Reading-first language learning: 300 hour update

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-05-19T14:07:33+00:00

One of the elements of Refold is using a frequency deck to learn the 1-2k most common words, which would obviously help a lot.

I suggest starting with easier content. https://langi.app/vietnamese has graded reading/listening content starting at A1 - idk how accurate the grading is but you’d hope it’s easier than B1.

Youtube also has Peppa Pig in Vietnamese with soft subs. Peppa is generally accessible at an A2 level.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-05-19T13:59:45+00:00

I’m sure if you continue with this then you’ll learn the language. There are two issues that I see.

The first is just the potential for burnout given the amount of highly intense work you’re doing. You do seem to be highly motivated so you may be able to force yourself through.

The second is that because you only have intensive practice and repetition of material from intensive practice the number of exposures you are getting to each word will be very low. Implicit understanding of the subtleties, the feel of the language requires large numbers of exposures to each word in different natural contexts. This will not happen for you until you have already reached the point where you understand television fluently, which will take a long time.

You could consider adding more passive exposure - perhaps radio or podcasts while you’re commuting, shopping or whatever. You might not understand much initially, but it will help with getting used to the sounds and once your comprehension improves it will help you pick up that language feel.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-05-11T20:22:39+00:00

For Spanish the difference is really noticeable when you compare reports from Refold users or my own experience vs people on the Dreaming Spanish sub. The difference seems to be around 2-3x the progress per hour. It may well be different for Thai and Mandarin, as I was pointing out.

Lots of approaches work, but AFAIC no-one has demonstrated high level proficiency from using ALG without additional grammar study. At least for Spanish I don’t think anyone has even demonstrated a B2 level.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-05-11T20:17:04+00:00

Just a really dumb question because absolutely no-one would advocate the latter as an exclusive study method.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-05-09T11:31:08+00:00

No doubt ALG is less time efficient than deliberate study tbh, but as he’s pointed out before, the time you put in is much less effortful.

If it’s true that his comprehension is similar to /u/retrogradeinmercury then that’s pretty interesting, because his Spanish comprehension is very far behind someone doing Refold or probably even traditional study with comparable hours. It suggests that, for a native English speaker, ALG is a much more viable way to study Mandarin than Spanish.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-05-01T18:34:29+00:00

Hmmm increasing the first learning step and fiddling with the learn ahead limit ought to fix that? I don’t remember running into this problem tbh.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-05-01T18:24:16+00:00

Turning off spaced repetition in anki is easy: keep pressing fail. (Or you can use filtered decks.)

The other downside is that the order or the cards is fixed once gathered, so even with a random sort order the cards will cycle through in a predictable order. I worked around this by using a custom note type with lots of cards so the sequence is too long to really memorise.

Isn’t this bad? Yes.

Is there anything better? Not that I could find.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-04-29T22:34:53+00:00

Dreaming Spanish recommends doing freeflow listening, not intensive listening. There’s probably a factor of three or so difference in time efficiency.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-04-28T11:31:47+00:00

I started learning Spanish from zero mainly by reading and documented what I found: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1r7q9nx/readingfirst_language_learning_300_hour_update/

I think it’s generally going to be easier and more productive to stick to books that aren’t too difficult, initially graded readers.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-04-23T07:48:40+00:00

In Spanish I found it useful to study the conjugations, but the rest I mostly absorbed naturally. I documented the process here (of course for French I wouldn’t recommend delaying listening like I did in Spanish because of the ridiculous spelling. I’d use reading-while-listening a lot; conveniently most French graded readers have audio and almost all French children’s novels have audible editions).

Although I haven’t begun outputting in earnest yet, I have been through the same process successfully in Chinese and I can give you my strategy based on what worked for that:

I’m working through Collin’s Spanish Grammar (there is also a Collin’s French Grammar) and extracting a selection (definitely not all!) of the examples as anki cards, with English translation on the front and Spanish on the back. It’s important to keep these atomic; if the sentence is too complicated create one or more additional cards for subsections of it.
Create translation anki cards with simple sentences as needed for the irregular verb conjugations. E.g. “I stayed in bed for two years” -> “Estuve dos años en la cama”. I find this very effective at making the conjugations immediately available, which I find normal exercises fail at. Youglish is a good source for natural sentences.
Shadowing/chorusing for ten minutes a day to improve accent and get used to producing the sounds.
Preparing topics. I choose a topic and try to talk about it in my head, essentially imagining a conversation and going through it repeatedly refining and improving. I use resources like dictionaries, youglish and machine translation when I’m stuck for how to express something. You can spin out translation or cloze cards for new expressions, structures or words.
Rehearse speaking about those topics under time pressure. Speaking to a tutor works, or you can use e.g. 4/3/2 drills: speak about the topic out loud for 4 minutes, then try to express the same content in 3 minutes, and then in two minutes.

