My Thoughts on Reaching Intermediate 2

[Hgmmf1]

Its a long post so here are some headings:

For Context:
Level and Statistics:
How I Use Lingq:
Reflections:
My Future Goals:

I would just like to share my positive experience with Lingq and receive feedback. This is all about my learning Spanish.

For Context. I had taken 2 years of Spanish in High School but learned basically nothing. I think the grading was a joke and I should never have passed. I may have passed the first year with a “D”. What I remember when I started using Lingq was basically how to count 1-10, hola = hello, adios = goodbye, and that estar = to be. Thats all.

I have never learned any other language before to fluency. But I did learn the constructed language, toki pona, to a conversational level. And I self-taught basic Biblical Greek using the grammar-translation method. I only made it to the point where I could read the 2 easiest books of the New Testament without too much trouble. But it took me about 10 years of off-and-on learning to do that…I do not consider these to count as having learned a language. I have tried maybe a half a dozen times to learn a language over the years but usually get frustrated and give up after about 2 weeks.

Level and Statistics: I began learning Spanish using Ling on December 2nd, 2024. Since then my calendar shows I have done something with the language 260 out of the last 302 days. Which means I was active 86.1% of days in the last 10 months.

I would consider my reading and listening to be a solid B1 on the CEFR scale. This is based on: 1) The self-assessment descriptions, 2) How comfortable I am consuming learner content listed as B1 without aids like Lingq, and 3) When reaching Intermediate 1 on Lingq I took an online cefr test and easily passed as an A2 in CEFR scale. It was an extensive test that took me about 45 minutes to complete. But my B1 self-assessment is only for reading and listening. I might only be an A1 in writing and speaking.

My general impression on how Lingq Levels match up with CEFR is this:

Beginner 1 = A0
Beginner 2 = A1
Intermediate 1 = A2
Intermediate 2 = B1
Advanced 1 = Low B2 (I assume)
Advanced 2 = High B2 and above (I assume)

On Lingq I have:
Words of Reading: 1,381,408
Hours of Listening: 190
Study Time: 256:59
Known Words: 16082

How I use Lingq: This explanation affects how I arrived at these numbers. From the beginning I started with the Mini-Stories. When getting bored with any one course I jump back and forth between courses of a similar difficulty to keep myself from giving up. After finishing the Mini-Stories I did a mix of courses already on Lingq and imported YouTube videos.

I have always consumed a lot of content from YouTube. So, I usually import and use videos of interest to me. I prefer to play audio and read while listening. I look for a casual/general understanding of what it is saying. I click on both blue and yellow words as I follow the text usually without stopping. I glance at the meaning and sometimes advance the status. I very occasionally read without audio but this is not my norm.

My statistics will seem skewed because of how I do this. It appears that I have done LOADS of reading but that is because I am mostly reading and listening at the same time. Even if the language is a little fast and I miss things I just keep on going and try to regain my comprehension. My listening time is way less than what I have actually done. This is because: 1) I often listen when making breakfast, when driving, and watch YouTube videos in free time like when lying in bed. 2) I almost never add this listening time to Lingq as I sometimes don’t keep track of it. I also stopped adding time once I realized it does not add to my coins at all. 3) I regularly play the YouTube video on my TV while following the transcript on Lingq on my phone. Which means I am listening at that time as well. My recorded Study Time is less than the reality because I sometimes do random things outside of Lingq. My known words are what they are. I am fairly conservative with marking a word known unless it is just another form of a word I already know or is a cognate.

My guess as to how all my time with the Spanish Language breaks down:
50% Following an imported Youtube Video on Lingq.
15% Learning lessons/courses already on Lingq.
15% Listening/watching something outside Lingq.
10% Reading a physical Book of some kind (not logged).
10% Dabbling in other learning materials. (Ex. chatting with the AI on Lingq, doing about 35 days worth of Pimsleur Spanish, Watching something about Spanish grammar but in English, etc.)

Reflections: My hope has simply been to some day be conversationally fluent in Spanish. My motivations are simply that I have a strange love/hate relationship with languages in general. And if I am going to learn a real language I want it to be something I will some day use in real life. Living in the USA I run into a fair number of Spanish speakers.

