Learning a foreign language is difficult, right? Well, yes it is if you start at 11, only do it for three years, get the bare minimum of curriculum time, have your classes so spaced out that you forget what you learned last Wednesday when it comes to the next lesson on Tuesday, and never get to apply your skills, so it’s all theory and no practice (let alone pleasure).
This is pretty much how schoolchildren in the state sector are taught modern foreign languages in the UK. And according to Dr Robert Crawshaw, head of European languages and culture at Lancaster university, it means that the state of language learning is «very variegated» across the country.
source https://www.guardian.co.uk/teacher-network/2013/may/13/languages-uk-schools
