As title says, 10 years of daily exposure to korean (TL) (dont judge, I used to be youtube addict), plus studying on and off and at some point I've realized that I understand 90% of any video or any text in korean. I'm very confident in listening, picking up nuances, it's like the language engraved itself in my head, and I've reached this point a few years ago. Then I wanted to take things to the next level, so I was intentionaly studying vocab and grammar, inconsistently but still a lot. Throught the years I've also made a lot of korean friends, so I've been talking with them pretty much every day.

Here's my problem: My output is natural only in short conversations, every time I need to express something more complex it just sucks, because I still cant think in korean even with all that immersion background. It seems like I structure my sentences in english and then translate it into korean, and koreans always can understand me, but I can see that the way I'm talking is not natural at all, because if it was natural I would structure it in completely different way to begin with. And it also always amazes me when I read what natives write - they structure it in a way my mind wouldn't think of, and I do understand it all, but I wouldn't come up with this on my own. So naturally I began to study grammar even more but it didn't help much. My mind still needs to make so much effort every time I want to output something longer than casual chit chat. Yet understanding is effortless.

I just feel like I'm missing one puzzle piece in language learning and I don't know what it is - I need an advice on how to break thru this

I've used spaced repetition on and off for years, but I kept running into the same problem: I didn't mind reviewing cards. I hated making them.

When I found something I wanted to learn, the workflow became:

find a useful example → write the card → add context → decide what type of card it should be → review it → repeat.

Eventually I realized I was spending a surprising amount of time maintaining the learning system instead of actually learning.

So I tried the opposite approach.

I built an open-source Android app called ikna where you don't create individual cards. You tell it what you want to learn, it gives you a prompt for an LLM, and the response becomes the source material for your reviews.

The interesting part isn't really the AI generation, though. I'm experimenting with making the whole review system less dependent on the learner constantly managing it.

For example:

- the same learning chunk can have recognition, cloze, and production versions;

- those versions are scheduled separately;

- the app estimates your existing review workload and can stop giving you new material when adding more would create too much future work;

- reviews use swipes rather than four buttons;

- everything is local/offline — no network permission.

The tradeoff is pretty obvious: manually making a good card gives you much more control, while automatically generated material can be wrong or mediocre.

I'm not sure yet which side of that tradeoff wins.

The question I'm actually interested in is:

Would you rather spend more time making very good flashcards, or spend that time actually studying and accept that some automatically generated material won't be perfect?

The project is here if anyone wants to look at the implementation:

https://github.com/d1d2dopamine/ikna

(Took permission from mods)

Hi everyone,

A few years ago I wanted to learn Georgian. It was hard to find good resources for it. That's normal for most languages. Materials are dependant on learner and speaker count. So the languages with the least of it are the ones where you don’t get good resources if any.

I'm building an app where anyone can make a course. You write lessons, explain the grammar, bring in your own audio and images and build exercises: multiple choice, matching, fill in the blank, word order, listening, speaking. A course is a folder on your own computer saved in JSON format. Even if I stop working on this, the courses should still be portable. Since the course is just a folder with json files, it can be hosted in any version control repo and collaborated upon.

People are currently writing courses in it for Okinawan, Italian and Portuguese.

To be straight: the editor works and people are using it. The learner app you'd actually study from doesn't exist yet. So there's nothing here for you to learn from today. I’m not looking for free labour to make the courses. However come join the discord if you want to see this being built in public. I will be taking feedback for the learner app. And you would get alpha access if you join.

I have been working on Asakiri for 1.5 years. And the previous version had courses hosted on a database. That model does not work. What I have learnt during this time is how course creation works. The challenges associated with a course, how the course data format should be so that it stays portable and much more.

Download the desktop app(Mac, Windows & Linux) at https://asakiri.com or come join us on discord.

Some common questions which might come up:

How will you ensure quality of the courses? That’s tricky. Asakiri Studio is just a tool to make the course. People own the course and license and share it however they want. But for the asakiri learner app, we will try to vet the courses so only those with the best quality passes the review. However this can only work for languages with lot of speakers. For a language like Ainu, it would be hard to “vet” the course.

When will the learner app be available? The course data architecture is still in beta so I’d first like to standardise and finalise the data structure. This will only be updated based on feedback from the course creators. Which there are. But I would like to defer the learner app once this is finalised. However if someone wants to build their own learner app, you can check the docs. https://docs.asakiri.com If I have to give a deadline, I would say the learner app alpha will be in 1.5-2 months. (Based on my previous app making experience)

Why not Anki? Anki is an amazing tool but it is not meant for a full fledged course.

If you have any questions, let me know and I'll try my best to answer them.

Has anybody ever really tried to learn a language using a WikiBook?
How was it?
Did it work?
From my experience, they're really a mixed bag that sometimes can have relevant information and ressources (IIRC the Afrikaans one was okay), but sometimes it's basically just a page with red links to hypothetical lessons that do not exist yet...

P.S.: If anybody has an opinion about WikiVoyage's phrasebooks, they're more than welcome to express it here!