I am very satisfied with my progress in the language. I had never thought I would get this far. I am more and more sold on the idea of comprehensible input. Lingq has been the key tool for me that has changed everything. Even Pimsleur is not sustainable for me and is at times frustrating. The way I have chosen to use Lingq keeps me interested and motivated. Most of the time it does not feel like work. Yet, I am making tremendous progress.

I have intentionally focused on reading and listening. I tried to speak a couple of times in Spanish to my young niece who is only using Duolingo. It has been a few months since then, but it was a very frustrating experience. I believe I was somewhere around 6,000 known words at the time. I had done zero practice speaking and found I could not produce even one sentence. I had to take a long pause (maybe 20 seconds) to think about how to say something and only afterwards realized I totally messed it up. It was discouraging at the time but I don’t really think about it too much now.

Speaking with real people has been a real fear of mine. However, I have already been doing some things to transition myself to being able to have conversations. 1) Reading out loud. 2) Occasionally using voice to text to chat with Lingq AI, 3) Watching a helpful series on YouTube giving tips and leading you through exercises on making sentences on the fly. I plan on continuing these things until I reach the end of 1 year of learning.

My Future Goals: I have seen advice online that says its good to focus on one language for 2 years before stopping or adding another. I am trying to follow that. I would like to continue comprehensible input with the help of Linq until I reach the end of the first year. In my second year I plan to add more reading by itself and having conversations with a tutor or other speakers. I would like to reach Advanced 2 by the end of 2026. Which at my current pace should be possible.

If you have any reactions, advice, or encouragement for me it would be greatly appreciated.

[11rhymesandreasons]

Well this is all very encouraging and thank you for making your experiences available to the rest of us. You’ve given us some benchmarks. If your self assessment is correct, and you are at level B1 with 16000 (inflected) known words, it gives a correlation to the CEFR benchmark of 3000 “lemma words” to attain B1. Of course this only applies to Spanish, showing that the ratio of inflected to lemma words is 5x or more. I wonder what the ratio would be for Russian? The words of reading shows 1.3 million for B1 in Spanish which is also helpful. Of course, like you said, you’ve done a lot of listening outside of Lingq. Thanks for the guidance!

[Hgmmf1]

Sounds like my self-assessment is on target then. Thanks!

As a funny side note. Today, I took a quick online cefr test that examines you for each level individually. I failed the A1 portion getting only 7 out of 10 correct…I needed 8…

I know I definitely need to practice output. I can generally recognize the tense of most inflected words. And I can mostly tell when something is in the subjunctive. But having not practiced hardly any output or grammar drills. I struggle to produce things properly.

When reading and listening I feel I understand a lot. I started watching Star Wars Clone Wars in Spanish and understand about 95%. I occasionally listen to a sermon in Spanish and understand probably 98%.

But at the same time I can’t pass A1 test when I have previously passed as A2. It’s all so silly. I hate tests. Lol…

[bbbblinq]

Well done on getting so far. I’m also impressed you could read din Bibilical Greek. I find Greek extraordinarily hard.
I’ve read 3m words and it’s slowly going in but not to the level of reading without tranlation or conversing (much). Still, it progresses.
Once I konw something in a certain way, it comes to me in conversation. That’s still ahead of me in Greek and maybe you in Spanish. I’m happy with the model of getting to know the language and it comes out when it is ready. And Comprehensible input supports that. Other methods don’t work well for me in any serious way.
Keep it up. Find the process you trust and it’ll come (even more).

[Hsingh]

Thanks for sharing. During school I also did badly in my 2nd language. scoring usually 48/100. The main reason i did badly was due to zero interest in languages. 2ndly I was not doing anything in the language outside of class.

The teacher used to tell me to read the newspaper everyday and watch more news and shows which i never did.

Basically I just relied on class time and never practiced or used the language outside class. Was this also the reason for you during school ? Did you use the language outside class, consuming content, like reading books, movies and etc.

Looking back to what my teacher said is mainly why i now have an approach that is heavy on practice/using the language, mainly consuming a lot of content, lingQ helps with that.

You can get a trial lesson with online tutors to assess your ‘CEFR’ level, which might be more accurate than online test. It is also cheaper than official test.

Your goal is clear, you mentioned your goal is to be conversationally fluent, It seems your listening is good. I think you can look for tutor that teach through conversation. They basically chat with you. They will start at your level even if it is A1 and progressively build up.

