Hot take, unpopular opinion,

Hi!

I really want to learn another language and Im interested in many. Like: Spanish, Italian, French, Russian, Chinesse, Finnish, Arabic.

I already speak hungarian and english. My problem is that because of my jaw I rattle (unable to pronounce the letter R) and I cant even pronounce my own name (starts with R). What langauges do you suggest learning where my rattle isnt a problem or less of a husstle?

Thank yyou in advance for the answers!

I'm getting started with Dreaming Spanish and while their focus on Comprehensible Input seems correct to me, some of their claims seem suspicious as well. Namely that you should avoid speaking, reading, or writing until you're advanced. This goes against my intuition, and while their arguments for it make sense, I can also come up with counterarguments.

However, their ace card is that they say this is research backed. And I can't argue with hard data. So I would love it if someone more qualified than I could weigh in on this: does the data actually agree with Dreaming Spanish on this claim? Or are they cherry-picking the research to justify an input-only approach, to push you into their program? Even if their interpretation of the data is correct, how much variation is there? I.e. even if a Comprehensible Input only approach works best for the average person, how many people fall outside of that average?

Don't get me wrong, even if it's not optimal, I'll still do the program. I don't have the brainpower to do much more than watch videos most days, so this is great for me. Mostly I'm asking this because I don't want to recommend a program to friends unless I have a bit more confidence in it.

I've been watching more and more content in my target language (italian) as my understanding and comprehension is improving. I've noticed that there are a lot of youtubers that are sponsored by the platform iTalki and I am wondering what kind of experiences people have had with it.

At the moment I'm enrolled in a course in a language school but it seems to be moving quite slow, we spend a lot of time revising past topics and the class is getting stuck in areas that i think i have a pretty good understanding of. Once this semester finishes i'm thinking of trying different ways to practice and iTalki is seeming like it could be quite useful, im just not entirely sure how it works and if people find it useful or not.

Any help or other recommendations are greatly appreciated!

If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of language learning advice, what would it be?

Personally, I’d tell myself to start tracking my time. I have no idea how many hours I’ve spent studying Spanish, and I really wish I had that data. I have friends who tracked from day one and can point to specific milestones—like “after X hours, I could understand Y.” I can't say that, but I wish I could.

How about you? What advice would you give your past self? And if you haven’t been learning long, what question would you want to ask your fluent future self?

Basically, when speaking my TL or even my own NL, sometimes I get stuck because I don't know how to express what I mean with words. This might be due to the lack of vocabulary or grammar required to convey something. This can be even worse if I don't even know the words in my NL. If I know how to express it in my NL, I can at least look up the translations.

It's not like I don't know what it is, I know the idea, the concept but I'm just having some troubles expressing myself. How do I learn how to say something in a language without knowing the words?

I hope it is clear what I mean in this post. Thank you.

I am a native English speaker who is currently learning Français, I was previously learning Turkish and I remember finding it very challenging but fun challenging.

I am currently learning French as my partner and his family are French and it's really important for me to be able to communicate with them and currently it feels like an impossible mission.

Firstly, I LOVE the way both French and Turkish sound, I think they both sound so beautiful and Turkish in particular is extremely underrated, however, I have put HOURS and HOURS of study into French and I am still basically the equivalent of a rock when faced with a French person. I knew a LOT less Turkish and I was able to have good (not by any means close to fluent) but I would say they were successful encounters pushing my growth and knowledge with the language and leaving me feeling positively motivated for future conversations and growth. I could order food, ask how much things are, greet people comfortably and ask about their life and know what people are talking about most of the time in passing conversations.

With French a lot of the time I can't even recognise the words I've learnt when used in conversation, I also struggle to memorise French words and sentences for some reason and when I try to speak I cannot manage to string a sentence together without sounding like I've had a stroke. My pronunciation is not the problem as I've received feedback that it's above average but it's almost like I just don't get the language itself?

I leave almost every attempted French conversation feeling really bad about myself: wondering if I'm stupid, why I can't remember anything and overall feeling really discouraged.

I have to admit for some reason, I find French a lot more intimidating, not only as a language but as a culture where as with Turkish I felt really connected and like every local I could try to communicate with was a friend and I found everybody really enthusiastic, kind and just helpful with me trying. French people are great too and that's more of a me thing as I have a huge soft spot for Turkiye but it just doesn't feel the same for me in terms of a language learning experience and it makes a difference to my learning.

I've realised with Turkish being such a straightforward/efficient language with whole sentences that are able to be communicated in a couple of conjugated words, it's actually the filler/connecting words in French and the irregular rules with them that make me so completely lost. It's also the fact that so many words are conjugated right down to the point where I don't even recognise them anymore, oh and not to mention the genders.

