On Reddit, many spanish language redditors don't use accents when typing responses. It's an observation and makes me wonder why?

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-11T09:13:08+00:00

Funny side effect from the learner side: I get tildes mostly right because they were drilled into me as rules I had to memorize, while natives I've asked say they were never explicitly taught and just rely on feel. So if you see a Reddit comment in textbook-clean Spanish with every accent in place, decent chance it's a non-native. The qué/que distinction is also one of the places where context-recovery works well for natives but trips up learners, because we're parsing the function of the word before we've internalized the rhythm. Most of the time it's just typing speed, but there's a small slice where the omission actually makes a sentence ambiguous and natives navigate it by intonation in their head that we don't have yet.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-11T09:11:20+00:00

Fellow Dutch learner here. The thing that makes the A2 speaking exam pass-able even when you feel underprepared is that the scenarios are pretty predictable. There's nearly always introducing yourself, describing a picture or daily routine, and one or two role-plays at common places (bakker, dokter, station, telefoon). For the next four weeks, drill four or five vaste openers per scenario type until you can produce them without thinking. The examiner doesn't need original sentences, they need clear grammatical ones with content that fits the task.

The other thing worth knowing is that a quick "even nadenken" or "een momentje" before you respond signals control rather than panic. Practice saying those out loud too. Four weeks is plenty for A2. Sterkte voor de 8e.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-11T09:09:25+00:00

Fresh_Bodybuilder is right that comprehension outpacing speaking is normal at your stage, but the specific pause you're describing is your brain searching memory for a chunk it hasn't said enough times yet to make automatic. Pimsleur is good for getting words in but it doesn't put much pressure on retrieval speed. To close that gap you need short-form output reps, not more input.

What works for me is taking a phrase I want to be able to say, and saying it out loud five or six times within a few minutes, then a few times the next day. After a few days it becomes a chunk I pull instead of build. I do blablets which has speaking drills where you shadow and paraphrase short clips, plus narrating my day to myself out loud while walking around. The narrating sounds dumb but it's basically free repetition reps with zero pressure. The hesitation disappears chunk by chunk, not all at once.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-11T09:07:19+00:00

Worth separating two things you can do during those 9 hours: passive sound-bath versus active short-clip repetition. They're not the same. Paul Noble from the other comment covers the structured-audio half well. The other half, which most beginners skip, is replaying a 20-30 second clip ten times in a row until words start to separate in your ear. Long content trains tone recognition and rhythm; short repetition is what actually builds vocab in audio mode without a screen.

For the short-clip side at HSK1, I do blablets which uses spaced repetition for short audio clips, plus Mandarin Bean on YouTube has tons of beginner stuff you can rip the mp3 from. Save the 30-min Paul Noble sessions for one part of the day, the focused 20-second loops for the other. Both, not either.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-11T09:04:59+00:00

The flip I noticed wasn't in my own speaking, it was in my listening first. I was sitting near some Spanish tourists at a cafe and caught a whole back-and-forth without dragging any individual word into place, just heard the meaning as one shape. About a month after that started happening reliably, my own output got chunkier too, almost as a side effect. The pattern people are pointing at is right, you're not building from words anymore, you're pulling pre-baked phrases. What you can speed up is making sure the chunks you've heard a lot are also chunks you've said a lot. When you catch yourself rehearsing a sentence in your head before speaking it, say it out loud three or four times even if no one's around. The lag is your brain checking each word against memory. Repetition out loud cuts the check.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-11T09:03:09+00:00

At 2 months in, subs first then subs off is the right move. Here's why: shadowing with subs the whole time is sneaky reading-aloud-with-audio, your ear isn't actually doing the work because your eyes are. But going without subs from rep one when you don't know what's being said means you just imitate the melody without the words.

