Become Fluent in a Language in High School

It's a common question: why am I not fluent in Spanish, French or Japanese ever having suffered through two to four years of it during high school? As you probably know from your own experience and that of your friends, high school language education helpful for ordering in restaurants, useful for getting into a good college, and perhaps makes a vacation seem slightly more authentic, but very rarely leads to a truly fluent level of speaking, writing and comprehension.

Download Drill of National Exam 2010

Download Drill of Soal Bahasa Indonesia UN SMA / MA 2010




Download Complete Solutions of Drill of Bahasa Indonesia - UN SMA / MA 2010

First, the human brain is a language learning machine during its younger years and becomes less receptive to languages starting at puberty. Second, we were never really meant to learn a language in a class room like something such as history or calculus. Instead, we all learned our first language through a natural process of immersion: Before we started speaking, we had exposure to thousands of hours of conversation around us.
When beginning to speak, we were strongly encouraged and not punished for small errors. Compared to this organic experience, learning a language from a book is dramatically different. Even if language classes cannot reproduce the immersion that we all had growing up, it's still starting too late: language classes that began in elementary school or even before would be dramatically more effective.