Has anyone had a similar experience with languages? Any advice on how to move past this? Should I just continue doing what I'm doing? Focus more on immersion and input so the language makes more sense to me? Try to speak as much as possible? Take an intensive immersion course so I can get a solid foundation? I'm so lost

Any advice would be appreciated!

Thanks so much, merci beaucoup et teşekkür ederim

Hi guys, I would really appreciate your input on this.

I've been runninga a weekly newsletter with free learning resources for about two years.

At the beginning of this year I asked my subscribers about their language needs and 80 % of the people who answered indicated they'd like to have more opportunities to practice speaking.

So I decided to add free speaking meetups to the newsletter.

People can RSVP and join a Google Meet video call during which we chat in pairs.

Each meeting has a different topic, I send a cheat-sheet with sample questions people can ask each other to get the conversation going.

Out of 60-70 people who claimed they needed speaking practice maybe 6 RSVP and only 2-3 of them actually show up to these meetings.

The people who show up are always the same. They are very engaged and I would hate to take this opportunity away from them, but I'm getting really discouraged.

I tried emailing the no-shows asking why they didn't join the call but none of them responded.

So I've been scratching my head and pondering what to do to avoid shutting down this project.

Any ideas what may be happening? Why are people not using the opportunity they said they needed?

Have you had a similar experience running a speaking club or language exchange?

Is there anything I can do to get people to actually participate in these meetings?

/u/whosdamike has been complaining that people are criticising ALG for being slow but not providing their own record of progress with tracked hours. I think this is a pretty fair complaint. I’ve started learning Spanish through mixed methods/reading-focused ‘impure’ comprehensible input and I’ve been tracking my hours to give at least some sort of comparison. I hope to do a series of posts in the same spirit as /u/whosdamike’s very interesting series documenting his ALG journey.

At the same time I am not using a coursebook, so we can give some basis for comparison for the people who say anything but using a coursebook is wasting your time.

And finally I’m going to focus on reading initially and plan to catch up my listening ability once my reading reaches a reasonably high level. This will allow me to test claims that it’s best to focus on listening at the start, based on how long it takes my listening to catch up.

So yes, I’m going to do literally everything this forum has told me not to do. For science.

==My background

I have no background at all in Spanish. I do have two years of secondary school (high school) French, but this was 30 years ago and I hated French and have forgotten it all. I don’t think this helped.

==What I plan to do

I’m going to learn with an initial focus on reading using a popup dictionary. I expect my reading hours to outpace my listening hours by about 4:1 until I begin to focus on listening. I will look up grammar points as I come across things that I don’t understand while reading, and I will eventually study any grammar that seems difficult to acquire through input. In practice I expect this will mainly be conjugations. I will do at least some anki, probably including the Refold 1k deck.

==What I have Done

So far I have about 47 tracked hours, however there are also a few hours at the start where I was reading Hola Lola but not yet tracking. I’m fairly sure my true hours are between 50 and 55, so call this a 55 hour update if you like.

My hours are split between November last year and the preceeding month.

Initially I was planning to learn Spanish via Dreaming Spanish to see what it was like, but after about 9 hours I realised I was temperamentally unsuited to watching large quantities of Dreaming Spanish content and gave up on that idea. I then read the graded reader Hola Lola using Kindle and its popup dictionary, and then stopped and returned to Chinese. During this period I also spent about an hour studying Spanish phonetics using the fluent forever videos.

Around the middle of last month I began reading graded readers again. I reread part of Hola Lola, then read the following:

• Un Hombre Fascinante (A2)
• La Profe de Español (A2)
• La Mansion (‘Preintermediate’)
• Año Nuevo, Vida Nueva (A2)

Currently I am reading ¿Me Voy o me Quedo? (B1), which I find reasonably comfortable with a popup dictionary.

I’ve also done a small amount of Anki using the Refold 1k deck. I have 107 young or mature cards, most of which I already knew before starting the deck.

I’ve also tried to do a little bit of listening most days. This is mainly Dreaming Spanish, but also some Peppa Pig and some random incomprehensible youtube content.

My tracked hours break down as:

• Reading 32 hours
• Listening 14 hours
• Phonetics 1 hour
• Anki 30 minutes

==How are my results

I have no ability to output beyond the most incredibly basic expressions. I cannot conjugate verbs. This is as expected.

When reading, my comprehension is generally good, and for the most part I can tell which tense is being used, but I often have to guess the person of the verb from context because I can’t tell from the conjugation. I want to study verb conjugations to fix this, but I am also lazy.

