Thoughts on learning English that I rarely see addressed in English classes

These ideas come from two perspectives:
learning Spanish, French, Italian, and Russian as a student, and teaching English 1:1 to over 150 students over the past four years.

I also spent hundreds of hours learning Spanish in Spanish, in classes designed for multilingual groups. For a long time, I believed this was the “best” and most rigorous way to learn a language.

Later, when I tried to teach Spanish to English speakers, something surprising happened.
I realized I didn’t understand much of the grammar as clearly as I thought I did.

The reason wasn’t lack of exposure — it was how I had learned. My focus had always been on getting words out quickly. In real communication, there’s no time to consciously apply rules. Over time, I also discovered that many grammar points I had learned as fundamentally different from English weren’t actually that different at all. I had made them more complicated than they needed to be.

That experience reshaped how I think about language learning.