It amazes me that people find articles like this to be useful.

I would not blame languages schools only, I think (from my experience) that attending classes have helped a lot but sometimes students gets lazy (including myself) and they think that by attending classes they are doing enough or they just enroll a language course to get a certificate. 

I think everything is important and spending time out of the class doing things in English regularly, is the key: looking for language partners and practice, listening to videos/podcasts in your target language, reading books or articles ... 

I really agree with you, I have seen how persons from universities come to ask me for help even when I barely finished the basic school (because I considered it boooooooring) they are used to solve problems based in rules which as you said "this is completely unrealistic !!" learn a new language is not a "math problem" is just about comunication as simple as that if you feel tired  you say "I am tired" as easylike that.

so much people ask me for help because they know that "I can learn so easy" they say. and I have been gotten work as private teacher and the first thing that I say to them is "forget all that you have learnt in the school and relax" so we learn playing and in a natural way without problems or rules, and not only at learning languages, this can be used in different cases. 

how am I sure that this method works?  because I have used it my born~language is Spanish, but easily I learnt english (because of the videogames ) and I used that english during years without knowing anything about rules or grammar I made friends playing online and chatting in english.

Later I had to learn Japanese because of some works that I had to take care and I won't say that I became a Master in Japanese, but I could chat with japanese people without problems using the same method, without rules or real grammar, just Identify the important words and mixing them you know "try~ fail~ try ~ fail ~succeed" method. Later I had to lear a little of Tagalo  that 5 or 7 years ago.

(continues....)

Is it true that the schools got it wrong and we got it right? I doubt it.

At school, rarely can we find a native fluent speaker as a teacher. That costs! Furthurmore, even if we had a native speaker, the teacher could only spend one session with us. These restrain our learning in the narural way like toddlers. As students with native language knowledge , which can be so different from the targeted language,  teaching us about the rules and reasoning is not a bad idea.

Without those boring useless stuff, do you think we can pick up the targeted language so easily? Three slices of breads made you feel full, can you just appreciate the third slice ? :)

You just remind me of sayings I heard in my country of origin:

The difference between idiot and genius is the genius knows when to stop, yet the idiot does not know when to stop

and more often than not, idiots are working harder than a genius..........

The other saying is

"Children are often taught to be an idiot by earnest teachers. " 

There are 2 things we have to clarify: validity and reliability

The former one is teachers are using the "proper way" to teach and the latter one indicates teachers are always contributing to efforts to sustain the quality. I consider language teachers and learners had better focus more on validity.

Thanks for your writing.