Just some quick advice for people new to learning another language, don’t do what i have been doing.
Most people say that you need to do some output as well as input but i was far more focused on the input, skipping output almost entirely.
i’ve read over a million words in Spanish, and obviously, ive become quite good at… you guessed it, reading!
The plan was to get really comfortable with reading, then start watching things in spanish with spanish subtitles on, then after that maybe a conversation would just flow… but no, it doesnt work like that.
i dont update my known words on LingQ but id say i know passively thousands upon thousands of words. But as i havnt put much of this to use i can probably only have very basic conversations but its more the fact that i freeze and become really nervous, its just not natural to me, but if someone asked me to read a bit of spanish out loud then ill be in my zone, itll sound like i could have really advanced conversations!
What annoys me about it the most is that i probably have a higher reading ability than most 6-8 year old natives, but have the talking ability of a 2/3 year old.
Lingq has helped my massively but ive switched to a more output method, i have in-depth conversations with chat GPT and use Tandem. i also use chat gpt to translate things id like to express for me, its far better than google, because i say things like “colloquially, how to say in Spanish from Spain…” and it’ll give me real life day to day chat back.
I love LingQ so much but the best way to practice your output is through Free4Talk. I’ve been seeing with my own eyes how much people improve there after breaking the shyness barrier. I’d say maybe your conversation lvl. ain’t that bad, you’re just not confident enough.
Just in case, you can count me in if you want to output some spanish.
You’ve come to the wrong conclusion - listening a lot (and when i say a lot, i mean thousands upon thousands of hours) is what will turn all that passive knowledge into speaking ability, not just simply outputting.
You have 1M words read. I have 740 000.
You have 40 000 thousands lingqs. I have 11 000 thousands. ( around 7000 in comparison to spanish).
You have 1250 known words. I have around 5850. ( around 3600 in comparison to spanish )
It looks like. I’m repeating much more the same content than you or I stay with the same theme
over and over. Period I have learned this is a little less than one year. It helps as doing things more
frequently helps to remember more easily.
About listening, try watching serie or anything you like. With time you will get used to natural speed talks.I think being abble to write the sentence you have just heard is already excellent.
Learning loop for me :
lots of listening/reading based on video from you tube 7h
lessons with a teacher based on video. 2h
Writting phrases based on vocabulary/grammar from the video 2h
2 times a week speaking Ukrainian with collegue who wants also to learn french. 1h