[EABurgess]

Well done.

I thought your experience was interesting and you clearly speak English, which helps with Spanish a lot.

Though I have a lot to learn, I am a language teacher living in Central Europe where it is really normal to learn more than one language at a time, and I will add my experience and observations to some of what you said.

You have learnt Spanish as an English speaker which brings some things with it it doesn´t for other languages. Firstly, English speakers and Spanish speakers are some of the most accepting people when it comes to foreigners speaking/learning their languages. Spanish speakers are really friendly and are well known for persevering in English for years and hardly making any effort whatsoever to pronounce words with a native like accent. Therefore it follows they aren´t so bothered about your pronunciation in Spanish. I had a Spanish girlfriend, and it was enough for her to hear someone speaking Spanish to introduce herself and say hello. As an English person, I tried this once in Sweden when I heard some English people speaking, and they just looked confused, clearly they wondered why was I talking to them based upon the fact we are from the same country, so the similarities between the hospitality of these languages ends about there.

The issue is this - both English and Spanish are languages where it is both possible to make a lot of progress very quickly but also to kind of miss what you don´t know because no one bothers to correct you.

This is both good and bad. And it brings me to why it is helpful to learn multiple languages at a time every so often, but it is best to do it calculatedly.

I lived in southern Sweden for four years and I was really interested in Danish. The culture between Sweden and Denmark is quite similar, but there are some really big differences. In Sweden people are real language nazis. It took about 1 year before Swedish people would stop automatically switching to English just because they heard my accent. After then, people were more accepting but still never really explained to me in a useful way what I was doing wrong, but the level of our discourse wasn´t academic so I never realised how many grammatical mistakes I was making and how much it annoyed Swedes to read these mistakes. Swedish is somewhat like Spanish in that in the beginning it is very easy, but it is actually incredibly hard as you break through a certain level.

My experience of Denmark and Danish was completely different. For a Danish person it was enough for them to hear me speaking a type of Scandinavian for them to proudly persevere in Danish and dammit you should listen to Danish if you´re in Denmark, or anywhere. They couldn´t care less if they lost you, they would just repeat themselves or paraphrase themselves until you got it (i.e: like how English people just speak louder if someone seems not to understand) and I have to say this was so much better than the Swedes. They would also just plain tell you when you were wrong, and it was like having an older caring brother who would fill you in. Swedes just winked at each other or did this weird thing of not directly explaining your mistakes, but long windedly repeating themselves until they think you might have heard your grammatical mistake corrected whilst never explaining what they were doing. In Sweden it is considered to be very strange to be direct, and they actually find Danish people frightening because they are so to the point or “brutish”.

Living in Slovakia, I have been trying to learn Slovak for years but teachers are not very experienced teaching Slovak to non Slavic speakers and honestly it feels like they take pride in confusing you. Asking a Slovak to get to the point about a linguistic issue is impossible. However, Czech is a very similar language and I have found Czechs to be far more to the point and helpful in learning their language. Due to the way the culture is, almost all Slovaks have a full receptive understanding of Czech (apart from the names of months, they are passive bilinguals, they cannot speak Czech or write it properly). Films and books always get dubbed/translated into Czech first, so literally everyone in Slovakia is geared up to use Czech resources. I made far more progress in Slovak by just learning Czech. So I would say whilst sometimes there can be an issue with language interference, it is pretty useful from my point of view.

I would consider trying to learn a bit of Portuguese on the side. They are far more “proud” of their language (Brazilian or Portuguese) and will really tell you what´s up if you make a mistake. It will also be useful to speak to Portuguese speakers as they can offer a great insight into Spanish from a second language learner point of view. I have found Czech´s explaining me things about Slovak really helpful as they aren´t so “touchy” about it.

[Hgmmf1]

Right. My Greek studies were all self-taught using grammar-translation method as I said. My motivations were to better understand the Bible. But to further clarify why I don’t consider myself to “know” Greek yet.