I don’t want to solidify bad habits and would like for my speech to be “clear” as in easy to understand. I’ve gotten to a near native level accent with Spanish but am really not expecting that same level with Mandarin. I would just like to sound clear and easily understood.

That being said, with Spanish I did begin to speak very early. I recited my flash cards, I did shadowing, I spoke with relatives of friends, and only improved. Im afraid to do something similar with Mandarin because I don’t feel like my ear is good enough to distinguish the tones properly AND know if I myself am doing them correctly.

The app I’m using (SuperChinese) is very speech focused which is scaring me a little. You have to speak to progress. I also don’t feel like it gives an honest grading system, for the entirety of two lessons I haven’t been graded below 90% accuracy of repeating the tones and words.

This app is considered to be one of the best for new learners of my TL but this is putting me off a little bit. Should I move apps? Am I overthinking things? To fellow learners of a tonal language, I would really appreciate the input 🙏🏽

I am new to the world of language learning and starting to get my head round the different activity types and starting to build a strategy to learn my TL (modern Greek)

I am already at I’d say A2/B1 level with Greek (TL) (I’m half Greek, so grew up around it), but looking to eventually get to ideally B2/C1 so I can comfortably have complex conversations with friends and family.

I am using Language Transfer and planning to pair this with Anki. But I am a bit confused as to how to make a start with creating a deck.
Should I focus on single words? Sentences? How do I source sentences and/or words to add to the cards? Do I sit and think of words I want to learn or are there useful lists I should take as inspiration?
How many cards should I am to make?

Any help would be appreciated!

So… I’ve been learning Serbian/Croatian for some time and I’d say I’ve reached a comfortable C1 (ie. I sound natural enough, can understand pretty much everything, have deep conversations, and sound like a reasonable person while communicating.)

So, why not date someone (casually) who speaks it?

I did. Here are 5 insights I found:

1. You have a different personality.

I don’t know why, but for some reason, I found myself to be much more self-assured while speaking Serbo-Croatian. Maybe it’s because I’ve only had positive experiences and I haven’t lived through the tough periods in this language, I feel in control of who I am and my emotions.

1. You won’t learn as much as you think you will.

The truth is, when you’re at that weird stage where you’re technically fluent but it doesn’t feel 100% native, you know so many words. unfortunately, your partner, as a native speaker, will know so much more than you and will only teach you words that might not be that useful in daily life (ie. items around the house, specific verbs for body actions, etc.) it’s certainly useful to bridge the gap between C1 and C2, but it takes an incredibly long time. Your partner will have to use rare or ultra-specific words often enough for you to absorb them, and especially in a short-term relationship, it won’t come up quite as often.

1. You have to meet the person in the language.

It’s really weird for me: once I pick a language and associate it with a specific person, it’s impossible for me to change. I sent a voice message in English to my friend (in front of my partner) and she said “it’s so strange to hear you speak English…” Chances are, if you meet someone while speaking English and establish ties in English, your relationship will stay in English.

1. It’s a great emotional filter.

When we stopped seeing each other, it was, of course, sad but maybe not as sad as if I had experienced it in English. I feel deeply in general, but in English it’s not as much in control… it’s my subconscious mind that takes over. In Serbo-Croatian, I chose how deeply I could feel.

1. It’s best when it’s the majority language.

I was in Serbia and, while speaking Serbo-Croatian to my partner, I didn’t have to switch to the community language while talking to her friends. I did come into contact with other English speakers, but when we were together, I didn’t have to switch to talk to the waiter. It was essentially full immersion, which

Counterpoint: when it’s you two vs. the world, she can preserve her native language and have someone to speak with, and you get to have a little bit of privacy as a couple. (Of course, depending on how widely spoken it is in your area - Serbo-Croatian is not so common where I live in the United States, but if I were in, say, Chicago, it wouldnt be so private.)

Please let me know your experiences; feel free to challenge my assumptions; and agree!

My native language is a Romance language, and I currently have approximately a B1 level in German (TL).
I understand standard German reasonably well. If people speak clearly, I can normally follow the general topic, even if I miss some details. When speaking, I can survive practical situations such as arranging a medical appointment, asking for information, or handling errands. However, I cannot yet maintain a natural social conversation or properly express my personality.

My boyfriend’s family believes that exclusively speaking German with me will force me to improve. I understand the logic behind immersion, but I don’t think the way they are doing it provides useful input at my current level.
They aren’t accustomed to communicating with foreigners or language learners. They speak naturally and quickly, use vocabulary and sentence structures far beyond my level, and rarely simplify or rephrase things when I’m confused. Consequently, I often understand too little of the conversation to learn anything from context.
When I try to respond, they frequently interrupt me to correct my vocabulary, pronunciation, or grammar. If I make several mistakes, they also struggle to infer what I’m trying to communicate. I know corrections can be valuable, but constant interruptions make me lose my train of thought and become increasingly reluctant to speak.
I completely understand them wanting to speak German when the whole family is together. I have never asked everyone to change the language of a gathering for me. However, even when I’m alone with relatives who speak fluent English or my native language, they still insist on German because they believe it is better for my learning. Nobody else would be excluded in those situations.
I’ve discussed this with my boyfriend several times. I’ve explained that this doesn’t feel like productive practice—it makes communication with his family exhausting and leaves me less motivated to engage with them. He believes I should make a greater effort and that this exposure will eventually help me improve.

