It is often said that if you attend a language course or if you study a language at school you're about to learn that foreign language; well, if on the one hand it is undeniably true that following a course you're laying the foundation stone for your learning process, on the other hand you must have clear in your mind the fact that you cannot learn a language just with classes or grammar exercises.
Learning a language is a process which involves each moment and each field of your everyday life, and it is something which is not only included in the pages of a book, but it is all around you, in every moment of your life. Obviously there must be a starting point, and that starting point may be a language course at school, or even at university, in order to get in touch with the language you want to learn. However, if you stop at the things you can learn during classes, your knowledge about that language will be what we usually call in Italy "Inglese (or whatever language) scolastico". What does this widespread label mean? To me, it means that you know "something" about that language, you know how it sounds, maybe also how it works, you know a lot about its grammar, but maybe nothing about its use in everyday life, its developement or its processes. At school you study foreing languages as well as you study History, or Maths, that is to say, as fixed matters, not as "live" matters as a language actually is.
As far as my PLE is concerned, I must say that the informal part of the learning process has always been very important to me: I remember myself being 12 years old and trying to translate the lyrics of my favourite singers, and at the same time learning new words and expressions without knowing I was actually improving my English. That has always been very useful to me for my learning experience, even if I know that it depends greatly on the level of curiosity each one of us can develop. Personally, I believe that formal learning can just help you to build a background for your language learning process, but you can really learn that language only if you come into contact with its "live" element, with its daily use; actually this can happen only if you manage to make an effort by yourself, and if you're curious enough to dip into that language in order to learn as much as possible about it every time you come across one of its various elements.
While building the mind map for my PLE I decided to show not only the different elements linked to formal and informal learning, but also which skills you're imrpoving while focusing on the two different fields of language learning. This does not mean that if you're watching TV you're not improving your grammar skills, or that during classes you do not improve your listening skills, but I wanted to make this distinction in order to point out where to focus your attention if you feel that you want to improve some of your skills. For instance, as far as my Spanish is concerned, I feel that I should improve my skills in oral production, so that I'll try to focus on the informal learning processes, whereas as far as my French is concerned, I should review my grammar, so that a good grammar book (formal learning) should be the best solution.
Ultimately then, it is a well-known fact that getting in touch with English in informal environments is much easier than with any other language, so that we should be even more encouraged to learn it given the fact that we come across it whenever and wherever we want, or sometimes even if we do not want, we're forced to relate to it. Informal learning processes are obviously more difficult to be developed as far other languages are concerned, but our curiosity should make us look for chances to get into contact with other langauges too.
Camilla