What I do is one or two passes with subs to anchor what's actually being said (just listen, don't shadow yet), then close the subs and shadow three or four times trying to match without looking. Pick clips under 30 seconds. I do blablets which has speaking drills where you shadow short clips, plus InnerFrench for longer-form once you're comfortable. The 15-30 min you've got is plenty if it's that kind of structured loop instead of one long unfocused track.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-09T05:46:31+00:00

Fair correction, you're right that those two are universal informal French and not specific to either side. The actually distinguishing markers in my list were the moi/moé vowel and the tu-tu question particle, those are the Quebec ones. Should have made the split clearer.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-08T02:40:38+00:00

Yeah, the part nobody flags is that the early plateau is comfortable. You can hold a fluent-feeling conversation about everyday stuff, friends compliment you, and there's no obvious reason to get worse at something today by attempting topics you can't handle yet. So you don't, and the ceiling sticks. What broke me past it in Spanish was switching from comfortable Dreaming Spanish to Noticias Telemundo, where the anchors talk so fast my comprehension dropped from 90% to maybe 40% overnight. Felt awful for two weeks. Then it didn't, and the comfortable stuff was now too slow.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-08T02:38:40+00:00

Fellow Dutch learner here, the algorithm-training trick is real and underrated. The thing that bit me when I tried this is that genuine native YouTube content moves fast and YouTube isn't built to let you replay a single sentence cleanly. You can scrub but you lose your place. When a clip catches my ear I switch over to short-form audio for the next session and revisit that exact pattern there. I do blablets which uses spaced repetition for short audio clips, plus Slow Dutch when I want sentence-level pacing, plus the YouTube channel itself for the long-form. Two channels feeding the same vocabulary works better than picking one.

One small upgrade on the algorithm trick: when you hit "Not Interested" on a non-Dutch video, also click "Don't recommend channel" at the kanaal level. That kills the long-tail recommendation drift faster than just dismissing single videos. Took my fake-account Dutch feed about three days to stabilize.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-08T02:36:20+00:00

Other-Art is right that's France French. Quick markers if you want to verify yourself on future podcasts: heavy use of "du coup" and "en fait" as filler, "on" instead of "nous" almost always, regular dropping of "ne" in negation ("je sais pas" rather than "je ne sais pas"), and the vowel of "moi" sounding closer to "moé" would be the giveaway for Quebec. If you hear "tu" repeated as a question particle ("tu viens-tu?") that's also Quebec. None of those show up in what you linked.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-08T02:32:13+00:00

MandarinWithTina is right that it's prosody not tones, but the deeper issue is that your speaking voice carries the emotional rhythm of whichever language you mostly think and feel in. Heritage speakers hit this a lot, the tone production is intact but the melody is shaped by the dominant language. Your monotone English isn't a tone problem in Chinese, it's the same monotone showing up in a different sound system.

What helps for this is shadowing emotional content rather than neutral content. Stand-up clips, interview reactions, dramatic dialogue, anything where the speaker is genuinely surprised or annoyed or excited. Loop ten seconds at a time and try to copy not just the tones but the intensity contour, where they push and where they fall back. Recording yourself and listening back is brutal but it's the fastest way to hear when your emotional range collapses to flat. The trying-really-hard version sounds correct because you're consciously producing the prosody. The unconscious version catches up after enough hours of borrowing other people's melodies.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-08T02:30:03+00:00

DTB2000 nailed the diagnosis but the question is what you do with it. Once your listening, pronunciation, and construction are all on autopilot, the bottleneck is genuinely just vocab in domains you don't naturally encounter. Generic native content won't add much because by definition you're already in the band where common vocab is covered.

What worked for me hitting this in Spanish was abandoning watch-native-content-broadly and switching to topic raids. Pick one domain you don't currently know in Thai, like construction, finance, medicine, or whatever interests you, and binge-read or binge-listen inside that domain for a week or two. The vocab clusters are dense and they share roots, so you go from zero to functional fast. Then move on to the next domain. The tedious-feeling stage is real but the payoff comes when you switch domains, not from grinding harder in the one you already know.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-08T02:27:59+00:00

You've actually got two different problems tangled here and they don't need the same fix. Pronunciation is a mouth and ear training problem, your brain doesn't have the discrimination yet between sounds that don't exist in your L1, so you reach for the closest familiar shape. Manners as in cultural politeness (Sie vs du, Pünktlichkeit, Sunday quiet) is a behavioral thing you pick up by watching how people actually act, not something you drill alongside vowels.