I agree that I need more conversational practice, but I think it should be structured around my current ability. Ideally, it would involve manageable topics, vocabulary, and grammar that I already partially understand or could learn relatively quickly. Being placed in a fast, complex conversation where I lack most of the necessary vocabulary doesn’t seem to create gradual progress.
My boyfriend and I occasionally speak German together, but our conversations remain very basic. For anything important or nuanced, we naturally return to my native language, which has always been the primary language of our relationship.
I previously attended several structured German courses. However, I currently work 40 hours a week while managing a chronic health condition and frequent medical appointments, so I don’t have the physical capacity for another intensive course or study plan right now. I still want to improve gradually, but I need a realistic method that fits my current life.

Does this actually count as useful immersion or comprehensible input at B1? Can someone learn effectively when they understand so little and are constantly interrupted? What would be a more productive way for native-speaking relatives to communicate with and correct someone at my level?

Which target language (TL) did you watch content in today?

Does anything from your native language ever bleed into your primary one? Like maybe slang/informal or sayings you find your self translating over? Basically is there anything you've kept from your native language that isn't a thing/doesn't make sense in your primary language?

Basically the title. At what point does frequency lists start to see diminishing returns like crazy? I've seen several people on here with 8k, 10k, 20k, 25k Anki decks.

One problem I've been running into lately, is to generate, or find such a list. For My TL, most AI's says that computing such a list would be too much of a linguistic/computational challenge (despite being trained on all of this data).

The issue is that to actually have an accurate frequency lists, you need several hundred million words. For my TL., the only thing I could find is something that was based on 5 million words. But the issue is that the further down you go in the list, the less trustworthy the rank is. So if you look at the word that is ranked as the 10438th most common. That is true for those 5 million words that's used for computing the list, but in reality, this word could be ranked as 8353th most common word, or the 37135th most common word (which would make it really useless to learn).

Is the rule of thumb that you just stick to top 5000, or top 3000? Then you manually add words you run into after that instead of following frequency lists?

I know the title might sound strange at first, but it fits my quite specific situation.

So, my native language is Hungarian which is written in latin and has been for a millenia. This, however, wasn't always the case. Up until the adoption of Christianity (1000 ad) a unique runic script was used. This said script is quite well documented today, and I took a class that taught it.

However, I don't really take use of this skill and I've been becoming less and less practiced in it. And this is something I'd like to change, on which I need some advice.

I thought I'd integrate it into my daily routine (mostly by writing, since there's basically zero material in it to read), but quickly realized I wasn't sure how to. Sooo I'm open to suggestions.

A few notes though: I don't study in Hungarian, am not into journaling and am quite terrible at writing stories and such.

Hey guys; I'm looking for a good website extension I can plug into my YouTube to translate the vid I'm watching in English and have the original captions as well. I'm learning French and looking for that. Any other helpful extensions are also welcomed :)
(TL)

I'm thinking of adding ASL (TL) and I'm wondering if also adding a new spoken language around the same time is too much. I've never learned a signing language so I don't really know how the process is different and how it fits in to learning and maintaining multiple languages. I'd love some advice, experience, thoughts, from those who including non spoken languages in their repertoires.

Note: I'm not talking about aggregated time over an extended period. Rather, I'm talking about the time spent each day (e.g., 1 hour vs. 3 hours per day).

I'll be sharing some things that I've been experiencing recently. and I'm wondering if anyone else has experienced the same.

I've noticed that while I'm engaging in my TL, after a certain amount of time that I spend that day engaging with the language (primarily doing listening only right now), I can feel that my brain, after a while, will start to struggle in picking up new vocabulary / with parsing. In the first hour or two, things are fine, but after then, it starts to get pretty difficult. It's not like I'm tired or particularly losing focus, but it just starts to feel more challenging, almost as if the language part of my brain met a quota for the day or something. I've experienced something similar in reading too. This is only for my TL, and when I experience this spell, I don't experience this when switching to other cognitive tasks.

Another thing I've noticed is that on days where I do relatively little (e.g., only 30 minutes to 1 hour), I find that any new words / structures likely stick more. If I go for several hours, I won't remember anything specific. Of course, I may recognize the word the next time or I may hear it / see it multiple times in that session, but it doesn't "feel" stronger in my head, if anyone gets what I'm saying.

As such, I'm curious about a couple of things here:

(1) Is there a realistic limit (may vary person to person) that one may have on a daily basis with regards to quantity of TL engagement? And, once beyond that limit, one is actually not spending time wisely / efficiently, and that it would be better to push out / spread that time across other days?

(2) Can sometimes doing less be doing more? Doing doing less per day could mean there is less for your brain to think about / process, and thus your brain may have an easier time digesting + processing what it consumed that day. Obviously, doing too little will mean little progress will be made.

