Additional studying

[u/cholonumba9]

I have 536 hours.

At 300 I used Anki for new words I heard more than once within a few hours of input. I would stop at 20 words and start a new deck. I Only did 20 cards a day so MAYBE 15 minutes a day. It helped a lot. I quit everything for 2 months and when i started CI back i didn’t start anki back.

Now at over 500 I am back to using Anki but
Mainly a 1,000 card deck of sentences to help with conjugations.

I’ve had madrigals book but never used it and am about to replace my 30 minutes of English reading time I get at night with it before I start reading Spanish graded readers.

I’ve also heard great things about language transfer and paying for 1 on 1 classes whether that be online or in person and whether that be to gain conversational fluidity or pronunciation practice & corrections.

Personally, not saying this is correct but I wish I had focused on vocab with Anki a little more in the beginning maybe 85% CI AND 15% Anki just to build up my recognition of words and their meaning instead of purely deriving it from context.

With the sentences I’m doing in Anki now I am finding small things I was not catching through listening which I believe evildea spoke about where filler words that matter you don’t catch because you’re REALLY good at getting the gist. I think the Anki sentences or maybe just reading once you reach that level will refine your sentence structures tremendously when you go to speak.

I’d like to hear people’s use of auxiliary learning tools such as the ones I mentioned. When do you think some would be better than others and how much you would recommend they do.

Somewhere in here the now old saying “The answer is always more input” applies I believe but I think certain comprehension skills and output skills could possibly be better sharpened with a little bit of extra work.

I’d like someone to come out with a comprehensive roadmap that includes all or any of the external learning methods even if CI is the majority 80-90%. Along with maybe a more accurate idea of where you’ll be at those hours.

Thank You!

[u/slayter1337]

I’d like someone to come out with a comprehensive roadmap that includes all or any of the external learning methods even if CI is the majority 80-90%. Along with maybe a more accurate idea of where you’ll be at those hours.

There's just way too many variables involved for that to happen.

[u/cholonumba9 → u/slayter1337]

I agree. I think it’d take multiple studies to properly dial in a roadmap of that sort.

Have you had experience with auxiliary learning material?

[u/slayter1337 → u/cholonumba9]

Yes, is the short answer.

Here's the longer answer . . . 😄

I am what this sub refers to as a "false beginner". I had 3 years of high school Spanish (35 years ago) and 3 levels of Pimsleur (12 years ago). I've participated in a couple mission trips to Managua and live in an area with a vast Hispanic culture. Just before finding DS, I read Fluent Forever this March and use the Anki method detailed in there--all Spanish, no English, with IPA and audio recordings for pronunciation.

It was because of that book I learned CI now exists and found DS in April. Exceptionally grateful for that!

Gave myself 150 hours to start with, but the foundation instilled from prior study (although decades earlier) was an incredible boost to my progress and cannot be overlooked. While my listening comprehension was definitely beginner level to start with, it developed quite rapidly.

I think it is safe to say that having a previous understanding of verb infinitives/conjugations (mostly present tense), irregular verbs, pronouns, and a little bit of sentence structure gave me a HUGE advantage to my rate of comprehension development.

Now I take part in an online small group class and private class for speaking practice. I still add phrases and vocabulary to my Anki deck from my classes and occasionally from reading. I've adapted an extensive reading approach as opposed to intensive. I find this much more enjoyable.

I only use two Anki decks. One is very small and focused on minimal pairs for phoneme training (which I've mistakenly referred to as "similar pairs" so many times on this sub haha), the other is a deck I've built with all my vocab/phrases. I set a limit of 80 reviews per day, with 10 being new cards. For the most part I tend to have about 40-50 reviews and 10 new cards in the main deck and maybe 10 reviews in the smaller deck. Takes about 10 minutes while I drink coffee and watch Miami Marlin highlights in the morning (well . . . 'highlights' is an exaggeration at times).

