I have posted several times my speaking updates with Spanish. I understand A LOT when reading and listening. I feel I am at a B2 with my general comprehension. But I find that I am still struggling a lot with past tenses when speaking. I have tried memorizing some basic conjugations with preterite and imperfect tense. But there are so many possibilities that are common that my brain just gets mashed and I feel my Spanish going backwards. Also, I still struggle a lot with which tense is correct to use.
Again, this pertains to my speaking abilities. What should I do to make this easier or to improve my speaking so I donāt struggle so much?
I have recently tried to get more speaking in by using voice chat with AI. But I still struggle a lot with it.
Speaking skills take a long time to develop. Consider hiring a tutor or two on a site like Italki or Preply and taking 1-2 lessons per week. More lessons will obviously lead to faster progress. Speaking with AI helps get reps in too, but it gets boring after a while and is less motivating (for me at least) than speaking with natives.
Track your time spent speaking with natives. Based on what Iāve read online and my own experience, many people find that by about 50 hours of conversations, youāll feel much more confident speaking. With two hours per week of lessons, thatās about 6 monthsā worth of conversations.
I have done almost 4 months of weekly speaking sessions with a tutor all in spanish. Plus early in my studies I did about 40 days of pimsleur (did not like it). I have also done probably 5 hours of speaking with AI.
I feel confident speaking in present tense. And can carry conversation about very niche topics of my interest (like theology).
But I am constantly corrected by both AI and my tutor regarding past tenses. Things that I know I have read and heard 1,000 times in my input. I understand it. But could not repeat it. Or if I could maybe once I would never remember it again.
When telling stories I take long 5-30 second pauses. Say something. And immediately realize Iām so wrong. Get corrected. And then feel like I need to go back to conjugations.
Iām in a cycle. Speak wrong. Get corrected. Go back to reviewing conjugations (advice of my tutor). Try to speak again. Maybe say certain things right. Then speak wrong again. Repeat.
It is normal to make mistakes, that is part of the learning process. Make a mistake, realise youāve made a mistake, correct it, carry on. I practice French by talking to myself. It removes the stress of an interlocutor. The mistakes become fewer with time. I suspect it is very hard to get to a native level of fluidity and accuracy.
First, keep up the weekly sessions with your Spanish tutors, In my opinion, this is the best use of limited time. I do this one or two times a week depending on what else is going on for me.
Secondly, try writing daily on what you did yesterday, last weekend, last year, and when you were a kid. Just start with a couple sentences: 50 -100 words. After a week or so of writing, time yourself and start reading aloud those sentences and at the same time think about what you are saying, Speak for 10 - 15 minutes daily of what you wrote, and you may start to get the hang of it.
Next, just read and listen to more material, you will find a mix of tenses in your reading, but the more exposure you have the better to retain it.
And finally, do not worry about mistakes, that is how we all learn.
Iām gonna go out on a limb and recommend the app āNatulangā to you. I was at a similar place with my Italian until a couple of months ago and Iāve been using it everyday. Has really helped me active all that passive comprehension I already had. Give it a try.
Looks interesting. Like an AI Pimsleur sort of but with shorter lessons. But I like with this I have the option to skip forward if I want.
Edit: I would have kept with it but realized after doing a few lessons it makes you pay a monthly subscriptionā¦given that itās basically AI. Iām not paying for that. I highly dislike when something is not up front about there being a paywall you run into. Everything does this nowadays. Very frustrating.
Thank you for your advice. I definitely want to do the writing followed by speaking. My problem is Iām such a lazy language learner. Without lingq making it so easy to look up words and the statistics motivating me I would never have learned what I have. I would not have stuck with it. It also helps that lingq is on my phone and goes with me everywhere. I started writing in the past but I believe I only ended up with about 6 or 7 entries before falling away from itā¦
Hello,
I would import a lesson into LingQ with lots of past tense. Then read the script and when you see the past tense, just make up your own sentences, just talking to yourself. You can also ask Chat GPT to make up alternative sentences.
When you read / listen you learn to recognise structures in the language but you need to talk or write to activate them so they come to the tip of your tongue easily when speaking.
For my Spanish to get off the ground speaking I began by taking weekly lessons with an italki tutor, I did 72 in about two years. At the same time I was talking to myself at home or on walks, I kept a small notebook and literally wrote down every word and phase (still do but not nearly as much as in the past) that I couldnāt remember, didnāt yet know or was in passive vocabulary to look up later.
I also began writing and looking up corrections, this was in a journal and was just before chatgpt came out.
I also went back to my input materials and made sure a good amount of my intput was not just long form podcasts or youtube videos or novels, but things that had a lot of realistic spoken Spanish, as in regular conversation thereās a lot of little things natives say in daily life that you just donāt hear in long podcasts about abstract ideas.
It was a struggle but slowly improved and then took off more when I began attending local Spanish meetup groups.
Now with my German Iām doing a similar path to activate my speaking minus the italki lessons, as thereās an active German meetup group in my city. And my mother speaks German so I can talk to her all I want. I use limited chatgpt to mostly just give me real time corrections. I have no studied grammar yet with my German and seeing how long I can go without it.
I find what helps my accuracy is going through endless lines of dialogue of shows in LingQ and other spoken Spanish and getting real time corrections from a daily journal with AI or having conversations with it.
It may sound crazy but I use character.ai in Spanish frequently. Itās mostly slop and bizarre scenarios to say the least but it feels much of the time like Iām talking to something approximating a person with a real personality and not just a robot, unlike chatgpt. But itās more advanced as there are no translations and itās all over the place.
I also have to take care of my brain. Too much drinking, losing myself to online media and the like kills my speaking ability.
Donāt stay only with one way of output. Writing will help you to realise patterns and to solidify tenses. Write a lot, do some shadowing if you like it, read out loud, keep your sessions if possible and you will eventually get it. Give yourself some time and credit
That is one thing I eventually noticed about reading books too.
Other than graded readers and learning material designed to have a lot of conversations. A native source with a lot of conversation might be plays they are usually mostly conversations. If you can find something modern I think it can be useful too.
Start with stories that you would tell your friends. Like maybe what you did the day before. Practice trying to say everything you did the day before. Or maybe what a typical day is. Describe it down to the finest detail. If you struggle, look it up, write down what you want to say and go over it. Then try again to tell the āstoryā or what you did.
Focus on the things that happen in your daily life and figure out those patterns first. These are the things youād be telling someoneā¦a friend, a coworker, a doctor, etc.
Then start trying to work on important events from your life that you might tell someone. Maybe a vacation that you went on. Or a great party you went to.
Since these things are dealing with your life youāll have more of a connection and therefore more interest in being able to talk about them.
Also, during the day, work on saying what you just did (in the past). Again, look it up if you struggle. Since these same things happen day in and day out youāll get the patterns quickly and then you can move on to other things.
Then maybe read articles youāre interested in and work how you would tell a friend about what you just read.
My own personal experience of iTalki tutors (Italian, Spanish, French) has been far from satisfactory. I have money locked in there that can only be used if I use more tutors to get through it. Catch 22. Perhaps other tutor platforms would be better, but I donāt have any experience of them.