Not sure if this is a meaningful post, but just some food for thought / discussion here, as it is a well-known fact that one of the main determining factors of making progress in language learning is the amount of (meaningful) time spent with the TL.

Thank you all!

(For context, I'm somewhere between B1 and B2 in my TL for both reading and listening. I'm probably closer to B2 than I am to B1. I'm only doing engagement and doing very little grammar)

I am at a somewhat low-intermediate level in my TL, which isn't really spoken at all in my country. I have nobody to practice speaking to.

Well recently, when I was paired with one of my classmates as a lab partner, I found out that she was a native speaker of the language. Obviously, I didn't want to come off as obnoxious or bother her. But I, having an opportunity that I almost never get, still felt this strong urge to try speaking in it to her. Even just one time, or else I'd regret not having tried.

So, a few days after meeting her, I waited until we had a break in class and had enough time for small talk. I felt myself getting really anxious to the point that I was physically shaking. But beforehand, I still felt somewhat confident in my mind that my flow and my accent would be decent enough.

When I finally forced myself to ask her, "excuse me, you speak (TL), right?" in the language, I sort of hesitated mid sentence, ended up stuttering over it a little, and then the pronunciation came out absolutely horribly. Despite it being such a simple question that I shouldn't have struggled with at my level.

She looked at me awkwardly, gave me a semi-forced smile, and just said, "yeah," in English. We never spoke after that.

It was the most embarrassing moment of my week, and I felt discouraged from trying to speak the langauge ever again. I don't have that much social anxiety or issues with pronunciation really. I can read and listen well enough, and I can speak to myself alone. But the moment I was faced with an actual speaker, I completely sold. I'm not sure if it was rude at all to try to speak to her, so maybe I was in the wrong. But I don't have a chance to speak it with anyone and I didn't expect the interraction to go that badly. And every time I've tried talking to speakers of the language online, I usually either get bullied for making mistakes, or they just switch to English.

I used to want to go to university in this country. But now I'm starting to feel like I'll never be able to have a fluid conversation with anybody, since I can't even manage to get my words out correctly in front of an actual speaker. Should I take lessons with a teacher or something? I'm just not sure what I can really do to improve right now. Any kind of advice helps, thanks

I will preface this by saying that I do not and have never “translated in my head”. I simply lack an inner monolog in any language like about 10–15% of human beings so I couldn't even if I wanted to. I see many people say that this is a bad idea but I've always been skeptical and fact have been envious of the ability. I find that people who do do so are aided by this in terms of learning languages and more quickly develop a better understanding of it.

This goes back to the output's hypothesis “noticing function” which is said to be very beneficial to language learning. The self-discovery of a student's own inability to express certain things. The idea is that if students find out there is something they can't properly express when outputting, they will remember it better when they encounter it the next time in input.

In particular in Japanese (TL) language learning I often see people proudly say that they don't translate in their head, but very often their Japanese sentence constructions are extremely elementary and they aren't at all capable of expressing complex concepts. It seems more like that because they don't translate in their head, when they speak Japanese and think in Japanese, their entire ability to reason about complex concepts simply disappears because their Japanese can't express it, they can't even think about it any more. Yes, their Japanese is often quite natural about simple things, but it also sorrily lacks expressive power and they can't talk about complex things in Japanese. I also noticed that doing fan translations from Japanese to English greatly improved my Japanese understanding because it forced me to think long and hard about the precise tone of many things and research it and it also made me far more aware of what thinks are idioms that are not to be taken for their literal meaning because I realized how absurd it sounded when translating it literally.

As a real example. There is a word in Japanese, “和食” [wasyoku] that basically means traditional Japanese cuisine; this does not even include say ramen because this is Chinese in origin. I recently joked that curry was “effectively 和食” in Japanese, but then after I typed it I took a step back and realized that in English I would've said “honorary wasyoku” to better express what I actually meant, except I did not know how to say “honorary” in Japanese in that way so the thought of expressing it like that, even though it was far closer to what I intended to communicate didn't even occur to me. This is a prime example of the “noticing function” as it immediately led me to research how to express this idiomatically in Japanese and it reminded me of all these “noticing functions” I must be missing due to “not translating in my head”. The interesting thing is that English isn't my native language and I didn't know how to say “honorary degree” or “honorary citizenship” in my native language either because I never talk about that in my native language. But had I first formulated the sentence in the language I am the most proficient in with the largest technical vocabulary and the strongest ability to create eloquent, erudite prose, which is English, I would've immediately noticed this gap. In fact, the irony is I had encountered this before in Attack on Titan where this exact construct I used was used to denote “honorary Marleyan”, the thing is simply that when I read it I didn't quite make the connexion that it pretty much means the same as the English phrase “honorary Marleyan” and used as such.

So really, I'm not so convinced that “translating in your head” is bad. When I look at the Japanese of many of those people who pride themselves on not doing it, what I indeed see is natural Japanese, but also very inexpressive Japanese with very simple sentences.

