My first language learning experience

In my primary school years, my country was part of the so-called Eastern Bloc, a group of communist states under the hegemony of the Soviet Union. Therefore, every child had to learn the Russian language. We had no choice. To be quite frank, we were fed up with trying to write and read the strange, unfamiliar signs - the Cyrillic letters - and memorizing the grammar rules. I remember that we liked our teacher, she was our form teacher, but we hated the methods she had to use and we hated the coursebook, too. She had no other option either in those days. So this was not a good start for me because I was far from loving language learning.

Then when the freedom of education came in the 1990s, I felt myself in the middle of an experiment. In high school, my class had 6 or 7 English teachers during the 4 years. It was real chaos. Every teacher used different course books, they thought in different styles and tried different methods. Fortunately, I loved the English language so I tried to learn at home from song lyrics, film subtitles. But I have always struggled with speaking. I knew the grammar rules, the phonetics but we never talked with each other in English in the lessons. The teachers spoke to us in Hungarian and we had to just read and write not to speak in English. I started to attend extra lessons to a private teacher but that was a disappointment as well because I merely had to copy texts, memorizing grammar rules and words without contexts but not to speak.

After the school-leaving exam, I paused language learning for a while because of these negative experiences.