learning taken care of in terms of organisation, right? But then you realise, as you started to say, but then you realise the disadvantages that come with having something fixed. What kinds of problems have you experienced being in a formal class, a large class, with lots of people studying French?

[00:08:22.700] - César (Guest)

Yes, basically, obviously, because we were 20, 25 people in the classroom when we were at the beginning of the lesson for example, correcting the homework, the exercises. It felt too much like I was 12 in secondary school again, and we were like, basically, each person was correcting a phrase, and it took 10 minutes until you say something in French and -

[00:08:44.800] - Oliver (Host)

Reading around the class, right? You do a sentence.

[00:08:47.300] - César (Guest)

Or reading a conversation for two phrases each person.

[00:08:51.480] - Oliver (Host)

It's actually quite funny because I've realised while I'm doing this, sorry to interrupt you, but how much I have changed as a student, because when I was at school, I was always that person, despite what we said about me over the summer, always that person who'd be wanting to put up their hand and wanting to volunteer to do as much as possible, not in French, I have to say, but in my other lessons that I actually enjoyed. And here, I feel like one of those moody teenagers that sits, sprawled at the back of the classroom. And with the other kids, the other students who are much more involved and wanting to read as much as possible, I'm like, Who cares? A little bit more. (You're the rebel.) Well, yeah, relatively. It can tell you about the level of rebellion in our classes.

[00:09:36.100] - César (Guest)

I think another thing that really put me off was the fact that obviously, if you study in a school, especially this one, it's got a specific structure. You have to go buy the book.

[00:09:48.970] - Oliver (Host)

Literally, they're going in the order of the book.

[00:09:52.020] - César (Guest)

Literally, and they give you a list of rules of use of a specific tense, for example. Me, as a language teacher, I hate that. There were a lot of clashes between how I was being taught and how I teach. I'm not saying that my teaching style is better, but I truly believe that the way I teach languages is more beneficial than the traditional, very traditional, old-school method of list of vocabulary, list of tense uses, and things like that.

[00:10:27.200] - Oliver (Host)

But I think that also it comes down to the fact that when you teach, when you have taught in the past, you've been teaching one person, or you have your online courses for Spanish, which is effectively one person. It's you and the student. You might be recorded, but everything has been designed for that individual, for a single person to complete. And therefore, there isn't this emphasis on reading around the class or something like that. But it's the reality in these schools of having a class of 25 people, and also people that don't come for a few weeks, people that join the class a month or two late, and you have to incorporate things that are not totally efficient for us into this teaching. (Exactly.) For me, I think that's been the problem of the lessons. I think the teacher is really good. We have the same teacher. I really like him. He's very funny. I love the way that he laughs, which is a nice little touch. He laughs like someone in the Simpsons.

[00:11:18.850] - César (Guest)

He's very friendly.

[00:11:19.960] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah. But the problem that I have is that the lessons are two hours. It takes me more than half an hour to get there and back. So really, it's three hours, twice a week. This is where the cold comes in because you're having to walk. You're late at night. My lessons are from 7: 00 till 9: 00. So it's cold and I'm fed up. It's the end of the day. It's not what I want to do. Then you go to the lesson, and because there are 25 people in the class, you will maybe say five sentences. And even if you want to be keen, there's not actually that much scope for you to - you know, we almost never speak off the cuff. There's almost never formulating the grammar as you go. It's all answering the questions.

[00:12:06.080] - César (Guest)

And filling in the gaps, grammar, exercises.

[00:12:08.710] - Oliver (Host)

Exactly. There's very little opportunity for you to have any personality or show, or test kind of what you know. You've completed the exercise, so you check you've understood the exercise, and that's all that you can do with 25 people.

[00:12:22.900] - César (Guest)

In my case as well, my lessons are earlier than that. They were 5: 00 to 7: 00, so I had to stop working around 4: 00...

[00:12:31.080] - Oliver (Host)

You love working. You actually do love working. I'm not being sarcastic.