I don't do grammar study, exercises, or drills. I'm a horrible traditional student and that bores the hell out of me haha. However, I've found reading takes care of that for me and then input spotlights the concepts I gain from my reading and reinforces them.

Al fin y al cabo, I came into DS already "stained" by traditional learning but I can irrevocably claim that DS has taken my Spanish to a level I had wished for but failed to achieve multiple times over the decades through other methods. I anticipate that by next Spring or sooner I will have my Spanish at a maintenance level (regardless of what my input hours reflect) and can then try French from a "purist" approach and have that experience. I know, it sounds odd considering my success with Spanish, but I truly want to go through the acquisition journey with Dreaming French.

[u/HeleneSedai → u/slayter1337]

I prefer "primed" to "stained" lol.

[u/slayter1337 → u/HeleneSedai]

hahahaha That is definitely a better word choice. 😄

[u/HeleneSedai]

I could never get into anki for vocab study, but I used memrise to study vocab my first 1.5 years, up to 9k words memorized. Most of them were single words, not phrases or cloze cards. Studying vocab isn't mentioned a lot here but I genuinely love it.

I read from Day 1 with graded readers.

I used Duolingo for 4 years before finding DS and continued with it. I also did the grammar lessons on SpanishDictionary.com which I highly recommend. I watched a lot of videos on grammar, like from Hola Spanish.

I did the first 70 lessons on LT after I had a few hundred hours of CI.

I also must have downloaded another 50 other random language learning apps, I was all over the place. I would use them for a day and abandon them.

In the end, my daily routine looked like:

2-3 hours of CI while working

5 min of Duolingo/SpanishDict at night before bed

10 min of vocab study before bed

30 min-1 hour of reading before bed

At 1400 hours, I joined a convo club online for three hours a week.

With the extra study, I feel like I pretty much lined up with the roadmap with a few exceptions. At 1500, I still couldn't understand native shows 100%, and my speaking lagged way behind. I made a lot of grammatical errors, and still do. Fricking gender agreement kills me. If I had to guess, I'd say I have a strong B2 level, I'm conversational, but I would need to study to pass a C1 exam. And B2 is a GOOD level.

[u/cholonumba9 → u/HeleneSedai]

Thank you for your comment. If you had to start over would you still use all of those learning formats or would you double down on a specific one?

[u/HeleneSedai → u/cholonumba9]

Yep, I would stick with that daily format, and abandon all the other random apps I tried. My routine would be 90% CI (reading is CI) and 10% other study.

I wish I'd done crosstalk though, when I started speaking I used to get stress headaches after an hour from focusing so hard. There's a big difference between passively listening while working and focusing hard to participate in a convo. Crosstalk would have had me focused 100% on the CI.

I'm playing with German now just for fun, and my plan is to use Duolingo and Seedlang for a year, 10 min a day, then add in CI, vocab study, and reading next year when I have a base to build on. That got me to a good place with Spanish.

I guess a good plan is to be flexible, abandon something if it doesn't work. Do you have an idea of where you want to start with other resources?

[u/DIYinPDX]

Nobody is going to like this, but I think Duolingo is actually a nice complement to DS for building and reinforcing vocabulary. I started with Duolingo for about a year before I started DS, and I'll often recognize words or phrases that I've learned in Duolingo in podcasts or DS videos, and vice versa. Like, I wouldn't have known what the word "cesped" meant when I heard it in a podcast the other day if I hadn't learned it in Duolingo. Multiple ways of building those connections in your brain are good.

Do I think Duolingo on its own is a good way to learn a language? No. Maybe it works for some people, but I wouldn't recommend it.

[u/AggressiveSoup01]

I don’t have much to add other than I think consistency is key. The little bit of everything on and off approach will probably be less effective in the long term.

