I can't say I learned English through a method. I learned it at university, while attending Berklee College of Music in Boston, where English was simply the language everything happened in. In the terms of this unit, it was the closest thing to a purely communicative approach: no presentation, no controlled practice, only production, with real people and real consequences.
Was it effective? In the end, yes: I teach the language now. But the beginning was hard, and the limitation was very specific. The pace of conversation with native speakers was too fast for me to keep up, and not everyone had the patience to slow things down. Nobody grades their language for you outside a classroom. That is what immersion lacks and what a good lesson provides: someone who decides how much you can handle today.
So for a new language I would choose the opposite. I have started Spanish a few times and always given up. What I would want is someone by my side, step by step, and a clear staged path to fluency: a structured approach like PPP at the start, with real communication added as soon as I can sustain it. The difficulty is that I know too much. Knowing what learning a language actually takes, the task feels insurmountable before I begin, and that also tells me how an adult beginner must feel on the first day of a course.
In my experience, learning English initially involved a traditional approach, mainly based on the PPP model. This was by far the most common strategy during my middle and high school years (reflecting the methodologies prevalent at the time). I had a similar experience when studying Japanese at university, where a structured approach was essential not only to learn new grammatical structures but also to become familiar with three different writing systems.
One of the main limitations of this kind of procedure was its rigidity. It often seemed to focus on learning and memorising linguistic rules and information that could be used at a later stage, sometimes long after they had been introduced. Despite providing a solid foundation, it did not always make it easy to use the idiom spontaneously. Later, I had the opportunity to experience more immersive learning environments, where language became something to live and use - this encouraged a more communicative, practical approach.
If I were to learn a new language today, I would choose a combination of "structure and communication". I believe these are not separate stages or rigid blocks, instead I think that effective language learning requires flexibility, with structured practice, communication and task-based activities alternating and complementing one another according to learners' needs, goals and progress. In other words, a balance between learning about a language and actually using it.