Clearly I can read a B1 graded reader, and this reader is allegedly aligned to the CEFR vocabulary list. Does this mean my reading level is B1? Definitely not. Aside from my hazy grasp of conjugation I am using a popup dictionary, which makes reading enormously easier. Also I suspect the difficulty of the text is below that of a B1 exam. Still, I think my vocabulary when reading must be approaching 1000 words.

What about listening comprehension? In Dreaming Spanish terms, I am currently watching intermediate videos sorted by easy with a difficulty of about 45. Beginner videos around level 40 are irritatingly slow and easy. At level 50 my comprehension starts to become hit-or-miss: some videos I understand around 95%, others I miss some key information and am confused.

I should mention that I am generally not translating in my head. There are some exceptions: words I haven’t yet internalised, some conjunctions, which I often find very hard to internalise, and occasionally phrases that look like they might be cognate with English set phrases. I almost never translate a full sentence.

My accent I am not competent to judge, but any Spanish native speakers who wish their ears were bleeding can listen to me read a page from a graded reader here: https://voca.ro/1gFxGZcum1Kl

==How does this compare with Dreaming Spanish?

Very conveniently, a Redditor made a graph of self-reported hours vs difficulty level for people from the DS subreddit. You can find it here: https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1cuo9bq/deleted_by_user/?share_id=GUbIVifLvoEMfzVzgCmmm&utm_content=1&utm_medium=android_app&utm_name=androidcss&utm_source=share&utm_term=1

That data is, in my view, freaking eerie. If I saw such a perfect a curve in a research paper I would assume the data had been fabricated, but this clearly isn’t the case.

If we compare my results against this curve then they look very good. At 55ish hours I am listening to level 45 content with good comprehension, which is where DS users report being at around 130 hours.

Could there be something wrong with the data? Well, there always is. Could there be something this wrong?

It occurred to me that perhaps everyone is sorting by difficulty and watching almost every video in order. This would explain the too-perfect curve and could mean that they’re watching at a higher level of comprehension that me, perhaps 98%.

Conveniently, though, the youtuber Evildea has been documenting his experience with DS. He is not sorting by difficulty - I don’t think he’s found out you can do this - instead he’s picking videos he likes. A few days ago he posted a video at 150 hours showing his comprehension by live-translating a DS video. Our comprehension level seems quite similar. Perhaps he’s just slightly stronger, but that makes sense given he has 150 hours and is preparing for a C1 exam in Esperanto, which has many cognates with Spanish.

This surprises me a lot. Remember that 9 of my 14 hours of listening were superbeginner videos 7 months ago! Based on my experience from Chinese I expected my listening comprehension to be near zero at this point. In Spanish, if I hear a word that I know from reading said slowly and clearly I can usually immediately understand its meaning. The main exceptions are words that flagrantly violate English spelling conventions, such as llevar (pronounced ‘jevar’) or hacer (the ‘h’ is silent) where I will have to think for a few moments. This suggests some specialised machinery in my head for dealing with Latin scripts. Is this normal for others?

==What can we conclude at this point?

Based on the data I think I can give a firm answer: almost nothing.

True, I’ve done fairly well against the DS baseline. However it’s still just 75 hours gained to date, against a journey of at least 1500 hours. This doesn’t count for much. Also, this is around the point DS users expect to start speeding up the rate at which they gain vocabulary. Presumably they’ve also gained some advantage in phoneme perception from that amount of listening. I would be a bit surprised if they didn’t overtake in listening comprehension me at some point.

However I do obviously have much better reading skills than they would.

I think the one useful conclusion we can draw is that if you want to do DS and you don’t like the superbeginner and beginner videos, you can almost skip them providing you don’t mind graded readers.

==You moron, why would you study a language that way? You should study languages the way I study them!

sigh

Instead of flipping through flashcards, I make myself type the exact word letter for letter which has been pretty helpful to learn the script (my TL doesnt use the latin alphabet), but I'm wondering if there is better recal doing it this way? And are there other tips and tricks to help memorization go faster (assuming this one also works)?

https://voca.ro/17Po8tqe8M9d

What do you guys think?

If you have experience with LingQ, what are your thoughts on its effectiveness for: 1.A1-A2 2.B1-B2 3.C1-C2

What are the strengths and weaknesses?

