Thoughts on a best teacher to learn a language from

When I was studying French, my teacher liked to measure out the knowledge at her own pace. If you asked about something that in her study plan was a couple of weeks later, she would pretty much tell you to learn what you are supposed to know first.

Being the kind of person who likes to connect the dots and figure out what’s important and what’s not himself, I was somewhat annoyed at this spoon-fed method.

Now that I started Spanish, my new teacher is completely opposite. She would answer any question, go into long - dare I say rambling - discussions of what rules and exceptions apply where and how spanish Spanish would be different from a south-american Spanish. She would even throw in linguistic/phonetic terms (like Alveolar) while trying to explain pronunciation differences.

This does not seem to work too well either. It is probably slightly easier for me, since it is not a first foreign language I am studying (4th ?!?), but other people seem to be rather confused at times. And even for myself, I have to double check online some of the points afterwards.

And that’s just third lesson. I am not looking forward to the second semester, unless Spanish is so much easier than French that everything just falls into place with enough practice.

Still, given a choice, I would probably go for the teacher I have now and supplement it with my own parallel study.

We shall see if this is this opinion will keep all the way to after the exam…..