So I am reaching a point of frustration with my ability to speak spanish where I almost want to take a break from the language for while. Which I almost can’t believe I’m considering.
I am at almost 24,000 known words.
I can listen to and understand most of what I run into.
I have 43 hours of speaking.
I have been learning for 1 year and 6 months.
I started having tutoring conversations about 6 months ago. This morning I had a tutoring session where I was to share a story from my life. How I met my wife. I feel like my ability to do this was still so bad. I have been having so much trouble improving my speaking. It is so difficult and so slow and so frustrating. When I say that:
I can understand a lot. But when I try to speak I often stop because my brain simply can not recall what I need.
I can speak comfortably in the present tense. I never really had to try to learn those conjugations. It just happened.
But, I struggle so much with the past tenses. Preterite and imperfect. Even though I understand them. Can explain them. And can recite conjugation tables for the most common verbs. But only sometimes can I use them in conversation. Often this is when I pause and have to change the subject or ask how to say something I should already know because I simply can’t remember it in the moment.
And don’t get me started about how to remember the perfect tenses. Or how to not confuse the conjugations for commands or subjunctive with the normal past tenses…it feels like there are just too many possibilities and too much to get used to.
I honestly feel like my improvement over the last 6 months has been so so small. It feels like at this pace if I want to be basically conversational it will take 3-5 more years. Which is so discouraging. My goal has been to be at least comfortable expressing myself by the end of this year. But it’s doesn’t seem like that is possible right now.
Why is this so hard? And why does no one talk about how hard it is to go from understanding to using / expressing?
Feeling discouraged. Any advice or help would be great.
You stated that you are learning the languages for 18 months now, thus probably have spend hundreds of hours reading and listening, but having convos for 6 months totaling up to 43 hours of speaking. So apparently you have invested less time in output than in input, which should answer your first question.
In addition to that and regarding your second question, it has been stated in the forum quiet often that actively using a language to express oneself is a completely different and much more challenging task than passively consuming it. It’s not like we would try to keep this secret. When consuming the language, you can use the context to guess meanings of words, expressions or grammar. You don’t have to bother that they are correct, that’s the part of the other party.
But if you produce the language, it is your job to handle this, besides thinking about what you are trying to say, keeping in mind what has been said before and what you are reacting to, anticipating the reaction to what you are saying and keeping all the muscles moving to create the correct sounds. So yeah, that’s difficult.
It’s btw the same in your mother tongue. The words and expressions you are actively using are just a subset of those you actually understand passively. But as your passive vocabulary is big enough, it doesn’t appear to limit you. Besides you having thousands of hours of practice in speaking.
It might be helpful if you generally try to produce the language more. As using tutoring conversations more is probably only a limited option due to costs and time management, writing would probably be a good choice. I, for example, have only a rather limited practice in speaking English, but having spent thousands of hours writing the language in forums I never had an issue expressing myself in the rare cases where I needed to speak the language (although I get super nervous if I have to, as I am not used to it). So practicing to produce the language in its written form might also benefit your speaking abilities.
When I say, Why does no one talk about how hard this is? I don’t mean that people don’t talk about output being more difficult than comprehending input. But that it is never talked about to the degree that it is difficult. In other words, it is way harder than anyone says. In my opinion.
Experienced this as a mandarin learner. Even after 500 hours of tutors.
Usually it went down to few things:
Lack of Confidence
Sentence production is slow
Lack of ability to understand
My advice is to shadow more and making sentences in your head and have conversations with your self and push yourself to speak as fast as possible to match native speakers mentally.
Maybe because “hard” doesn’t sell language courses. But you’re right. It is hard. Really hard. Rest assured, as you build up more and more hours in the language, progress will become more and more tangible.
For example, after 4.5 years of Ukrainian, I often look back and think, “this particular thing was really hard a year ago, but now it’s so much easier.” It’s like climbing a mountain. Occasionally it helps to pause and take in the view of how far you’ve come.
Was this a spontaneous topic asked in the session? Or did you have time to prepare for it?
For all sorts of topics related to yourself I think you should start figuring out how you would take about these ahead of time. You could use it as an exercise it writing if you want at first, or simply right down in your native language (or recite in a recording) what you would say if you were answering it in your native language. Translate it using chatgpt or deepl. Then practice it over and over again. You could practice the whole speech, split up the sentences and flashcard them using Anki or Quizlet or whatever. Put some audio to it and listen to it over and over again. and recite over and over again. Do this for all kinds of topics that you would talk about yourself. Where were you born? Where did you grow up? Where do you live now? What are each of these places like? What are your hobbies and why do you like to do them? Do you like to travel? Where have you traveled to and what did you like about them, or what stories might you have that you would tell someone if they asked you in your native language?
