Saville-Troike's Chapters 1 and 2

This reading has me thinking about a couple of things. First, one of the final questions of chapter one asks, "Do you think that you are (or would be) a "good" or a "poor" L2 learner? Why do you think so?" This question got me thinking about my own experience with learning languages which seems to have changed over the years. In high school, I took two years of Spanish. I really liked it... Well, most of it. My first year, I had an awesome teacher. The class would sit around and talk with the teacher in Spanish. He would introduce new words and encourage us to attempt to figure them out. It was a lot of fun, and I learned quite a bit. My second year, I had a different teacher. She would provide us with stories of elephants that ate peanut soup, and monkeies that fell from trees, and made us retell the stories in different tenses many times. I quickly began to feel that I was wasting my time and didn't sign up for another year. I realize now that what I lacked was the interaction, which Muriel Saville-Troike says is necessary for learning a language.

Many yeas later in college, I took a semester of Japanese. Though we barely made it through the basic characters and beginning vocabulary, I still felt that I learned a lot. This time though, I had to put in more conscious effort to learning. Perhaps this stems from the fact that I couldn't transfer my knowledge of the alphabet because the Japanese characters look totally different from anything I'm used to. At least with Spanish I didn't have to re-learn how to read and my thinking about what a letter is. I wonder if other languages are like this...

The second thing that this reading made me think about is who constitutes as a second language learner? On page 9 of chapter two, for example, provides a chart of people learning a language as a first or second language. What measures are enabling them to qualify someone as L1 or L2? Would I be considered a L2 for Spanish and Japanese even if I am not actively learning the languages? Also, if learning a language never fully stops, what age is the cutoff to be able to say "This many people are learning X language as L1?" Perhaps the only way for me to find these answers is to look up and read the original source.