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Language Learning Update 2

2023-12-23

input stonks

Like the S&P 500, it really only goes up.

Since my last update, much has happened, much has changed, and yet mostly things have stayed the same. Let's get into it.

Disclaimer: this is my personal experience, not a prescription or directive for how anyone else should learn languages. And it's not like I've achieved any passable level of fluency yet, so all claims of proficiency are speculative at best.

Executive Summary

A tiny brief recap on my CI approach: I'm focused on getting comprehensible input (videos, podcasts) until my comprehension level is very high before doing any output (speaking). I plan to read sometime before I start speaking regularly, but no idea when. I don't study grammar, do translation, mine vocabulary, do shadowing, or really anything else besides watch/listen to stuff.

Spanish

Because I track my hours through Dreaming Spanish (DS), I unfortunately don't have fine-grained statistics, but here's at least some numbers:

Dreaming Spanish stats

First, I'll address a couple deviations from what I said in March.

I dropped my input goal down to 60 minutes/day in April. I was forced to confront that: I'm not in any particular rush to learn Spanish, I have a lot of other things I want to do during my daily life, and the daily goal was more stressful than helpful. Life goes on; I'm not the kind of person who can dedicate 3+ hours a day to just watching Spanish videos, so I won't pretend to be. If you are and you can, I'm jealous!

My goal was to hit 600 hours by the end of the year; for reasons described above, I mentally dropped that goal to 500 hours at some point. But even now at 479, I feel proud of my progress and dedication. Committing to and achieving gradual progress every day is ultimately more gratifying than an arbitrary EOY number.

panik meme

Final deviation: I just sliiightly regret going through all of Language Transfer that early in my input journey (I finished in February 2023). Recognition of grammar structures, especially the subjunctive, kinda detracts from my enjoyment and ease of input consumption because my brain switches to analytic mode too easily. I actually feel like I get better input when I'm doing something mindless (driving, cooking, working out) than when I'm actively watching a video.

Input

Here's the content I've been consuming throughout these past 300 hours, broken down by the hours I had:

Shohei Barou

I swear that "este tipo" is the catchphrase of shonen LATAM dubs.

The only thing I read fully was ¡Hola, Lola!, a graded reader that was honestly too easy and somewhat boring.

Final thoughts on Spanish

I'm still not really outputting, though maybe I could scrape by if I had to (largely due to the two semesters of community college Spanish). However, I'm extremely happy with my level of comprehension, even at sub-500 hours. I can watch YouTube channels made for natives. I can enjoy Avatar for fun and not purely to grind hours. I've done a bit of crosstalk with native speakers, and I had no problems understanding them.

Japanese

The big questions I'd have for myself are: (1) why did I start acquiring Japanese, (2) is it worth it/possible/difficult to tackle two languages simultaneously, and (3) does a CI approach really work from an absolute beginner perspective?

(1) I started because I visited Japan in May, and that motivated me to plan on returning in 2025, but at least with some working grasp of the language (hopefully around where my Spanish is now). In hours, that's oooptimistcally a target of 600 (despite vast relative difference in my NL, English, vs Japanese/Spanish).

(2) It mostly doesn't affect me besides the time management aspect. Sometimes I have trouble remembering the Spanish for something because I instead think of the Japanese, but it's not like I'm outputting anyways.

I'll get back to (3) in the conclusion of this section. For now, let's look at these freakin' numbers, yeah? I got a Spreadsheet, way over blown, and it's good to me.

Japanese CI Tracker

Holy shit the numbers Mason

I consider May 22 the official start date, since that's the day I got back from Japan.

Rolling average (2023)

Lonely rolling average

If I crank my goal up to 1 hour/day, I might be able to hit 600 hours in time for a 2025 trip 👀👀.

Input

Since I only have very few hours to work with, I'll break these down by ease instead. Again, this is from the perspective of someone who's on a "purist" CI approach with no explicit study whatsoever.

Complete beginner (0+):

Between complete and regular beginner (50+?):

Beginner (90+ in my experience):

Definitely harder than beginner, even though they're labeled as such, and I tried to consume it anyways:

I didn't like these resources for various reasons, YMMV:

You'll notice that I had to explore a dramatically different range of content for Japanese than for Spanish. This is because there is simply not enough good complete beginner content on the level of Dreaming Spanish.

I also gotta mention that I've been doing crosstalk online with a Japanese teacher since ~50 hours (hi Nami!), and it's been hugely rewarding. She's incredible at meeting me at my level, even without visual aids (we have a whiteboard but use it very sparingly). If you're looking for a crosstalk partner, I'd recommend hiring a teacher for sessions, since they know how to adjust to students' levels much better than a random native speaker. (Friends can work too, since you can tell them to slow the fuck down and draw more).

Kanji

Not much to say here. I revved up Anki, gassed up with a copy of Remembering the Kanji, and went to town (approximate meanings only, no writing/readings). My initial pace was quite high, but it's now tempered out to 3/day. I'm on target to get to all 2200 by October 2024.

But, but, but what about readings?

I don't give a shit lol. I genuinely think I'll acquire them naturally once I start reading subtitles.

Anki calendar Anki reviews Anki card counts

Card Counter Sakura

My favorite kanji so far is, of course, 胞 (placenta), made of the primitives for "flesh" and "wrap".

Final thoughts on Japanese

I'll finally get back to the question of: "Does a CI approach really work from an absolute beginner perspective?"

Yes so far, but it's been fucking hard to find easy content. To CI creators out there: thank you for all your work, but also know that if your video has no visual aids whatsoever besides a person talking into a camera, it is not complete beginner content. It just... isn't.

It's highly possible that dedicated study (Genki 1), vocab work, or reading hiragana/katana subtitles could have jump-started my input ability — I've heard experiences like that from Spanish learners who did Duolingo. Hell, my classroom experience let me start directly with DS beginner videos (at what cost?). But in truth, I don't really care. This is a once-in-a-lifetime experiment that I can only run on myself, so I'm going to stick to it unless I'm convinced it's not working.

And it is working! I am finally, finally, finally at the point of being able to consume podcasts, which is the absolute key to farming input numbers. I can understand my crosstalk partner for an hour every week, and I get to have a nice chat too 😄.

shadowmere farming

If input is your destruction level... podcasts are Shadowmere.

End

This ended up much longer than I thought it would, but thanks for reading. Shoutout to all the input resources I've been able to consume, largely for free, as well as the very supportive and lively Dreaming Spanish Fans Discord server. Catch you at the next update, and I hope this encourages you to take on a second language!