Learning language might not be the most fun thing to do. It is difficult and at times not so fun especially when you have to study grammar but it is a necessary evil I'm afraid. In order of being able to speak a language you need vocabulary and grammar. It is the two most important things without it you will not be able to write, read or speak.

When learning a language I would not recommend starting with grammar since it is boring and the students will loose their motivation if they had any when they started. Instead you should begin with vocabulary teach your students words and use different ways of doing this. Be more creative than only using vocabulary lists. 

One exercise which might be fun for the students to do is a word map. A word map is built similarly to a mind map that is you but the subject word in the middle for example Christmas. Then the students should come up with words that are related to Christmas such as, food, snow, Christmas tree, decorations and anything else they can come up with. And you connect these with each other where possible. It is important to first show the students what they are expected to do so that the students know what success should look like. After doing one word map together give your students 2-3 words which are related in someway and ask then to try to find the connections by making word maps.

Of course you will also need to follow this up. It can be done thorugh reading comprehension, listening or writing. You will have to use a text where they can find the words that you have given them and thus you as a teacher can see if they have understood the words or not.

Well, it has been two days of the new course and we are already drowning in work. Like okey it's university but there are still limits to what we can do, we are only humans. Teachers often forget that students have a lot to do especially students at upper secondary school since they have mutliple subjects at the same time and I remember how we could have 5 tests in one week, plus papers that needed to be handed in and other homework. It's really incredible how teachers don't communicate with each other and plan their tests and bigger papers so that the students don't need to have everything at the same time.

At university it is a bit different, most of the time you only have one course at a time (we are a bit different and have atleast 2) but it's manageble. Until this new teacher of ours who believe that we have all the time in the world just because we only have 2 seminars/week. Teachers who overdo things is not really liked by the students and hey thats not their job either, but I believe that students will learn more if the teachers respect that students need time to recover to. 

Studying at university is a fulltime job and when we go home from university in the afternoon many think that yeah now you are free to do whatever you want. They don't understand that studying at university is a 24/7 job if you wan't to make it. You can maybe take the weekend off if you have studied at least 8-9 hours everyday not including seminars, lectures or group work but individual studying where you read up on everything, start planning you exam, try to find a suitable topic and so forth.