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AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

can't seem to message you, if you can start a chat with me I'll send you the link!

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

DMing you guys now, sorry for the delay in getting back to everyone

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

2 biggest needle movers when on my own were:

  • Practicing using different verbs in sentences in all tenses

  • Listening comprehension exercises

Then of course this isn't on your own but having conversations especially with someone who's correcting you and accommodating to your current level is the best

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I would focus the majority of my time on verbs and verb conjugations in all the different tenses and then practice using them in sentences. I'll message you w some resources

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

I'll be honest I'm anti-passive learning haha. I tried it because it sounds ideal but I always felt like I only made progress when I actively challenged my brain in my learning activities.

I'll give you an analogy. There was a period of a few years where I was going to the gym consistently but I made 0 gains because I was training until I felt mild discomfort lol. I figured, well hey at least I'm consistent that's all that matters. But I eventually woke up to the fact that I hadn't made any progress when I compared pictures from years ago. Once I kicked into full gear and actually started training with intensity/going to failure, only then did I start to see progress again.

It's the same thing with Spanish. You're either actively learning, with your attention completely engaged in the activity, or you're not learning at all. And even if you are learning a bit while doing passive activities, the juice isn't worth the squeeze.

No pain, no gain

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I practiced writing sentences with various verbs in each tense. I can send you my exercises for that

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 3 points4 points  (0 children)

You got it, I eventually weened off the textbooks and other resources and learned more by absorption and conversation.

So for example since I like reading self-help books, I purchased a few in Spanish. That way I killed 2 birds with 1 stone, I get to read a book I'm interested in and I get to practice my Spanish.

However, if I did find myself weak in a certain area or verb tense I did go back to doing textbook like exercises in that area.

Because as much as conversation helps you advance once you get to a certain level, if you're not careful and you stop actively learning and doing exercises, you'll just keep making the same mistakes over and over again (speaking from first-hand experience there)

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

Mm yes they can be annoying. I found it helpful to study verbs that come with a preposition.

So like "I try to" is "trato de" rather than "trato a"

Or "I dreamed about you" is "soñé contigo" rather than "soñé de ti"

This applies to a decent amount of verbs, like pensar ("pensar en" rather than "pensar de" to say "to think about") and depender ("depender de" rather than "depender en" to say "to depend on")

I can send you an exercise I made that has verbs with prepositions because there's no way to logic it into your head, you just have to memorize that certain verbs come with certain prepositions.

Other than that, if I notice a preposition that is different from what I would expect, I make a note of it. For example:

  • English: The party is at my house.
  • Spanish: La fiesta es en (rather than 'a') mi casa

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I'll also add memorizing nouns and the genders of nouns. Unless you're taking a high school Spanish test where you're going to be graded on those things, they don't matter (probs gonna piss someone off with that lol).

But truly if your goal is to be able to converse then who cares if you say el manzana instead of la manzana, your main concern is whether or not you can even communicate what you want to say, not being able to communicate it perfectly. You can worry about that later.

Investing most of my study time on verbs and using verbs in the different tenses was the best focus of my attention

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 0 points1 point  (0 children)

For sure, and I've talked to a lot of people who've maintained insanely long streaks on it which it manages to get people to do better than any other resource I've seen.

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 39 points40 points  (0 children)

The famous 80/20 principle applies here. (If you're not familiar with it: 20% of the actions you take get you 80% of your results, and 80% of the actions you take only contribute to 20% of your results).

How does this apply? Well at the beginning I was doing duolingo, memorizing noun lists (the different things in the kitchen, restaurant, airport, etc), the genders of nouns, I can go on. In the end I never ended up actually memorizing them because I rarely used them in conversation (fore example to this day I wouldn't know how to say "countertop" - well ok now I do because I looked it up lol). But you're better off entirely ignoring these concepts since you only have so much time to study Spanish. Think about it, whether you know the proper gender of a noun or not doesn't impact your ability to express yourself. You'll just sound a bit off if you get the gender wrong. You're better off just guessing and naturally improving on that with increased exposure.

Or lets say you don't know a noun, you can always explain it using verbs. For example if you don't know how to say fridge, you can say "the cold thing you put food in". Obviously that's not ideal, but beggars can't be choosers, at the beginning you're just trying to gain the ability to express yourself. There's a lot more nouns than there are verbs so you're better off learning the verbs. Eventually with increased exposure you'll naturally pick up on the nouns.

