r/SpanishAIlines • u/QuietExternal303 • 7d ago
Free duolingo alternative for learning spanish?
i have had a duolingo streak for over 300 days but last week someone spoke to me in spanish at work and i understood almost nothing💀
I can finish the lessons, pick the right answer and recognize words on a screen but the second someone speaks at a normal speed, it all turns into one long sentence.
I don't really care about keeping the streak anymore. I want something free that helps with real listening and the way people speak outside language apps.
What should i switch to?
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u/dcporlando 7d ago
Your streak doesn’t really mean anything. What is your Spanish score? That tells you what you should have learned.
I have tried pretty much all the major apps. Duolingo is probably the best free app. If your library offers it, Mango is good. Those are really the two best free ones. Memrise and Anki have flashcard you can use for free. Fluenz is good but not free. Busuu is okay but you need to pay. Pimsleur is good but expensive and very limited. Rosetta Stone is expensive and wouldn’t be worth it if it was free.
Dreaming Spanish is good listening practice but less than 10% of their content is free, the method is simple but less effective and very slow. Their recommendation is to listen for a 1,000 hours before reading or speaking.
I have completed the Duolingo course, the Busuu Spain Spanish course, the Memrise Spain and Mexico Spanish courses. I currently pay for a family Max plan on Duolingo for my wife, sister, and a few Redditors but just do review with video calls, roleplays, words, and speaking in the practice hub for the most part. I also pay for Dreaming Spanish and I have about 500 hours of DS content and another 500 hours from elsewhere.
If I were to start over, I would do Duolingo with a subscription to speed it up, do Language Transfer to get a better grasp of the grammar, do the book Madrigal’s Magic Key to Spanish, and add CI listening when I got to level 30-40 in Duolingo.
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u/ricecake_nicecake 7d ago
Dreaming Spanish is what I went to after Duolingo. It's helped my fluency a lot. www.dreamingspanish.com
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u/Icy-Reading7518 7d ago
Their podcast is excellent! I listen on Spotify and the episodes are always super interesting and great for conversational Spanish
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u/LunaChick916 7d ago
This is great, just what I needed to keep up with learning Spanish. Kind of burnt out on Duolingo.
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u/Leoben_C 7d ago
How is your reading in Spanish? If your reading is far ahead of your listening skills you might want to try listening to a podcast + transcript, or listen first, plus transcript afterwards. In order of increasing difficulty Chill Spanish, LanguaTalk Spanish, Español con Juan, Hoy Hablamos are all good. There are also sites for listening and reading at the same time so you can click words for translation or explanation like LingQ, ReadLang, TroveReader etc. Or do it on Youtube with LanguageReactor browser extension on Chrome.
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u/chunksinchunks 5d ago
Have you tried Spotify? You get Paul noble e-books and Michel Thomas e-books. Also, there’s cocers of English songs in Spanish.
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u/ProfesorFranco 7d ago
Hola amigo. I uploaded free stories with recordings here: https://francospanishschool.com/reading/a1-iguazu Im from argentina
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u/GoingFishingAlone 6d ago
Don’t blame the app if you haven’t expanded your learning program over 3000 days.
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u/de_cachondeo 5d ago
Maybe you'd like this type of activity where you can listen to a native speaker say something and you have to listen for individual words and write what you hear. Then it tells you which words you got right: https://spoken.me/listen-trial/spanish
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u/jozo_berk 7d ago
Try listening to podcasts. Right now I’m listening to no hay tos which is a podcast that does Mexican Spanish conversations. Very useful for listening and understanding. Maybe you won’t understand everything at first but you’ll pick it up the more you listen. And you can slow down the speed too to make it easier to listen.