High school
After my primary school I wanted to study Management in machining industry in high school. I studied two languages there, German and English. German was my first foreign language and I used to have it three times a week. English was was only once a week (one lesson took 45 minutes). Fortunately, for both langauges we had the same teachers for the whole time, so there was not any problem with starting again and again as before. I started learning English there, and it was my first experience
with that language. As a total beginner who did not know anything about English, we were issued a book printed at Cambridge University that was completely in English. It was quite a difficult subject, but for me no subject had ever been difficult enough that I would have given it up without trying my best. I mean, a lot of students did not make any affort while learning subjects in primary school and high school. Some of them were satisfied with their grades, even though they had bad grades (maybe their parents did not care so much). So that's why even languages were not such
difficult subjects for me—I worked so hard on them. In the beginning of the final year, I had to decide what subjects I wanted to do for my final exam at high school. I could have picked a language or maths. A lot of students picked a language – either German or English. For me, I picked maths. I really enjoyed maths at high school. To me it was playing with numbers and variables--it was a subject that I enjoyed most of all. I decided to go to a technical university and to have fun with the similar subjects based on that.
So that's why I focused on maths even more in my final year and I even picked maths as my final exam, and from that point on I did not care about languages at all, because learning languages was not really enjoyable for me. Why not? I was used to memorizing vocabulary for tests and preparing for conversations for a specific topic, but I must say that I did not listen to anything at home, I did not speak German with anyone, anywhere —it was only used in at high school. So, let's calculate: 5 minutes per each lesson, 3 lessons a week, four weeks a month, 10 months a year, for four
years – so the result is 2400 minutes, which is 40 hours. Forty hours speaking for four years with my Czech speaking schoolmates did make me fluent at all. How could it? When I randomly heard native German speakers on radio and television, I did not understand them. And that was after 6 years of studying at my primary school and 4 years at my high school! So after 10 years of studying German “properly,“ according to SCHOOL METHODS, I had made very little progress fro such a hardworking student. Thinking about it now, it's obvious that I did not really care about my results in German at the time.
