Having to understand the concept of grammatical tense through conjugating verbs in Spanish made me actually think about things like past tense, the present participle, the fact that English does not have a future tense, and much more. I’m really thankful for the realization but a little disappointed now that I realize our English curriculum in the United States is basically a culture class more than it is a language class.
There are really two different pedagogical goals:
- Learn to read and write accurately and clearly in the English language (what would, in Spain, Germany or China also be "English Class")
- Practice a REPL regarding things that other people have written (in the context of a larger corpus of things that people have written), by happenstance in English because that's what the students are most familiar with[0]. This could better be called "Language Arts" because presumably they do similar things in Germany, Spain and China but they (also presumably) don't call it "English Class".
[0] I had an angry moment in high school (among many) when I found out that my English class would be spending an entire year reading translated works.
There are different components (the REPL part is called “Literature" when separated out, and other major, though conceptually lower-level, parts are called “Composition” and “Grammar”, and there are probably more; equal with Literature, and also a kind of REPL, are “Conversation” or “Speech”, where the P and, in the former case, the R of the REPL are oral rather than written.)
Foreign languages are often taught similarly, including the REPL parts.
English class is usually a bunch of things. There's a reason they've moved away from just calling it "English", now. Comprehension is a huge part of literacy, yet most adults are pretty bad at it despite all the time schools spend trying to teach it to them.
My main issue with the language was pronunciation and orthography, the fact the way you write is not the way you read for many words was just bonkers for my brain used to read any word in Portuguese and know how to pronounce it but now that I see even natives struggling i don't mind it that much anymore HAHAHA!
The only adopted word I can think of that avoids this is ‘Canyon’, since the y is added from the ñ. In Spanish it is ‘Cañon’.
Brazilian Portuguese and Portugal's Portuguese have very different pronunciation rules (and accents) but you, as a speaker of any of these languages, would know how to pronounce any word you haven't seen before because the phonetics are consistent inside your accent, if you can read a word in Portuguese you know how it's going to be pronounced _in your accent_.
And this just doesn't exist in English as there are multiple words that are written the same but are pronounced differently. So while there are some rules as to how English is spoken the written language does not encode them, mostly because someone somewhere decided to use an orthography that would link the word to its source word in latin or french or whatever.