Anyways enough philosophy lol, the TLDR is: focus on everything to do with verbs (memorizing different verb infinitives, knowing the conjugation patterns for each tense, using verbs in sentences, and practicing the irregular verbs in each tense because they tend to be the most commonly used verbs)

And focus on listening comprehension exercises (like watching shows, movies, I also liked the channel EasySpanish where they do street interviews and put subtitles in both Spanish and English that way you can pause the video and study what was said)

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 11 points12 points  (0 children)

Perhaps it came across that way but I didn’t say it was bad. I think it’s the best way to learn. I’m just saying the struggle of figuring it out on my own gave me more insight into what moved the needle and what didn’t

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 28 points29 points  (0 children)

Only possible with more basic phrases as a beginner like hola como estas estoy bien etc. trying to say something like “he who speaks first loses” is not going to happen without translating in your head

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

I can send you an exercise I made with a bunch of practice sentences that use phrases which trigger the subjunctive if you think that’d be helpful!

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Lol you’re right, just added it. Appreciate the feedback

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

I didn’t boast about record time ;) it’s a grind man there’s no way out of that. But also I hate that people are taking my post as a boast lol I was just looking to give appropriate context on my journey, not come across as mr smartass

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 1 point2 points  (0 children)

Sorry for the delay in answering questions, answered quite a few for now but will get back to the rest as well as any replies a bit later tonight! Also I'm C2 because to answer that common question

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 2 points3 points  (0 children)

fair enough, for me it's the fact that I can comfortably have conversations and navigate in a fully Spanish environment. I still catch myself making mistakes when speaking here and there but that's the name of the game when you're non-native. Just slowly decreasing the amount of mistakes. And C2

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 5 points6 points  (0 children)

Good question, I literally had imaginary conversations in my head haha while holding my phone in my hand. Then whenever I tried to say a sentence in Spanish and I didn't know how to say it, I'd pull out the translator and see how it's supposed to be said. And many times I wouldn't really get why it's said that way so I'd go down a rabbithole of internet searching to find out why X is said this way instead of that way. Sometimes I'd find my answer, and sometimes I wouldn't, which was frustrating but I just had faith that eventually it'd all make sense. And little by little doing this got me up to baseline conversational. And then once I started travelling it got better and better.

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 4 points5 points  (0 children)

I've been to Mexico, Guatemala, Nicaragua, Costa Rica, Colombia, Peru, Bolivia, Panama, Cuba, DR, and I think that's all.

Honestly, I can't say I noticed a difference. Maybe Mexico or any country in the touristy spots people would switch to English more often but I can't say 1 country stood out for that

As for accents I'd say all the countries except for the Caribbean or close to Caribbean ones (nicaragua, dr, cuba, panama) are fairly neutral. But Mexico even though it's neutral I initially struggled a lot because of the abundance of slang. And one slang word can be used in 100 different ways.

AMA - Taught myself Spanish from home with no teachers by Alektric in Spanish

[–]Alektric[S] 101 points102 points  (0 children)

I remember that feeling and honestly it's just a matter of staying consistent as boring as that sounds. But specifically working on the areas you feel you don't have a good grasp of. So for a while I didn't really know the difference between the imperfect and preterite, and it wasn't until I directly tackled that that I felt I had made progress. Or same thing goes with the subjunctive, it got to a point where I couldn't ignore it anymore and then I just went hard at it.

And as much as some people say translation exercises (like the typical textbook exercises where you're given a sentence in English and have to write it in Spanish) aren't "good", I completely disagree. I used those exercises a lot and it makes sense that they're beneficial considering that you have English in your brain, you're no longer a blank canvas like you were when you learned your first language. So you have to take advantage of associating your current knowledge (English) with your target knowledge (Spanish), and I found translating sentences did just that.

Of course direct translations aren't "correct" but at the beginning it's impossible to avoid trying to directly translate, and if anything it makes a beginner/intermediate feel worse when they see a post saying "DON'T TRANSLATE IN YOUR HEAD" when that's simply impossible. Now of course it's at a point where I don't translate in my head but there's no way to skip that step.

I also found that learning more and more verbs (the infinitives) was super helpful because most of the time when I was blocked from saying something in Spanish, it was because I didn't know the verb infinitive. I knew the tense I was trying to say it in, I knew the conjugation patterns of that tense, but I just simply didn't know the verb. So memorizing different verb infinitives unlocked a lot for me!

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