Hermit wrote:True. Yet, there is a place for rote learning. Take Latin, for example. It's a beautiful and elegant language. It is also extremely consistent. Exceptions are few and far between. However, you'd waste a lot of time trying to come to grips with it if you tried to learn its conjugations and declensions just by doing and using intuition. Learning the correct endings of words by rote to begin with saves a lot of time on one's path toward fluency and competence. Even by remembering a short, rhythmical ditty as a memory bridge will soon teach you when to use the ablative. It then becomes second nature to not say "ad nauseum". I really wish I had put more of an effort in to learning it, but rote learning is anathema to anyone who is as lazy as I am.
I can't disagree with you there, but Latin is a dead language.
Modern second language acquisition theory is much more geared towards real-life communication, rather than academic work. I do tell my students to memorize what then need to for success in academics, but I emphasize to them that most (not all) of that is practically useless for achieving face-to-face fluency, which is what most of them desire most. The problem is that they don't distinguish between those two very different purposes, and thus use inefficient study methods. That is, they study in ways that will help them academically and expect that skill to automatically transfer to their real-life conversational skills. It just doesn't work that way, according to research.
That said, even modern language pedagogy recognizes that the adult has cognitive capacities that children don't, so that adults may speed up their language acquisition with conscious study. The question is a matter of emphasis. Here in Korea, the emphasis is on conscious study (memorization) of rules and vocabulary, with little regard for the learner's innate capacity for subconscious language acquisition (development of intuition). Judging from what you and Sælir describe of your early English education, the teachers were giving priority to taking advantage of your innate capacity, using conscious learning as a supplement. That's what I try to do over here, and what I try to teach my students to do when they become teachers in the future. The research and resultant theories are useless if they aren't applied.
"A philosopher is a blind man in a dark room looking for a black cat that isn't there. A theologian is the man who finds it." ~ H. L. Mencken
"We ain't a sharp species. We kill each other over arguments about what happens when you die, then fail to see the fucking irony in that."
"It is useless for the sheep to pass resolutions in favor of vegetarianism while the wolf remains of a different opinion."