1. Biblical Greek is Koine. But it is the easiest Koine you can find. Far easier than anything secular surviving from ancient times. And I’ve never even tried much outside of the New Testament.
2. I learned using materials which were grammar-translation method. So I basically spent 10 years on it on and off struggling. I literally built up a 1,200 word vocabulary (base words, not inflected) using physical flashcards and memrise. The grammar I learned in charts by rot memorization. Forgetting them and then relearning them over again. At a certain point I realized this was not the way to go. I had struggled through several workbooks as well.
3. I decided to just do more reading starting with the easiest books moving towards harder ones. Even though Biblical Greek is easy within Koine. Yet, I could not even read medium difficulty books in the New Testament. I only ever made it through the first 2 easiest books pretty much. 1 John and the Gospel of John. Looking here and there at other books. I can’t read anything outside of them without a “Readers Greek New Testament” which gives you glosses for uncommon words at the bottom of the page. My comprehension with 1 John is probably about 99%. And for the Gospel of John I would say 97%. But that quickly drops off for any other books. Romans is probably medium difficulty and my guess would be I could understand about 85%. For something like Hebrews which is hard my guess is 70%.
4. Most of my reading has been intensive reading…Using a physical Greek NT my most successful method is to read about 1 new chapter at a time, but add the 2 previous chapters as well. What I mean is: Day 1 = read chapter 1. Day 2 = read chapters 1 and 2. Day 3 = read chapters 1, 2, and 3. Day 4 = read chapters 2, 3, and 4. And so on. I have done a lot of reading and re-reading so there is no telling how much I have read. Maybe only 30-50,000 words would be my guess…

I don’t really have a desire to learn modern Greek right now as I would have no use for it. But I am seriously considering using Lingq to shore up my Koine Greek. I know it is mostly designed for modern Greek. But I am basically hooked on Lingq. And I know it works for reading and listening. Even if I have to double check a lot of definitions and make my own to make sure I’m understanding the ancient literature correctly it would be worth it.

Right now. My long term thought is to continue with Spanish through the end of 2026. Then in 2027 go back to Greek. I have found a lot of ancient Greek online which can be imported. I’d like to import everything and just read a ton. Hoping to switch to comprehensible input using extensive reading rather than intensive. Try not to get bogged down and just keep going.

[Hgmmf1]

Thanks for reminding me of my goals. And that sounds like a good idea to get busy with tutors. I definitely want to do a lot of that in the next year.

With High School Spanish I never did a single thing outside of class. I was one of those lazy students who took easier classes just so I could have less work. Do homework in whatever time I could find while at school and never take a single book home. Whatever didn’t get done I was happy to take a zero. If I passed with a “D” I was satisfied and moved on. Definitely not what I would recommend to kids now…

My Spanish teacher was a former German teacher who had lived in Germany. But she only got into Spanish after returning to the US. She wanted to stay in language education but German was not offered in most schools. So she got educated in Spanish just enough to teach the first 2 years in High School. I don’t think she really cared much about Spanish to be honest. I don’t remember her ever recommending we use the language outside of class.

I remember having no idea what it would be like to learn a language. I kind of understood when we got our first vocabulary list. But when we got our second and then our third I hit a wall. I thought, “you got to be kidding me. I’m not doing all of that. Especially when it doesn’t seem I can use it right now.” And don’t ask me what I really thought of grammar. I didn’t even know or like English grammar. I hated my English classes too. I definitely learned more English grammar while hammering through my first year Greek textbook than I ever did in school.

I will say though. I was reminded by my dad recently that he received a phone call from my Spanish teacher in the early days of 1st year Spanish. Apparently, she had reached out to my parents to tell them how proud she was of me in her class and how I have a gift for languages…She said I should be encouraged to pursue languages…

Now. I don’t know what exactly led her to say that. I know I was genuinely interested in Spanish at first. But that quickly went out the window when I saw it would be work. And that the work didn’t seem to make me feel like I could actually use the language. Then I just wanted to pass so I would have enough credit to advance to the next grade.

I personally don’t feel gifted in languages at all. Anything I have learned in my life I feel I had to just do over and over and over again. And not give up. If I stay focused then I can learn it. But it takes a certain “stick-to-it-ness”. I just kick myself over the days I miss using Lingq. How much better would I be if I worked at it literally every day. But sometimes life gets busy…

Looking back. It was mostly the school environment that held me back. I hate memorizing for the sake of memorizing. I hate tests. And the grammar-translation method is such a painful process. If they had had something like Lingq on a tablet at the time. I probably would have gotten somewhere and enjoyed myself more.