- Saturday, October 11th. 10am - 3pm Central (Chicago time). Zoom. - For Beginners. - 5 spots available. - Sign up: https://langmatrix.com/one-day-5-hour-class This class will teach you to teach yourself Spanish.

I was able to find 2 of the worst language learning things back-to-back. The first is when we're asked to conjugate verbs to fill in the blanks of a sentence that has no context and has nothing to do with the actual exchange of thoughts. It wants you to say, I lived with my grandparents when I was a kid. And the other is like she brought me a computer and ... the rest seems like a typo. Even without typos, this exercise is so far removed from communication and real language learning that it gives me vertigo. Even in English, these exercises are confusing, straining, and tiring. It should be easy to say, I lived in such and such place growing up. Where did you live growing up? Where did you buy your computer? Oh I bought it at XYZ place. Can't we just do that? It's not that hard and we would be actually conversing in Japanese or whatever, right away. Why take an easy thing and make it weird and difficult and unnatural? Speaking of unnatural, that brings us to the second thing -- the Spider-Man thing -- where 6 or so similar-sounding words are unnaturally placed side-by-side so we are supposed to say oh man Spanish is hard, look how similar those words are, how am I going to *remember* that? Those words will never go side-by-side in real life! When was the last time Peter Piper picked a pack of pickled peppers actually came up in real conversation for you? This is difficulty for the sake of difficulty. I believe subconsciously some language learners take comfort in seeing languages their most absurdly difficult form, because then they can justify their lack of real progress (i.e. actual communication skill). If language patterns are easy (which they are), then the onus is on me to make something happen with the language. But if language patterns are hard (which they're not) I can say, well what do you expect? Of course I'm not making progress, look at how hard this language is!