Observing the class up close I couldn't help but compare it to my high school and college experiences in foreign language classes. The children were given an exercise where animals were missing a feature. The elephant was missing it's feet, a zebra its stripes, a girafe it's spots, etc. The children had to answer questions using the verb tener saying something like the following:
"Elefanté no tiene pies!"
Of course I'm going from memory and probably getting it wrong, which is kind of my point. You see I can conjugate tener (to have) in my sleep:
| Yo tengo |
| Tú tienes |
| Él tiene |
| Nosotros tenemos |
| Ellos Tienen |
But I can't seem to use it in a sentence unless it's a sentence I practiced like "Yo Tengo Hambre" (I am hungry). When you learn Spanish at the higher levels an enormous amount of time is spent learning conjugations, repeating them over and over. That makes a certain amount of sense, you only learn a language through repetition, but it's often done at the expense of conversation. In the event I do formulate a sentence it is so formal that any Spanish speaker immediately switches to English for my benefit.
The children on the other hand have no idea what tense they are using tener in. They only know they are talking about elephants and girafes, which is the same way they learn their native tongue. It's tempting to say that won't work with adults, but with so many different immersion classes popping up I'm not willing to dismiss the idea. Indeed the Barron's course I bought quite some time ago says that virtually the only way to become fluent and sound right is to repeat native speakers, and doesn't spend much time on conjugations. Seems like something might be worth another try.