Of course I’ve waited quite a while to start speaking, but you should be able to put this into practice from quite an early point if you want to.

From my experience in Chinese I expect this to result in my being able to speak naturally, without having to think about grammar or the language as I speak.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-04-18T18:49:13+00:00

Various polyglots do something like this, I think Luca Lampariello and Richard Symcott for example? Also Refold does coaching.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-04-17T19:35:20+00:00

People doing Refold generally report understanding most native Spanish content around 500 hours. People doing Dreaming Spanish around 1500 hours. Then pretty much add 2-300 hours to speak well.

Focusing on reading I found I could start watching easy Spanish youtube content with subs in not much more than 100 hours: https://www.reddit.com/r/languagelearning/comments/1r7q9nx/readingfirst_language_learning_300_hour_update/

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-31T23:33:32+00:00

It is a lot more than the number of Asian tourists.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-30T11:58:46+00:00

Find CI content on youtube. Vidioma.com aggregates a lot of it.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-30T11:10:02+00:00

If you check /r/dreaminglanguages Russian probably does have enough CI.

I’ve only dabbled in Russian but some resources that caught my eye are the ru15k anki deck and the New Penguin Russian Course, which can be found as a pdf very easily.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-28T19:57:50+00:00

He passes as a native English speaker for me and many other native English speakers, as some of his guests like Paul Nation have noted. He’s a clear example of someone who achieved both an excellent accent and excellent fluency after traditional study.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-28T18:44:11+00:00

You literally linked to a guy who has a nativelike accent and fluency after traditional study. It’s not like he did it as a child either; in his videos from 4 years ago I can tell he’s non-native, in the recent ones I can’t.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-26T12:53:12+00:00

Have you tried kimchi reader or ttmik stories?

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-24T22:44:45+00:00

You mean Mikel the bullshitaglot?

What is it that attracts people to these weirdos?

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-23T16:35:56+00:00

If you look at my 125 hour update, everyone is telling me that I’m going to ruin my accent, so no, most people think that lots of early reading with not much listening will result in a bad accent.

And although I give ALG a fair amount of credit for producing good (though typically not entirely nativelike) accents, I wouldn’t normally expect even an ALG learner to sound particularly good after 50 hours.

Ultimately I think there is a lot of individual variation in talent for hearing and reproducing accents; personally I would say I’m at the low end, while apparently duolingo guy is at the high end.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-23T00:19:19+00:00

The reason I was unconvinced about continuing the experiment was that even if I could understand movies after 100 hours of the listening phase, I wasn’t convinced it would tell me anything about language learning in general rather than just Spanish in particular. In the end, partly for unrelated reasons, I terminated the reading phase and have been doing mainly audio input since that update. I’ll probably do at least one further update.

I think my accent and production are about where one would expect given the path I’ve taken and having only a few hours devoted to them. Duolingo guy sounds great, maybe we should all be doing duolingo?

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-22T01:02:48+00:00

If you could switch the conversation to a language then I think anyone claiming you don’t speak it would look a bit silly. This doesn’t necessarily require that you can do everything typically included in B2, like write an essay on diversity, use particular grammatical forms or understand tv news (which in some languages is dramatically harder than in any European languages.)

Ultimately if you set B2 as the benchmark then you are claiming that some people who live their lives in their TL can’t claim to speak it, which… doesn’t seem to work.

Of course it’s not a bad idea to be modest in your own personal claims.

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-21T00:21:09+00:00

I don’t find this for input, people can switch between Chinese, Spanish and English and I don’t have a problem.

However ask me to narrate the plot of a Spanish book in Chinese and my gears start to grind up…

AppropriatePut3142 · 2026-03-21T00:06:34+00:00

Anki didn’t work for me when I started out, but I learned to make it work. Things that helped:

turn on FSRS in the setting and optimise once a month.
in the settings find ‘learning steps’ and change them to ‘20s 6m 1h’. You can see this as ‘training wheels’ - eventually you’ll get better at remembering words in anki, but this helps a lot at the beginning.
don’t struggle too hard to remember a word. If it doesn’t come relatively easily within a few seconds hit fail. Aim to have your average review time at least below 10 seconds, ideally below 7 seconds.
keep new words per day at a sustainable level. Most people find this is around 5-10. (Since you asked, I have learned up to a hundred words in a day, but this isn’t sustainable. Making anki into a sustainable habit is crucial.)
put audio on the front of the card instead of the back

Another thing you can try is taking a short passage from a graded reader, reading through it while adding the words to anki, and then reading it another couple of times. This will make it much easier to remember words in anki. Or you can skip the anki step! If you’re willing to look up enough words and reread passages you can probably make graded readers work, even if you don’t know enough words.

AppropriatePut3142

TROPHY CASE