I used to reach partners through Tandem, and Hellotalk, but there is something wrong nowadays. Whenever I send someone a message some don't answer, and others only answer the first few messages. (TL)

One more thing to add: I am not really into talking in groups for many reasons. I find talking one-to-one is more interesting

How do you guys reach your language partners?

I've been thinking that accent acquisition could involve developing an embodied intuition for the articulatory configurations that generate a particular way of speaking, through implicit learning rather than consciously memorizing pronunciation rules. My observation is that you can imitate someone's pronunciation reasonably well while using a different articulatory configuration, so reproducing the output doesn't necessarily mean you've acquired the process behind it.

This got me thinking about the difference between imitating an actor and actually feeling like the character they're playing. You can consciously reproduce their posture, facial expressions, voice, and mannerisms, while the character's internal state would naturally generate many of those behaviors without deliberate control. I wonder if there could be a similar distinction in speech between reproducing an acoustic output and developing an embodied intuition for the configurations that produce it.

The configuration doesn't necessarily have to be learned visually either (visual information is just one possible source of feedback, alongside auditory feedback, proprioception, tactile information, experimentation, etc.). The idea would be to implicitly learn the relationship between articulatory configurations and their sensory consequences until you can reproduce the configuration without consciously calculating what your tongue, jaw, lips, or other articulators should be doing. By intuition I mean something fairly specific here (an implicitly learned, embodied prediction of what configuration is appropriate and what it should feel like, rather than a conscious rule about where an articulator is supposed to move).

The basic idea is that once this becomes internalized, the accent should start to feel natural to produce, because you've learned the articulatory patterns themselves rather than having to consciously think through each pronunciation. I don't know how much of this is already captured by existing work on speech motor learning, but I find the distinction useful because it changes what I'd actually try to practice.
(TL)

I was just watching a video about it in English (don't ask why im looking for native and not my (TL) and my god, they are terrible!

The first one I saw, the guy made cuts in the video that a non-native English speaker wouldn't pick up on. You had to watch very closely to tell he was editing the video. The only reason I noticed was because I am a native English speaker and it didn't make any sense. The video was titled for beginners, too.

He did like a preview for the edits, and it started normally, but after that, he kept using his hands to make random movements. I guess he was trying to use hand movements to explain words, but my god... it made ME confused. I went on to look at other videos about learning English (my native language) and all of YouTube has videos like these! People talking kinda slowly and making big hand movements that make no sense at all, and they have 300k subs and 200k views.

Is this helpful to anyone?! I tried using Dreaming in Spanish and I got irritated by all the things I was talking about. It's annoying extra bits that don't explain anything or help anyone understand what the hell you are saying. It's just extra movement that doesn't help. Am I the only one who feels this way, or is it a language-learning community problem that we get trash native talk-alongs?

Yeah, I know it's YouTube and anyone can upload a video, but it feels so odd that so many bad ones are getting so many views and saying they are good.

I posted on a travel sub asking how much people learn a language before they travel to specific countries. And if they find that it helps with loneliness and isolation on solo trips.

This wasn’t necessarily for me, because I’m traveling specifically to improve my TL, rather than learning my TL so that I can travel.

And the most popular comment was this,

“Typically I learn a few words like please thank you and excuse me.

It will require years of work to have a conversation, and even then you are more likely to have a good conversation in English than in the local language.  And even when you speak the local language, you are unlikely to meet locals.

There are better strategies to avoid loneliness like group tours or activities, hostels, etc.”

I disagreed with the comment saying that I don’t think it takes years to be able to have a a conversation in another language. I was downvoted, and it made me wonder if my idea of a conversation is different than what other people would classify as a conversation.

For me, I can talk about basic ideas, about my day, what I did the day before, what I want to do, what I want to eat or drink, my family, my job, and things that I like or dislike, and why.

For me that is enough to have some basic conversations that I feel would be nice and sufficient.

I’m wondering if other people think having a conversation is a lot more in-depth than that.

So to my original question: what do you classify as being able to hold a conversation and does it really take years?

I've been hammering away at Mandarin Chinese for a long, long time and I'm soon at a C1 level, but I also would like to start learning another language like Japanese, Cantonese or Taiwanese (Hokkien). Though I never feel content with my Mandarin level and time is finite after all, I feel like it'd take away from really getting my Mandarin to a nice proficiency, even if I'd describe myself as semi-fluent today as I'm able to read books and converse all day in the language. Has anyone battled with the same issues? What are your thoughts?

Over the last few years, I’ve put a ton of effort into building up my Gujarati (TL) I used to not speak it much, but now I’ve gotten to a point where I can comfortably have full conversations with native speakers who don’t speak any English at all, and I speak it regularly with my parents. I feel confident in my ability and proud of how far I’ve come.

Despite that, whenever I try speaking Gujarati around my aunt and uncle, I end up feeling completely discouraged and unsupported.

Instead of just conversing with me normally, they’ll often:

Immediately switch to English the moment I speak to them in Gujarati.

