Language Learning Update 1
2023-03-01
Summary:
- I'm learning Spanish
- With mainly comprehensible input
- Let's see where I'm at by the end of the year
As just about everybody in my life knows, since I won't shut up about it, I've been learning Spanish. This post documents what's going on so far, mainly for myself, so that I can almost certainly look back with regret and mortification later on, but also so that I can stop hurting my throat by giving the CI spiel to my friends.
My language background: I'm a native English speaker who grew up in a Cantonese household. I've taken 5 years of elementary school Cantonese, 3 years of middle school Mandarin, 3 years of high school Mandarin, and 2 quarters of university Mandarin. All that to say: I function in Cantonese well enough such that my family has to be disappointed in my career instead, and I'm practically worthless when it comes to Mandarin.
A brief timeline of my Spanish learning so far:
- A while ago: 2 months or so of Duolingo
- Fall 2021: SPAN 101 at community college
- Spring 2022: SPAN 102 at community college
- 2022-07-24: Started Language Transfer
- 2022-08-15: Started comprehensible input with Dreaming Spanish
- 2023-02-24: Finished Language Transfer, started 15 Kanji/day via Remembering the Kanji and Anki
- 2023-02-28: 179 hours of Spanish input
The spiel: for now, I'm pretty much all-in on the comprehensible input method. Dreaming Spanish basically says: get 1000+ hours of comprehensible input, then read and converse a lot, and that's how you acquire a language. Grammar, output (speaking), pronunciation, translation - those are all either unnecessary or even harmful in the early stages, and input is the best method to natively absorb a language. For better or worse, I've learned some level of grammar Spanish due to the two semesters of classes and Language Transfer, but I don't think it's actively hurt me yet.
My current input goal is 70 minutes/day; I'm hoping to have at least 600 hours of input by the end of the year, which is not mathematically sound (I'd have to get 118 minutes/day to reach that goal). However, my experience so far is that CI is absolutely a snowball: the better my comprehension, the easier it is to consume more content, since I will increasingly be able to understand longer, more interesting media (podcasts, TV shows, YouTube channels that interest me, video games, etc).
Some Questions That People Don't Actually Ask Me, But I'm Insecure So I've Answered Them For Myself
What level of Spanish can you currently understand?
This video is highly comprehensible for me (maybe 90-95%).
Why not Duolingo/other app?
Duolingo had me practice highly gamified garbage (even though I play FGO hmm) that is completely useless in practice, it taught me nothing about the context of what I was "learning," and it heavily relied on translation, which is very obviously not good. When will I ever fill in the blank or pick from a word bank? When will there ever be exactly one right answer for what to say in a situation? When will I have the time to translate back and forth from English in a real conversation? And how is it valuable whatsoever to formulate sentences when I have no means of understanding what someone is saying back to me?
How can you possibly learn a language without speaking it?