[00:12:34.600] - César (Guest)

I enjoy work. I like my work a lot, my job. But it was taking a toll in the sense that I was leaving so much work behind these two days in the afternoon. So in the end, I realised that this school is really good in the sense that people who have been studying their French from the very beginning, they're progressing. It's just that you progress at a lower speed, right?

[00:13:02.020] - Oliver (Host)

Well, yeah, because in my class, there are people that have been in that school for six or seven years, and their French is good. But it's -

[00:13:10.300] - César (Guest)

But they got the same level as you, and you achieved it in two years.

[00:13:15.300] - Oliver (Host)

Yeah, because I had more flexibility in my time. I was able to dedicate more time to it, whereas they had that fixed period.

[00:13:21.760] - César (Guest)

I think any resource or any programme, any course in language learning, it could be good for someone and might not work out for someone else. It didn't work out for us.

[00:13:34.940] - Oliver (Host)

I actually think my French has gotten worse since I've been going.

[00:13:38.610] - César (Guest)

Okay, that's bad.

[00:13:39.920] - Oliver (Host)

It's really not the teacher's fault, obviously. I really don't.

[00:13:42.760] - César (Guest)

I actually-You relied on going to these lessons and do it less on your own.

[00:13:46.300] - Oliver (Host)

Exactly. I basically stopped doing anything by myself because I was like, Well, I'm spending these essentially six hours a week going to these lessons and doing these lessons. I don't have time to do more. So I'm not consolidating the stuff that I've learned in past. I realised that when we were doing a lesson recently on the present subjunctive, that there are elements of it that were actually less right at the front of my memory than before I started the lessons.

[00:14:11.900] - César (Guest)

It's like going to the gym on your own being very motivated and then saying, Okay, I'm going to get a personal trainer twice a week. Because you're paying and you're taking these sessions with a personal trainer, you do less on your own the rest of the day, so you don't take care of your food during the week.

[00:14:33.100] - Oliver (Host)

Also, lots of people will pay for a personal trainer, and then they'll think, Okay, great, that's taken care of. But they won't even then try with the personal trainer. They'll stand around and chat. That's the equivalent of what I've been doing in my French lessons, where I've just been relaxed, I haven't worked hard enough, I haven't worked outside of the lessons. I've regarded it almost as an imposition.

[00:14:51.980] - César (Guest)

Yeah, again, it all boils down to the fact that you have to see if you're going to progress with the method, if you are progressing, if it's working out for you, and if you have another option, just shift it, change it. That's what we've done, right? We were now using... I stopped going to these lessons, but we have a teacher who we share.

[00:15:14.350] - Oliver (Host)

Like a tutor.

[00:15:16.540] - César (Guest)

Like a tutor. Once a week. I keep studying with my online lessons, with my grammar book as well.

[00:15:23.480] - Oliver (Host)

And your French has really improved in the last couple of weeks. (Yeah.) Ironically. Because I felt bad when I made the decision of quitting this school. You didn't even tell me, really. You just stopped going.

[00:15:34.860] - César (Guest)

I was like, Okay, César, if you're going to quit, you have to be very thorough with your schedule and really work on your French during the week. So that's what I've been doing. I feel at this point, I'm very motivated. I know it will go down and it will go back up again.

[00:15:51.920] - Oliver (Host)

It's paying dividends.

[00:15:53.400] - César (Guest)

It's paying dividends, that's true. It's paying off.

[00:15:55.820] - Oliver (Host)

It's paying off, exactly. Okay, well, thank you very much, César, for talking to me about this. (You're very welcome.) And, speak you soon. (See you later.) Bye bye! Thank you very much, listener, for listening. And we'll see you later, too, I hope.

[00:16:12.020] - César (Guest)

Or watcher, no?

[00:16:13.750] - Oliver (Host)

Well, yeah, if you're watching, then thank you for watching. See you later.