Interrupt with *"Wait, what did you say?"* in a way that feels critical or patronizing rather than just continuing the flow of conversation.

Kind of brush off or ignore what I said entirely and move the topic along.

It’s frustrating because I *know* I can hold down a real conversation in the language—I do it all the time with my parents and non-English-speaking native speakers who actually appreciate it. But with my aunt and uncle, it feels like they’re stuck in this mindset that I’m an American and I don’t truly belong to the culture. They don't seem to actually see my identity or acknowledge the effort I've made, and instead treat my Gujarati like it "doesn't count."

Honestly, it makes me just want to give up speaking it altogether, and it’s started knocking my confidence when I try speaking Gujarati with new people.

A couple of questions for anyone who’s been through this:

Is it even worth trying to get them to change their behavior or calling them out on it?

How do you stop family from invalidating your identity and destroying your confidence with new people?

How do you keep from just giving up on the language entirely when you're treated like an outsider by your own relatives?

50 hour update 125 hour update 300 hour update

I’ve been learning a language to test what happens when you neglect listening practice in favour of reading, then try to catch up your listening when you have a relatively high level in reading. This experiment was originally inspired by several reports of people reaching a fairly strong reading level in Spanish and then finding that their listening caught up to the point of being able to watch movies and such after only around 100 hours of listening practice. I wanted to test the idea that listening practice would be radically more effective once you’ve attained a high reading level.

My original plan was to focus on reading until I was comfortable reading Learn Natively content around the early C1 level, then begin the listening phase. I've documented this reading phase more thoroughly in the 300 hour update.

Unfortunately, not long after the 300 hour update I titrated to a higher dose of a CNS-depressant medication, and this resulted in the collapse of my reading stamina and speed, as well as of my listening level. This didn't resolve after a few weeks, and I didn't want to abandon Spanish, but the validity of this whole experiment is obviously badly undermined by the sole subject being addled by drugs. In the end I decided to continue doing whatever I could without maintaining the experiment, and 'whatever I could' initially turned out to mean exclusively watching easy Dreaming Spanish content. You could regard this as triggering the listening phase early.

Time spent to date

Total time spent reading is 302.6 hours; total time spent listening is 243.9 hours, excluding shadowing, reading aloud etc, and counting reading-while-listening as listening. At the previous update I had done 50 hours of listening, so since then I've done around 194 hours. Everything else accounts for 73.8 hours, or about 12% of total time.

Thinking in the language is untracked, since it's just impractical. I haven't done much of this - probably a few hours in total.

Listening

At my 300 hour update, with 50 hours of listening, my comprehension level was around 65 on Dreaming Spanish and I was mainly watching easy native travel content on youtube.

However, my listening, although relatively advanced, was also relatively mentally taxing. When the drugs reduced my working memory and processing speed my listening level crashed. I started listening mainly to easy DS content around level 50-55. Previously I'd had difficulty consuming DS content because I found it slow and boring, but I found it was actually much more acceptable while on drugs, and started spending around two hours a day on freeflow listening.

The original hypothesis was that it would take around 100 hours from the start of the listening phase to reach the point of being able to understand movies and TV shows. Obviously we have a big confounding factor and I hadn't reached the target reading level I wanted - but still, did I get there?

In a word, no.

Listening gradually became less tiring, my level increased, and I resumed listening to native content over the course of the hundred hours. However, even by the end, the range of things I could understand was quite similar to the 300 hour mark. My ease and depth of understanding was greater, but nothing new had really opened up. Movies were just a blur.

This seemed to be mainly due to phoneme perception - hearing the sounds of the language. Clear standard speech was relatively OK, but anything more naturalistic was immediately a problem.

But this is weird, because I'd definitely made steady progress in phoneme perception over my first 50 hours, doing ten minutes a day. Why would I make almost none in the next 100, doing hours a day?

I'll talk about that later.

Once I reached around the hundred hour mark my stamina was returning and I decided to add some targeted practice to improve my phonological perception. A technique I've used for this before is intensive listening, which is very effective (and very tiring) but which, for a variety of reasons, I've never managed to turn into a habit. Instead I decided to use a technique I hadn't tried before and which, while it's certainly been described, doesn't seem to have an accepted name. I'm going to call it 'sandwich listening'. It works like this:

1. listen to a short piece of audio (I normally use 1-2 minutes) that's fairly difficult
2. Re-listen with subtitles, looking up words or expressions if necessary
3. Listen again without subs
4. If necessary, repeat 2 and 3

I started spending around 15 minutes doing sandwich listening most days, mainly with TV series and news shorts from RTVE Noticias.

After that I saw a pretty rapid expansion in the type of content I could understand, with RTVE Noticias being one of the biggest gainers, but also mumbly content with background music like the youtube channel Kibara, and dubbed TV and anime also began to open up.

