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Why is second language education so routinely terrible in the United States? (not sure if it is like this in other countries as well, but speaking to what I know). Not only do students almost never achieve fluency after nearly two decades in the system (grade school through college), but the entire academic structure seems completely in denial about what actually is effective at generating fluency. Research on second language acquisition has consistently shown that immersion based approaches with a small amount of grammar at early levels is much more effective than the grammar/translation method. Yet every language class I've been in, from middle school on has been laser focused on verb conjugations, and direct translations. I can excuse this at the high school level because teachers aren't exposed to the latest pedagogical research. But at universities where part of the job of many of these instructors is pedagogical research, this approach is frankly embarrassing and a huge waste of student's time.
I have two theories on why this might be the case. Firstly, immersion learning doesn't really lend itself to test-taking, which is a necessary part of the academic system. Secondly, there is no incentive to actually teach language effectively at scale: Americans don't need to understand foreign languages, and the ones that do want to become diplomats or do business in other countries eventually seek out immersion approaches on their own.
I think this applies in a lesser sense to the entire educational structure in the US, baring maybe doctorate level education. There's so much useless crap in the system that doesn't help with the learning or retention of relevant information. Bryan Caplan makes a compelling case in The Case Against Education that this is by design because the point of education is signaling. I think he's mainly correct, which is why the lib bandying of education as a panacea to society's problems makes me want to tear my hair out.
The US actually discouraged second language learning for a period out of patriotism/final assimilation of Ellis islanders.
I'm also very skeptical of immersion as an adult language-learning strategy. The results based experts on adult language learning use grammar-translation- places like the US military's language academy, or missionary training hubs, use... classes, with blackboards and verb conjugation exercises and vocab flashcards. They also do immersion on top of it, but they start with grammar-translation.
I think you need to look harder if you're skeptical of immersion as an adult strategy. It is the current thing on language learning YouTube and has some pretty impressive results. That said, I think it's swung too far in the immersion direction: grammar and vocabulary drilling immensely accelerate the process. Pure immersion by itself isn't incredibly efficient.
You can, however, become fluent through immersion alone: see the millions or maybe even billions of Chinese and Europeans who learned English through watching TV. I don't think the same is true for grammar/translation: Latin instruction is probably the best example of this, where you have professors treating each sentence like it's grammatical puzzle to be solved rather than just reading the text like they would have been able to if they'd incorporated more immersion.
It seems worth noting that English is pretty hard on the uninflected end of world languages- for Spanish or Russian you have to memorize conjugation tables. I don't deny that immersion is a real thing that greatly accelerates previous lessons(which those chinamen and euros did have, even if they didn't make it all the way to fluency). I deny that it's sufficient for fluency in itself.
Well you would eventually learn the conjugations through immersion, it's just slow. I've experienced this through learning Italian where I eventually just figured out how to conjugate some basic verbs (esssere and avere for example). Of course in practice it would be dumb not to just learn them through grammar study: I've learned far more conjugations in a few weeks of Italian class at Hopkins than I learned through osmosis in the ~150 hours of immersion that I've done in the language.
My own personal approach is hybrid of the grammar study and immersion methods for this reason. Certain things are much more efficiently learned through deliberate study, like conjugations or prepositions, and honestly even vocabulary words. But to truly internalize them, immersion is key.
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