Focus on these things first. The things that will come up typically in a conversation and practice saying them over and over again. When you are doing input you get hundreds or thousands of reps on various words in sentences, you need the same amount of reps of these things you might talk about.
Also notice that many of these things will use the same base phrase and you can interchange other words in place.
You essentially need to make these things come out automatically more or less and it’s going to take a lot of repeated effort, but to a degree what you say is probably pretty limited overall on a day to day basis. You’re not being asked to recite a speech on a thousand different topics. Just work on the things that are most important to talk about and say in your own life.
Look up language islands. Or there’s also a fellow on youtube named Tony Marsh. Look up his 20 “OPI” questions. Much of conversation lives around these topics. You can expand on them from there. Think of questions you might ask someone or that they could possibly ask you about these things, but get the basics first.
To a degree I’m in the same boat as you. I have heavily focused on input. I’ve enjoyed it and it’s EASY to just do it. Much harder to try and put the effort towards output and especially on a more limited topic base. Hard and a little boring =).
I’d like to humbly suggest that you are actually doing really well. You are experiencing a combination of the intermediate plateau and the comprehension-production gap, well known parts of the process we all go through. They can be frustrating!
I’d give a +1 to @ericb100’s suggestion. Instead of trying to boil the ocean learning everything at once, break it into manageable bits by focusing on specific topic areas (language islands).
This makes it much easier to feel progress and develop confidence.
Here is an example of one I am doing this week:
Topic:
Beekeeping (I just started beekeeping this month)
Step 1 (Input):
1 Wikipedia article, and seven 10-minute youtube videos, imported and read in LingQ Step 2 (Output):
Written ChatGPT conversation, for production practice and corrective feedback Step 3 (Input):
Imported the ChatGPT convo’s into lingQ to reread Step 4 (Output):
Conversation with tutors, noting where I struggled Step 5 (Input):
Had AI generate some content based on the areas where I struggled in my conversation. I imported that text, more articles and videos for input in LingQ Step 6 (Output):
Wrote a short text about beekeeping for an AI to review, and had a written conversation about it after.
etc…
This isn’t a fixed pattern. Sometimes I’ll throw in some flashcards or drills, too, but I didn’t this time. I don’t try to memorize big long sentences or passages. I prefer to focus on the terms and expressions, so I can mix and match them in different ways.
I find using input, output and feedback in a loop like this works for me. I work on an island for a week, and switch to another. I can return to it again if I feel the need.
Like others have mentioned. Output more. I think writing a lot helps the most because you constantly question yourself, words you don’t know are more apparent and the way you phrase your sentences or certain word choices can be critiqued later by some AI or tutor.
I did have time to prepare. We chose this exercise days prior. But I didn’t have as much time out into it as I would have liked. But I did basically what you are suggesting. I wrote it out in english. Then translated it using Google translate. Then read through it a couple times to edit. There were a lot of words I did not know in the translation. And phrases I was not familiar with. But once I realized the meaning I replaced many of them with simpler ways to say the same thing which I did know. I printed out the notes once I was happy with it. And then reviewed / practiced it before my session. But without totally memorizing it I felt the need to have it in front of me but try not to look at it. I found myself totally scrambled. My tutor not wanting me to have notes and just tell a story. But then in the moment I was forgetting what even came next in the story that I wanted to say. Which broke my focus on the language. And all of a sudden I couldn’t recall almost any conjugated verbs in the past…
Output is hard. You’re not imagining it. I’m sure quite a lot of LingQ users have similar experiences.
After six months I tried speaking French with a tutor and my mind went blank. All I could remember was my poor high school Spanish!
Some people like Steve Kaufmann are happy to jump right in with conversation, mistakes and all, I admire that, but it’s not me.
I’m three years and 3000+ hours into French and I’m only now starting to get serious about output. I’m shy, so I’m starting with writing exercises. I’m happy to report that I actually know a fair amount of French that I can use in writing.
I’m slow and I make mistakes of course. I try to keep it light and not beat myself up. I now understand that learning a language takes years, so I optimize for maintaining motivation.