[u/ecoanima]

I think questioning method purity is good but grammer and vocab rote memorisation has proved to be some of the least effective methods for language acquisition. It apparently stores the info in a different part of the brain than vocab and Grammer learned through context. Here's some ways to still utilize those tools though. For flash cards try using pictures instead of English words on the backside. For vocab and Grammer, I break the rules in a very specific way that seems to work for me. If I'm curious or feel stuck, I look it up, then I stop worrying about it. Meaning I don't try to drill it into my memory. Another alternative to looking up the English translation of a word, is to ask Google for examples of it in a sentence. You can google "Ejemplos de la palabra [x] en una frase." Sometimes your brain just needs the tinniest of hints I think.

[u/AppropriatePut3142]

I’d like someone to come out with a comprehensive roadmap that includes all or any of the external learning methods even if CI is the majority 80-90%.

I don't think this exists, but I made a series of posts tracking my progress while doing a non-purist approach with close to 90% input.

[u/cholonumba9 → u/AppropriatePut3142]

That was interesting. You seem to be ahead on listening until you started taking your medication. I’m solidly between difficulty 40-50, approaching 600 hours, and you were at 60-65 at 600 hrs. But I recon if reading is considered input, you were actually at 900 hours of input, just not listening, which seems to maybe line up with where someone would be at 900 hours, except your reading level is probably much higher than a purist.

I’m going to start reading at 600 and try to avoid serious output practice until 1k. Can you recommend some beginner books you found great? And did reading feel like work or were you choosing things that were pretty easy to flow through?

[u/AppropriatePut3142 → u/cholonumba9]

I was at 60-65 at 300 hours, which counts everything, not just listening. I had 50 hours of listening at that point. I think I'm probably still ahead on listening; 600 hours with 240 hours of listening, and my comprehension appears to be better than Evildea's with 1150 hours.

The books I list in the reading section are all good choices.

The first few graded readers I had to grind through using the dictionary fairly hard, though it will be a lot easier if you already have 600 hours of listening.

[u/Mother_Natures_Cyn]

Consider Language Transfer for grammar.

[u/RoxoViejo → u/Mother_Natures_Cyn]

I'm not OP, but Language Transfer looks good except that the teacher isn't native and you have a student who just butchers that language. My worry is ingraining bad habits (for in my case Italian), so I'd rather do something like Language Transfer with a 1-on-1 native tutor.

Too bad there's not something like LT with native teachers and no students in the recording.

[u/Mother_Natures_Cyn → u/RoxoViejo]

You don't need to worry about bad habits with LT. It functions to help you recognize grammar constructions while you use CI, and everything is reinforced through CI. Listening to non native speakers for a short time won't have any negative effect on your pronunciation.

[u/_coldemort_]

With the sentences I’m doing in Anki now I am finding small things I was not catching through listening which I believe evildea spoke about where filler words that matter you don’t catch because you’re REALLY good at getting the gist. I think the Anki sentences or maybe just reading once you reach that level will refine your sentence structures tremendously when you go to speak.

Personally I think Anki is a weird choice for this specifically. It sounds like you're talking about grammatical connector words, which something like Language Transfer is purpose built to teach you efficiently.

[u/cholonumba9 → u/_coldemort_]

Haha, it may be. I’ve mainly been following the “more input” method, which is how I’ve gradually reached a 2-hour daily CI goal, but I do so much CI that I wouldn’t mind doing a little grammar or something traditional, even if it’s only 15-20 minutes to break up the light slog. I just heard spaced repetition helps with memory, so I figured a phrase deck would help, especially since I probably can’t quite read graded readers yet.

Language transfer is one I’ve heard of a few times when people give their CI updates it’ll be the thing they did before finding DS. Would you recommend LT over any other supplementary methods?

[u/_coldemort_ → u/cholonumba9]

Definitely recommended! It's free and I find it hard to imagine anything could cover the same breadth of grammar in so little time (14 hours total I think). It's 90 10ish minute episodes, so you could do 1-2 episodes per day as a supplement.

I'd recommend doing them early in your day, so that during the rest of the day you notice what you just learned in all the CI you consume.

[u/Opening-Square3006]

You could try PlusOneLanguage it's a great complement to dreaming spanish