Back in high school I wasn't really interested in language learning. I took spanish and passed fine. I really don't remember what happened my second year nor anything that I learned in the first year besides a stupid sketch about arroz con arroz con pollo.
Fast forward to college. I had a couple German guys in one of my classes. I studied with them a couple times. Fast forward again. I was looking for a summer class to fulfill a GE requirement and I found an intensive German class that met the requirement. I decided to take it, one because it was 2 weeks long and two I thought it would be cool to learn German because of the exchange students I met. Anyway the class was pretty fun. It was the standard classroom approach of working through a textbook, memorizing vocab and taking tests. After I finished the classes I didn't really do anything more with what I had learned. Well I looked for cartoons dubbed in German to watch. That was fun and found a lot of good cartoons. I watched them but with the wrong mindset. I'll talk about that later.
So basically a year later I got interested again and picked up a book from the library and started to try to work through it. Needless to say it didn't go well. I didn't put to much time into it and got confused by the German cases. Anyway I bought two cheap workbooks(German Made Simple and German Grammar Drills) from amazon, thinking that they would be better that the 30 year old book I was using. I started with GMS and made it through a few chapters. I wasn't really trying and didn't really try to learn the vocab in each chapter. I made to about chapter 10 but couldn't understand a lot of the sentences. I wasn't really dedicated and would do a part of chapter every once and a while. I still watched cartoons hoping somehow I would pick up the language. I also tried listening the Deutsche Welle Warum nicht series but it was boring and slow.
Let's fast forward a little more (about five months). We did a lot of fast forwarding. Anyway I saw a post on Lifehacker about learning languages which really inspired me to refocus and try again. I started to look more into how people learn languages and discovered that there is not one correct way. It really depends on your own learning style. In this search I discovered Steve Kaufman and some other youtube polyglots. I really liked Steve's input based method and started practicing my own version of it, with cartoons of course but with a different mind set this time. I also found some Steven Krashen's papers on second language acquisition. His ideas were very fascinating to me. He basically says the keys to language acquisition are constant comprehensible input at an n+1 level in a low stress/anxiety environment. Everything that I was reading had me very excited about language learning.
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