As with anything, there are always lots of different reports and views about the wrong and right ways to learn a language. A report found in the Washington post quoted an Andrew Eil - a staffer who works at the U.S. State Department on international climate change, who recommends that foreign language students start with “boot camp�. He believes in studying grammar very hard, doing drills of vocabulary every day, and forcing yourself to talk. This regimen, he claims, put him in a position to develop high levels of competence in several languages; he now speaks Russian and French fluently and can converse in Mandarin and Kazakh. Others would disagree and find this system just doesn't work for them and I have heard many people say they have studied incredibly hard in this fashion for an exam, only to find they couldn't remember hardly anything the day after!
I personally feel that different people work in different ways and brain function and capability can differ from person to person. I remember as an A Level student I liked to write lists and learn vocabulary in a methodical fashion- but how much of that stuck in my brain, I don’t know. What I do know is that when I moved to the North of Spain and I could see the language working for me in its own environment, is when I truly became confident with my Spanish. Whether this was due to immersion or because I was putting the language to use and seeing it in context, is unknown. Our books,