The other two languages that I feel more or less fluent in are English and French, but I have a really different experience with each of them and I have learned them in quite different ways.
I will start with English, because it is my first foreign language and the one I have been studying for the longest time. At present in Spain students start studying English earlier than I did, even though I am not sure this means they will do better in the future. In my time as a student we started at 6th (more or less at 12 years old).
The foreign language teaching here is really unproductive and not the best way for one to learn the real language. Fortunately, I was one of the few privileged students that had a native speaking English teacher for the first two years. She was tough and strict, but I learned a lot (even if I was taught in the traditional way); to the point that I consider that they were indeed the only two years in which I really learned something about English in school.
From then on, I just had several average teachers that just repeated the same boring and utterly useless things year after year. Maybe it was just a coincidence, but those first two years with that native speaking teacher, I was in no way a brilliant English student; in fact, nothing could be further from the truth!
However, in the years that followed (High School), I was one of the best students in my English class, although I really did not do anything to deserve that “title,” as I did not really study a lot.
There was no Internet or anything similar available to us, so we did not have the amount of resources that we have at present. Apart from the little bit that you got at school, it was hard to get any materials with real English content of any kind, aside from the occasional movies playing in some small old-fashioned cinema from time to time.
Thank you very much Seraph! I really like your voice and you did a great job. The audio quality is also amazing! :-)