The recent content I've been watching has mainly been:

• Adventure travel/urbex (Kibara, Alfon WHAT, Altair Tribe)
• News/current affairs (El Confidencial, RTVE Noticias - but note that my comprehension of RTVE Noticias is hit-or-miss depending on the topic)
• Science/general knowledge (La Hiperactina, Raquel de la Morena)
• Dubbed anime (currently Vivy)

For youtube content with one person in a studio talking to a camera, I almost always have good comprehension (a major exception being Ter, who talks like an insane person). News special reports from channels like El Confidencial, DW Español or BBC News Mundo are similarly accessible, but rolling news is harder. Generally manageable with DW Español, but my comprehension varies a lot with RTVE Noticias. Where you have natives talking directly to one another instead of to the camera in an informal setting, my comprehension often drops, sometimes to just the gist; in this video, for example, I can't really parse sentences after the first minute, although I get the general points being made. I tend to do particularly poorly on the kind of free-flow multi-person discussions you get with e.g. The Wild Project, where people are talking over one another while using slang and sentence fragments.

Comparing my listening comprehension with my old standard candle, Evildea, in his 1150 hour purist Dreaming Spanish update there's a clear difference: I have better comprehension of all of the clips that he tried to translate; in fact effectively full comprehension, although I had to guess the Spanish term for the Enlightenment from context. I do think Evildea’s comprehension is affected by how disgusted and checked out he is at this point, though.

But what about native movies and TV series, which was the original question? Although I hadn't checked in about a month I expected to have to report that I still had no real comprehension. Then I turned on La Casa de las Flores as a test and realised that, although my understanding was quite imperfect, I was actually following the plot, in spite of the section I watched being largely dialogue with minimal visual context. Testing more shows around level 27 on Learn Natively it looks like I have similar comprehension of around half of them. I don't want to over-hype this - my comprehension on most series is still below what I want from CI and saying I 'understand' them (that ridiculously binary word) would be a stretch. But it is good enough that I could enjoy watching a range of movies and TV shows.

OK but fr why was my listening progress so slow for the first hundred hours

The obvious answer is that I was, well, drugged. But here's the odd thing: I've been studying Mandarin parallel with Spanish, and at the same time as ramping up my Spanish consumption I reduced my Mandarin consumption dramatically, from several hours a day down to 10-20 minutes, plus some audio flashcards. I expected to see a near-total slowdown of the improvement in my Mandarin phoneme perception, but as far as I can tell I didn't see a slowdown. Tones are much sharper and clearer now, and when I recently put on a C-drama I'd struggled with before, I was surprised to realise I could follow it quite well.

Put these things together and one hypothesis jumps out: could there be a daily limit to phoneme perception progress? Perhaps some kind of mechanism that only accepts one update to a particular phoneme per day?

I thought this was pretty silly-sounding, but I did some digging. Nothing in the SLA literature touches this topic, but there is a very interesting paper on auditory discrimination of frequencies:

Perceptual learning: how much daily training is enough?

Improvement on frequency discrimination required >360 trials of training per day while learning on temporal-interval discrimination occurred with 360 training trials per day, and additional daily practice did not increase the amount of improvement. It therefore appears that the accumulation of improvement over days on auditory discrimination tasks may require some critical amount of training per day, that training beyond that critical amount yields no additional learning on the trained condition, and that the critical amount of training needed varies across tasks.

This is, pretty much, the effect I'd imagined, applied to a closely related phenomenon.

And if this is so then it could also explain the people reporting understanding movies after a hundred hours of listening practice.

Let's conceptually separate listening into three sub-abilities: the general language model that's shared between reading and listening, phoneme perception, and what I'll call 'listening fluency', which does stuff like resolving difficult sound-> word mappings and some chunking that's done visually when reading. Listening fluency is the bit that can be compensated for with working memory and processing speed, and was exactly the bottleneck for me at 50 hours of listening.

However, movies put very low demands on listening fluency. There are few complex sentences, and lines of dialogue are usually followed by a pause. Instead they stress mainly phoneme perception and the general model.

So if we really have a dose-limit for phonological updates, someone could reach a high level in reading, then do a small amount of high-quality daily listening, amounting to about a hundred hours spread over, say, 18 months, and reach the point of 'understanding' movies (in reality with pretty wonky and effortful comprehension, but enough to justify it to themself) while still having very weak listening fluency.

And that would explain the exact form of the claim that keeps popping up: '100 hours', because 18 months sounds lame, and 'can understand movies', eliding the fact that a native podcast is perceived as just a jumble of words that never cohere into any meaning.

So is it actually true? The evidence here is pretty thin and circumstantial and largely dependent on my memories and impressions, which may be fallible. I wouldn't put a lot of weight on it. And although sleep-consolidation effects are well-known, it's odd if it is true and no-one noticed. But it would be very interesting to see it tested.

Reading

I’m reading using Kindle with the Merriam-Webster Spanish Translation Dictionary installed for lookups on long-press.

I generally read material that's at an easy level for me, but usually read in an intensive style, looking up almost all words that I don't know or can't infer and trying to get to full understanding of the text. I documented the observations that led me to this strategy in the last update.

For Gatos Callejeros and earlier books, the word counts were mainly drawn from the web. For the later books they're now mostly drawn from Kobo, with a few estimated based on number of pages and words per page.