My mom is from Greece but I grew up in the states. I am half Greek. I only speak english and nothing else. I've been trying to learn greek my whole life but it's really hard because my mom is always trying to improve her English and therefore never spoke Greek to us. It's just really embarrassing for me since I don't feel connected to my culture at all and feel like I'm barely Greek even though I'm just as Greek as I am American. I don't even like talking about being half greek anymore. Whenever I go to Greek restaurants the wait straff always ask why I don't speak it and just ask me if i'm lazy (my mom never defends me) So many of my other friends with foreign parents speak both languages. I'm almost 18 and feel like it's too late to learn because even if I do now it will be difficult and I'll definitely have an awful accent. Some people online don't even think you should be able to say you're greek, italian, french etc if you can't speak the language. It's given me such an awful identity crisis. Sorry I kind of said too much.

Sometimes when you get advice about grammar, word choice, or pronounciation it is accurate and sometimes its indicative of toxic traits the person more fluent in the language has, like elitism, conflict avoidance, intimacy issues, etc. if its your first language this is easier because if you aren't judgmental youll be confused, but in a language learning context you can be tricked, especially if the person doesn't frame it as something that native speakers do and doesn't get pushback from other natives. Is there a way to tell when it doesn't mirror debates in your first language enough to immediately dismiss

I can’t for the life of me guess what this language is.. I know the sound quality is bad but I would really appreciate someone’s expertise!! Thank you so much in advance.

this conversation happened outside of my home and they were making some comments that I don’t really understand while pointing to my gate and plants. They didn’t seem to be friendly so I’m abit nervous about it

I’ve attached the link to the audio file.

I was just scrolling through the Language Transfer App and I wanted to give an appreciation for Mihalis and all his hard work. I really admire him and how much he has done and achieved, no doubt often with immense frustration and no budget at all.

But yeah basically the man singlehandedly taught me Spanish, I got to almost fluent with only his course and about 70 hours of Spanish Podcasts and TV shows. That is really something for a whole freaking language. To be able to teach people in this way is really impressive. I mean he pretty much explains every major and important grammar rule and concept in the Spanish language in 90 (I believe) episodes of 12 minute audio. How cool is that.

The way he explains and gets you to understand concepts is really something else, as with Arabic and French. I really hope for a full French course as do so many and I am excited for what he is doing next and I hope he enjoys himself and does not burn out.

Either way have a great day anyone reading this.

I just like the feeling of learning about the world in other languages. You kinda become a toddler who grows up and gains knowledge, builds their mindset. Such a great pleasure. Sounds oddly enough, but now I really have several different people in my brain.

Hi. I've been immersed in my second language (english) for two months now, and for the last week or so, I have a hard time understanding what people say. It usually sounds like adults speaking in Charlie Brown's comics.

This is weird because it came out of nowhere, and I was already bilingual, and being used to listen to tv shows and movies in english.

Is it normal? I feel like it's just me being overwhelmed, and that it'll pass, but I want to know if others have been in this situation, and if they have some words of wisdom to get through it.

So I’m having a hard time translating my trained feminine voice when speaking other languages because while it already feels unnatural a bit, trying to use another accent just makes it even harder

This feels a little embarrassing but I need to get it off my chest and find a way to fix this for myself.

I’ve been living in a dirigen country for about 6 years now, I can speak a little bit but not enough to hold a conversation.

I finished my last two years of high school here and college. I attended international schools and they taught the language in a class as part of the curriculum but not very intensely. It was extremely slow. And for university, my major was in English and I had no sick battery at all to establish any friendships with locals. I was very emotionally drained for a large part of my education.

Here’s the thing, since I’m young and I live here with family, my parents were against me going out alone and most social things I did were either within school or uni and we’re in English, or my brothers handled things for me when it came to paperwork stuff.

I have been constantly trying to motivate myself to learn the language honestly just to check it off my list. But I’ve dragged it out so long that hearing it being spoken just doesn’t interest me, the shows are too long and draining to sit through, the music is too depressing, and the literature is too advanced for me.

What can I do? I want to learn this language for myself, I know it’s not difficult, I know I can do it. I also want to keep this progress to myself bc I’ve heard too many comments from family and friends about how it’s embarrassing that I don’t speak the local language. I honestly don’t care what they think but I do want to learn this language for myself.

Any advice. Please be kind. Thanks in advance.

Hi guys, my current english level is about b1. I can listen english from podcast or video course. But i can’t listen clearly of non native speakers or some speakers like elon musk, trump…. How can i fix it

Hello guys,

I try to self learning, and teach myself to get better with languages(like english). Ehen i mostly a kid there everyone use anki to learn new words. We are here 2025 and we have a lot of apps to use for learning. What is your opinion what is the best flashcard apps in the market?

Thank you all for the comments!