This year, I’ve set myself an exciting challenge: to bring my Spanish from a B1 to C1 level in just one year.
With plans to save for a house, I find myself with extra time on my hands—and what better way to use it than to invest in personal growth? Currently, my Spanish study routine looks like this:
1 hour of reading per day
2 hours of listening daily (from lessons and other resources)
30 minutes of grammar practice with Anki
2 hours of private lessons per week
I’m determined to hit my goal by the end of 2025, but I’m curious: Am I doing enough? Should I add more speaking practice, writing exercises, or other strategies to fast-track my progress?
If you’ve mastered a second language or have advice for levelling up quickly, I’d love to hear your tips and insights.
Personnaly I have learned spanish from zero to something as C1 I think ( higher level in the institut Cervantes ).
It was 120 hours of lessons per year. 2 times 2 hours per week.
Plus after the second year I have spent one month in Cuzco with 80 hours of intensive lessons.
I have bougth a few gramar books to do exercices.
I have read some Isabel Allende books during the last year.
Plus often one hour of conversation per day.
I think what you are trying to do is last part of my training. Let’s say the 200 hours of lessons of last year.
I was really abble to understand everyone 5-6 years after I have started.
Sounds like high goals, I think they’re doable. Especially since you’re already at B1.
As long as you stay with the mindset that it’s gonna get progressively easier. Then you will succeed. Right now having C1 in reading in French. I really only read for my own sake, targeting the language is too tedious. If I had to redo my path from B1-C1 I’d only read interesting topics and specifically wikipedia I’d only read in the target language as this gives rabbit holes to the language but also has so many different authors that the language is very varied.
Focusing on listening is the best choice, without a doubt.
I’d download Tandem or HelloTalk and look for one or two friends to speak the language with. But make sure it’s someone you enjoy speaking a lot with, as if you don’t speak privately to anyone or are learning from someone it might either make or break your motivation to learn the language.
@buxey1 3.5h x 365 = 1,277h + 100h of conversations. You should hopefully be able to get from B1 to passing a C1 comprehension exam with this many hours. You might be scraping it to get C1 in speaking with only 50h or 70h of it though (100h * 50% or 70% of the conversation you are speaking). You probably need to get more speaking if you wanna pass with confidence. If you wanna pass an exam, you wanna also put in some time doing some writing and also for exam preparation.
I recommend you focus your listening on podcasts or YouTube talking heads and not movies. Movies and TV series have a lot of silence and action scenes, so that isn’t practising the language. You are looking ~4,500 wph compared to ~9,000 wph on average as a rough estimate, so 2x more language learning content.
I am sceptical about shadowing as a way to improve pronunciation to decent level after I heard Alexander Arguelles speak Russian. He is understandable, but I wouldn’t call his accent great.
It definitely helps somewhat but it probably requires lots of shadowing and time. Guessing he hasn’t been shadowing long enough to deceive other native speakers. So I get what you mean
Considering Alexander Arguelles is the populariser of shadowing and people use the method as described by him, I consider his method should be top-notch. He’s definitely very practiced in his own method, which he’s been using for years for many different languages.
As per his Russian level, at the time of recording, as far as I’m aware, his Russian was already high. I saw in old forum posts dated years before the recording of this video (at least a decade before), he had mentioned he had read lots of Russian literature. So in terms of reading ability, it was upper advanced. Back when Russian was his focus, I think he may have also mentioned that he had also spent one month in Russia doing an intensive learning session with a private tutor. I’m also not sure how much he had been upkeeping his Russian since then (in the recording he was up to lesson 70 aka day 70 at the very least), but considering these factors, I honestly expected a better pronunciation, if the method is meant to give you good pronunciation.
Also, I am learner of Russian, not a native speaker. I have ~450h of listening to Russian, which 90% is probably reading while listening. To me, he has a very obvious English accent for individual words. Not to mention his intonation at a sentence level and hesitations. He is understandable, but from the first word, you can tell he’s a foreign speaker who has not focused on pronunciation. From watching other videos with him, I think he does not consider pronunciation a priority, pretty much ever. I’m just saying that it seems that the ‘father’ of shadowing does not have good pronunciation, despite from using shadowing. He’s understandable and I guess that’s his goal.