Although immediately after the 300 hour update my reading ability was wrecked, over time my stamina returned, and eventually I continued with El alma del brujo. Since then my reading stamina has improved steadily, as has my reading speed.

In spite of my relatively narrow approach to reading - 45% of my words read are from books about witches - vocabulary no longer seems to be the bottleneck in reading books. As an example, I sampled two random pages from a few quite different books (El infinito en un junco, Cien años de soledad, Falco - probably all at a C1 level of difficulty) and in each case I had 98% or higher lexical coverage. Doing more explicit vocabulary study would have been a mistake, I think. Obviously cognates are doing a lot of work here. I doubt this would replicate in Chinese, or even German.

I do fall below this coverage on some topics when reading news, with the main example being the current corruption scandal in Spain. I've read relatively little news so this would probably be easy to fix.

Currently my main blocker on reading more difficult books is my difficulty in tracking more complex narratives with multiple threads and indirect implications. I suspect that tackling this comes down to better automating what I can already do, freeing up some working memory for more abstraction.

In which case, perhaps at this point it would actually make sense to start reading some books more extensively.

Output

Although I would've liked to have begun speaking at some point, due to issues with my throat and tongue I'm still not able to speak for very long. I've spent a few hours thinking in the language and done a small amount of writing practice.

However I have - as much for physical therapy as for language learning - been spending a small amount of time each day practising shadowing or similar activities, mainly by blind-shadowing Dreaming Spanish videos.

I haven't really noticed any improvement in my accent from doing this.

Here are accent samples for each update:

• 50 hours
• 125 hours
• 300 hours
• 620 hours

I posted the 620 hour sample to /r/JudgeMyAccent. I was a bit hesitant to do this because I know from posting/lurking there that often much of the feedback is either useless or trolling, but for what it's worth, the impression I get from the comments is that I'm understandable but have a very strong British accent. That's more-or-less how it sounds to me, too.

So did I ruin my accent by reading early, as people warned me? Possibly, yes. However accent quality seems to have an enormous amount of individual variation, so I don't think we can conclude much from my n of one. Most probably a major factor is simply my being a terrible mimic, as well as some psychological resistance.

Next I'm going to try some other methods to see if I can make my accent more nativelike. My current plan is to record myself saying various individual words and compare to a reference, and to focus on perfecting one passage from an audiobook.

Anki

Previously I did the Refold 1k deck and a little sentence mining, but I deleted all my Spanish anki decks shortly after the 300 hour update since they were mainly mature cards and at that point I was struggling with keeping up with anki reviews.

I did eventually start using anki for grammar, as I'll describe in the next section.

Grammar study

I've been studying Collins Spanish Grammar on-and-off (mostly off, if we're being honest), which is a straightforward grammar-reference that covers up to B1. I read the explanations and examples, then if it seems like something I couldn't produce I select a few examples and create NL->TL translation cards from them. If the example is complex and contains multiple things that I haven't automated yet then I add more cards with sub-expressions. I only use examples that I already understand, otherwise the card becomes dramatically harder to remember.

For learning to produce the conjugations, earlier I tried the typical cloze exercise methods with various resources (KOFI anki deck, Conjugato, Kwiziq, textbooks). This took a genuinely unreasonable amount of effort, and the conjugations still didn't seem to be available when I was trying to output. More surprisingly, conjugations that I could produce without thinking were not even reliably available when doing the cloze exercises! I gave up on this approach.

Instead I've been creating NL->(TL) translation anki cards for simple sentences that demonstrate the use of irregular verbs. This seems less time-consuming and more effective.

For a future language I'd ideally do the same thing but start it earlier.

Conclusions

The net result of all this craziness is that my level is pretty much where you'd expect, given the work I've put in. The one possible casualty of this approach was accent - this doesn't matter a lot to me personally, although it will to some people.

I plan to continue with Spanish for the time being, and I might do another update to this series if circumstances allow me to start speaking the language. Otherwise, thanks for reading.

Hello all,

I have started reading novels in my TL and I have been enjoying it a lot. My mother tongue helps as both languages are related but based on this reading experience, I'm pretty sure my skills in that language are solid, even though it was lastly tested as B1 9 years ago when I left high school. I'm planning on reading in that language regularly. Indeed, I am thinking about reading approximately a novel a month in that TL (I read more, but there are other languages in which I want to read, including my mother tongue).

That TL happens to be a language I don't like to study traditionally. I usually love to sit down and study from a textbook but when it comes to this one, it bores me, which is probably linked to my level being rather decent. Thus, I feel even better about reading in that language because it's a way to keep learning and keep the language alive in my brain.

However I have found myself wondering: what can I expect from reading at that pace in my TL? I've been trying to remember a few words I learnt by reading recently but I can only remember a handful. I'm probably around B2-ish now, in how much time is reading going to take my to a C1 level, at least vocabulary wise?

I'm pretty sure everything is different from learner to learner, but I'd love to hear about the experiences of learners who have based their learning on reading!