I’m over the hump with reading French. Output will come in time.
You start with present tense so you can have back and forth conversations.
For past tense, that’s telling a story about what happened. To get more exposure to hearing past tense in conversation, you can ask questions about what happened, and then build on the response you get.
Your range of comfortable topics expands gradually. Think about what you want to talk about, and go find some vocabulary or example conversations to rehearse. It also helps to figure out how you’d say something very simply in English.
My gf is a German Native speaker, and she has been learning Spanish for a while. I once recommended her what I am going to tell you and it was helpful for her: Focus one week ONLY about what you are struggling in. That means, for one week, even if it is not natural, just speak and write about the past. By the end of the year, write about your day, speak about what you did, what you did last week and so on. You can do it for one week or two, as you wish.
For her it was really helpful. You can do it also with any tense or anything. Many people will say that you should not focus on only one thing, but it is only momentary. I also have focused on, for example, German personal pronouns for some days and I have improved a lot.
It’s only been 18 months. Put it into perspective. How long did it take you to learn your native language? How many years to be good at it? Steve has made countless videos saying to not get discouraged. If you plan on using Spanish for the rest of your life, what is your rush?
I am also trying to speaking more, currently, I am going through the free language transfer course. Apparently it will make learners think in the language. There are community created transcripts for it, in which you can see if it covers the area you are weak in.
It’ll be a struggle in the beginning. Even “memorizing” as I suggested could trip one up. If you forget even a little bit then you’re screwed =). But really it just means you have not used any of these sentences, phrases, fragments, words enough at an output level that they come out readily. You need to keep trying to say these things during the free moments you get. Practicing over and over. Like lyrics to an annoying song or commercial. (make your learning annoying =P ) .
Also, in addition, think of how you could describe something with words and phrases that you DO have cemented. You can maybe describe something without needing to know the exact word for it. i.e a flying thing = airplane. That can maybe sometimes get you to be able to navigate something that you don’t know the words to. Still takes some practice to think outside the box but that may help too when you are in the hotseat so to speak.
Hi, I urge you to stay with it. I started learning sept 24, and had an initial goal of b2 in two years. Currently, while I know it’s possible: for a Brit with no Spanish speakers apart from my weekly group class it’s just not going to be possible. However!
What I have learned is incredible! I’ve spent the last 6 months not really learning anything new but building more and more solid foundations at about A2 level. I decided there’s no rush. I enjoy the process and study a little every day. While the progress will never be that of the first six months . It naturally plateaued, but i just keep going. LingQ I think is slowly rewiring my brain to make less errors, to normalize structural stuff.
I need this comment right now. But giving up is sort of what I’m on the fence about. I got very busy with work over the last 2 weeks. And wasn’t able to do any Spanish at all. I had to reschedule my tutoring session to today…it was brutal. I honestly feel like I am getting worse. After just a few days I forgot a lot of very common and basic things.
During my session I had to stop to Google translate for the word “encontrar”…I also had to search for “divertido”. And many other things. It was very frustrating. At 23,000 words, hundreds of hours of listening and more than 1.8m words read this shouldn’t be happening. I felt like my speaking was a low A2 in that conversation. But with many many pauses. Like complete stops to the conversation and change of subject.
Anyway. I desperately need to recommit to my regular study habits and increase the amount of contact with the language. And probably spend a lot of time writing while speaking to myself. Otherwise, it’s hard to see a point in continuing…
Thank you for your encouragement. I will try to find a way to keep on keeping on.
Yeah, I get it. But I think you just are being too hard on yourself. Forgetting words, grammar, conjugations. It’s going to happen time and time again but just keep going and laugh it off. My daughter called me mum today and I’m her dad, it’s kind of the same thing - brain , neural pathways, mouth. Funny set up isn’t it.
Happens to everyone. Sometimes a word doesn’t sound or look quite right on that day. Or there’s a seed of doubt for some reason that day. Hell that happens to me in my native language from time to time. It happens all the time in my target language. This is totally common and the natural process of learning a language. And if you’re stressed your brain isn’t going to be focused enough.
When consuming the language, you can use the context to guess meanings of words, expressions or grammar. You don’t have to bother that they are correct, that’s the part of the other party.
But you’re right. It is hard. Really hard. Rest assured, as you build up more and more hours in the language, progress will become more and more tangible.
to make less errors, to normalize structural stuff.