My First Tutoring Session

[Hgmmf1]

I just had my first session (30 minutes) with a tutor. I am learning Spanish and wanted to share my thoughts and receive feedback / advice.

But first, some context: I know no other real languages. I took 2 years of Spanish in High School but learned basically nothing. I started learning again with Lingq mostly reading, listening, and watching videos about 1 year ago. I have just focused on comprehension and have done almost no grammar study. I also had done about a month of Pimsleur at the beginning but didn’t stick with it. So my time with the language has been mostly comprehensible input.

My stats:

19,291 words known

211 Hours Listening

1,571,967 Words Reading

I thought my tutor was great. A very nice guy who made it as comfortable of a time as possible. When I didn’t have things to say or struggled to talk he filled the time by explaining or planning things that might be helpful. This was literally my first real conversation with another person ever in Spanish.

It was only a 30 minute session. At minute 8 I saw the time as my tutor was speaking and I thought: “I can’t believe we are only 8 minutes in. This is going to be the longest half hour of my life!” But we kept going and at 24 minutes i thought: “Wow, we are almost done already.” Overall we were able to understand each other. There was only one point where I fumbled what I said so badly my tutor maybe misunderstood me. So I suppose that is good.

But I really struggled to express myself at all and made LOADS of mistakes. Much of the time I knew what I wanted to say but subconsciously thought: “How in the world do I say that?” I know I have seen what I wanted to say perhaps a hundred times in my reading and listening. But I had almost no recall. I knew I was messing up my grammar A LOT as I was speaking. So I can only imagine how many mistakes I had which I didn’t notice. Lots of Uhh’s and Umm’s. Long pauses. Half of the time I had to stop talking and give up on what I was going to try to say because I just couldn’t figure it out.

I know a lot of people might say I did a good job for my first time and don’t focus on the mistakes. But I am often hard on myself and feel my ability to communicate was less than I had hoped. My wife sat silently off camera during the session as she wanted to listen in on how it went (she doesn’t know any language besides her native English). She was overwhelmingly positive afterwards. Saying she thought it would be in English talking about my Spanish. She had no idea it was going to be all in Spanish (which is what I wanted of course).

I did look up some things before my session in hopes that it would help me. Reviewed how to conjugate common words like, “ser”, “estar”, and “quierer”, etc. Translated some key sentences I thought I might need to say. But in the heat of the moment I was so nervous I forgot everything and never felt like I could look at my notes. So I don’t think that helped.

When I had asked for advice on the forum about a month ago one person said not to worry about "activating” my vocabulary and that it would come. Honestly, I feel like if I don’t do something to actively use my Spanish consciously I will be agonizingly slow at speaking for a long time. When I see or hear Spanish I can understand most of what I am dealing with. But If you ask me to do exercises with as much time as needed to conjugate words myself. I am useless. Which means if I try to speak on the fly I am even worse. So, I could study more grammar. But I find that extremely de-motivating and boring to where I don’t stick with it. Its a miserable exercise. Plus my looking up basic grammar and sentences didn’t help me as I immediately forgot what I had looked up in the moment.

In the end, I am glad I got my feet wet a little bit. And this will push me to try to improve between my future tutoring sessions. I have to wonder if going back to something like Pimsleur might help? I will certainly keep reading and listening. Also, reading out loud which I do quite a bit now. So, its not pronunciation or accent I think I need. Its using my Spanish out loud on the fly.

Thanks for your reactions and advice!

[chytran]

Hi there. Had about 700 online lessons through Preply and Italki.

The struggling to speak is due to never having the opportunity to think about the words and phrases in that type of environment. Classes are essentially great to activate your fight or flight response and makes you more hyper focused on finding any information within your subconscious mind to convert into active vocabulary to use in a situation that involves a native speaker. In addition to building confidence.

To your question, Pimsleur wouldn’t do much of a difference since it’s intended to help you grasp the fundamentals of the language, and you would need to pursue more intermediate/ advance content to further your knowledge of the language in which Pimsleur can’t aide you in. Lingq should be enough to assist in improving reading and listening comprehension but speaking is a different skill in itself.

I would recommend thinking and talking your self in the language, which will help you trigger the fight or flight response that you have experienced during the class when trying to express yourself. Not at full capacity but it will trigger a certain amount in which you can prepare when you have the lesson again. The more classes you have, the more opportunities to trigger passive vocabulary to active vocabulary and increase your confidence.

To give you a reference point for spanish from another learner, got about 55,000 words in Spanish, 815 hours listened and 107 speaking hours. Did about 100 classes in spanish and know that it will only get easier inevitably and are filling in cracks each time you struggle.

Happy hunting!

[Zolka]

Thanks for the follow up, I was one of those gave advice. Nice to know how it went, well done!

[sockdoll]

Thank you so much for taking the time to write about your experience, that was quite interesting. I think it’s natural to dwell on the things that didn’t go as smoothly as you would have liked.

I’m currently subscribed to four different paid sites for language learning, as well as using some free resources. Two of them offer connections to live tutors as well as AI chats. I’m also lucky enough to have actual classroom experience with five of the languages I’ve studied, as well as living in other countries where two of those languages were spoken natively.

Besides the usual ADHD stuff, I’ve had another major learning disability since childhood, resulting in severe difficulty in recalling learned information. Many of the people in my classes (in all subjects) just flew by me in progress. I love studying languages but I kind of suck at them, and only really got conversant with the two where I was physically immersed in them.

Right now – besides all of the usual stuff like comprehensible input and studying grammar and vocabulary, I’m working with AI tutors so that I can make all of the mistakes that I have to without worrying about it. I’m not doing that on LingQ though so I don’t know how well their new AI features work, but my experience with a site that has much more time spent with the technology has been good so far. I feel like I’m starting to make a bit of a breakthrough in my current target language, but recalling things I’ve learned is still really tough. I have to go back and review the basics constantly as well as adding new information.

Best of luck to you. Finding a good human tutor is a godsend. I enjoyed my experiences with them in the past, as well as trying to be one for my own students. It can take a lot of patience.