My Spanish Journey - Part 1
For a while now, I have wanted to learn a foreign language. However, I never actually dedicated any time to it. Finally this year, I decided to take it seriously and began learning Spanish.
Why choose of Spanish of all the languages in the world, you ask? Partly because it is English-adjacent, making it much easier to learn compared to a language such as Japanese, Korean, or Mandarin which have their own writing systems. And partly because it is also one of the most spoken languages in the world.
I am writing this post about 5 months into my learning journey. My plan is to document it to share my experience, my approach, and resources, as well as to hold myself accountable.
Comprehensible Input (CI)
I think I first came across CI in one of my YouTube recommendations, which led me down the rabbit-hole of Google searches and reddit posts. It was developed by linguist Stephen Krashen and hypothesizes that languages are acquired via input. In particular, input that is comprehensible; it refers to input that you can understand even if you don’t grasp 100% of the words or grammatical structures used. In many ways, it is akin to how a child learns a language growin up — by continuosly being exposed to and immersed in it.
For the past couple of months, this has been my primary method of learning. Although, there are purists out there who think that CI should be used on its own, I disagree. I find that CI works extremely well when supplemented with some structured resources.
Dreaming Spanish (DS)
Dreaming Spanish is a fantastic and easily the most comprehensive resource for Spanish CI available on the internet. It features several teachers who create videos about interesting topics across fluency levels — from superbeginner to intermediate to advanced.
The initial videos require a bit of discipline to sit through, but that is not really a fault of the platform. There is only so much exciting content you can create with extremely basic vocabulary. The videos get more interesting over the levels, and you can definitely feel your comprehension improve as you progress. Plus, once you reach an intermediate level, uou can substitute this with native content. The website supports logging hours of content that you consume externally.
I am currently about 50 hours in my progress or Level 2 as DS calls it.
Lingq
Lingq is platform to help you consume and immerse yourself in your target language. It works by maintaning a dictionary of words that you have come across so far. Initially words that you have never seen are considered unknown. You can then mark a word as known if you are familiar with it, or you can look up the definition for it and mark it as learning. This is known as creating lingqs.
Content can be in the form of text articles, YouTube videos (with transcripts), or from Netflix. The platform also has its own media library, and also allows you to import your own content in the form of articles, audio files, e-books, etc.
The website can feel a bit dated and clunky at times, but I have pleasantly enjoyed my experience using it to read in Spanish. There are a couple of similar alternatives that I might try out in the future:
Language Reactor (LR)
Language Reactor can be mostly succintly described as Lingq for the web. It is a Chrome extension aimed to help you further immerse yourself in your target language.
You can conveniently import web pages in your target language and look up / mark words similar to Lingq. You can also look up words in native subtitles directly on YouTube or Netflix. It even provides its own subtitles for select languages, and titles on Netflix.
Podcasts
There are many beginner Spanish podcasts out there to help you learn. These make a great complement to DS, because you can listen to them when you are unable to watch the videos such as when working out, or commuting or performing chores. Currently, I am only listening to one podcast, called ¡Cuéntame¡, but I plan to add more as I progress.
You can find a more detailed list in this sheet.
Guided Apps
Busuu
While I first began my learning journey with Duolingo, I have since moved on to Busuu. Busuu, like Duolingo, provides you a gamified experience to learning languages. But in my opinion, it has a cleaner interface and slightly better explanations.
I mainly use this as a way to improve my grammar, and get a quick lesson in during work-breaks or commuting.
Spaced-Repetion Software (SRS)
I did try various softwares which allow you to learn vocabulary primarily via spaced-repetition:
Although, I am not sure if this is completely my thing. I found them a bit tedious and boring at times. In the future, I would like to revisit and give SRS another try. In particular because both Lingq and LR have options to export your vocabulary to Anki.
Misc.
Language Transfer (LT)
I think that Language Transfer is a fantastic resource to complement your preferred method of language learning. LT is a series of byte-sized audio episodes explaining different ideas in your target language. It helps you understand the nuances of your target language, form connections with English and form a logical structure of the language in your head. It definitely helped me understand concepts such as verb-conjugations, object pronouns, etc. much better than having to blindly memorize them.
Well, I think that’s about it for now. My next update will most likely be when I hit 150 hours of CI or Level 3 of Dreaming Spanish.
¡Hasta luego!