I have a test coming up this week, which will ascertain whether I am ready to move up to the next level of Spanish classes. I don't feel particularly confident, so I have spent the last couple of days drilling. Hours and hours I have spent repeating over and over again lists of irregular verbs, conjugations for different tenses, formulas for making comparisons and expressing obligations and, of course, all the uses of the dreaded prepositions.
Feeling like I was back at school, I came to the realisation that this is actually how you need to learn a language. It's all well and good taking a relaxed attitude and resting on the idea that because you are supposedly immersed in a language by living in a foreign country, you will automatically start to absorb it simply by osmosis.
Up to a point, this is true; by being constantly exposed to a language you can't help but start to pick it up. However, to be able to function in a language, to have what you want to say ready on the tip of your tongue rather than finding yourself drifting off in mid-conversation while you cast your mind back to a lesson you were in once, for that you need to have the grammar cemented in your brain. And the only way to do that is to revisit your school days, when you sat at home reciting times tables in preparation for a test the next day.
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