2nd Language Acquistion: When it comes to learning a foreign languages which is best — the classroom, online learning or study abroad?

I’m a native American and my 1st language is English. I attended Welsh Sunday School and Swedish Sunday School as a child and I traveled to Sweden as young as 11-years old. I grew up in a multi-ethnic steel mill working class neighborhood in the Northeast Ohio / Western Penn. region (think Youngstown, Canton, Akron, Cleveland, Pittsburgh) where I was accustomed to our neighbors speaking other languages, including Arabic, German, Polish, Greek, and Italian. This might have pre-disposed me to learning languages.

In college, I studied French, Italian, Classical Greek, Hebrew, Classical Latin and Modern Welsh. I acquired a postgrad certificate in TESOL 3 years ago, and I’ve lived more than 13 years abroad, mostly in Italy, Britain, and with many trips passing through the Czech Republic, Germany, Spain, Netherlands, and France.

My Italian spouse once told me, when we’d already been together for almost 11 years, “You are getting something from me and my family that is better than all your schools and lessons!” This was 100% correct. Every time we traveled to Italy, a caravan of several carloads of family would whisk us from the train station or airport to their remote mountain villages, where no one for 50 miles around spoke fluent English.

In all those years, I never got to visit the Vatican in Rome, the Tower in Pisa, the canals of Venice — instead, I wandered cobbled streets in sunny medieval hilltop towns and tried to be understood. Hundreds of sheep spilled across my path and I learned dozens of new words every day — sometimes, every hour!

This is my bias — go somewhere foreign, and in whatever way you can afford, go native. Deprive yourself of any visible means of support, and learn the language the organic way. There’s a proverb in Italian that goes something like, “You can’t really speak the language until you learn to sing, argue, make love and break dishes in la bella lingua . . .” I can attest that it’s true.

So, where does this leave classroom language learning and learning online? I will discuss this in coming weeks.