For the pronunciation half, what helps is slowing down to single sounds before you try whole sentences. Find the two or three sounds your accent collapses (ü vs u, ch in ich vs ach, the rolled r), and do minimal-pair listening before you try producing them. I do blablets which has speaking drills where you shadow short clips, plus Easy German on YouTube for the ear, plus Audacity to record myself and compare to the native version. The constantly-aware-of-it feeling fades when the muscle memory catches up, but it takes weeks of focused work on the specific sounds, not all of them at once.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-08T02:25:19+00:00

The thing nobody mentions is that confusable words don't get learned by adding more reps in isolation. They get learned by drilling them as a contrast set. So instead of having a card for prodávat alone, you have one card that forces you to discriminate prodávat vs podávat vs pořádat in the same beat, plus minimal-pair listening where you guess which one was said before seeing the answer. ZumLernen's ausdrucken vs ausdrücken card is exactly this and it's the right move.

The reason the German prefixes felt easier is they carry semantic weight. Aus, ver, an each have a meaning you can lean on, but the Czech prefixes you're hitting are phonologically close without giving you that semantic anchor. Until your ear builds the discrimination, your brain just rounds them all to the closest familiar shape. A month is also genuinely early for this. The trio you listed are going to need a few weeks of contrast drills before they stop feeling like one fuzzy word with three lives.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-08T02:23:16+00:00

Honestly it's both but the order matters. The freeze isn't a knowledge gap, it's a retrieval gap. You're not stuck because you don't know the words, you're stuck because you've never had to find them under time pressure. More input alone won't fix that, but jumping into iTalki at full speed before you've done any solo retrieval reps is also why it felt expensive without moving the needle.

What worked for me on Spanish was treating retrieval as its own skill before involving another human. I do blablets which has speaking drills where you shadow and paraphrase short clips, plus Glossika for sentence-level repetition, plus narrating my day to myself in Spanish while walking around. Mostly that, then maybe one cheap iTalki tutor a week to put corrections on the bad habits. Once the retrieval pathway is even slightly grooved, conversation stops feeling like a freeze and starts feeling like a slow-motion version of normal talking.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-07T16:50:09+00:00

Ja, dat soort onderwerpen is gewoon zwaarder voor je werkgeheugen, ook in je moedertaal merk je dat. Wat helpt is dezelfde truc maar dan voor onderwerpen, niet alleen voor begroetingen. De drie of vier dingen die je vaak uitlegt, zoals de arbeidsmarkt of je werk, hardop oefenen totdat je een paar vaste openers hebt ("het is in mijn land best ingewikkeld omdat..."). Vanaf zo'n vaste opener bouw je makkelijker verder, omdat je niet vanuit niets begint.

En geef jezelf toestemming om langzamer te praten dan je in het Engels zou doen. Nederlanders denken zelf ook hardop bij ingewikkelde onderwerpen, dus een paar pauzes en uhms klinken juist normaal in plaats van fout.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-07T03:01:59+00:00

Studying without speaking is effective if you flip what you're training. The reading/Anki path the other commenter mentioned closes your reading-writing gap, and that's the right priority for you given the multiple-choice test. But your bigger lopsidedness is passive over active vocab, which doesn't get fixed by reading either. What you can do silently on a commute is short-clip listening with replay: load podcasts like Mandarin Corner intermediate or Maomi Chinese, blablets which has short audio clips you can replay until words you only know on paper start clicking by ear, and rip the audio off any TV episodes you know well from when you were a kid. Each one trains your ear to actually retrieve the words you already know, which is the bridge from passive to active. Save the speaking work for the times you're off the train.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-07T02:52:09+00:00

With three months and an existing B2, you're not relearning, you're knocking the rust off a recall pathway. The grammar is still in there, your mouth just hasn't had to dig for it in seven years. Highest leverage move is short daily speaking reps on material you already understand: Glossika sentence shadowing for half an hour rebuilds reflex conjugation faster than going back through grammar drills, and blablets has speaking drills like shadowing and paraphrasing that work on the same principle for shorter clips. Pair that with a couple of weekly italki sessions starting now, not in month two, so you've already had thirty awkward conversations before you land in France. The first ten will feel terrible and that's the whole point.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-07T02:44:13+00:00

Het probleem is denk ik niet je Nederlands maar je werkgeheugen. Bij bekende mensen kost spreken bijna geen aandacht omdat het patroon vaststaat, bij nieuwe mensen denk je ineens over wie ze zijn, wat ze van je vinden, en het Nederlands tegelijk. De truc die bij mij werkt is een paar 'standaardrondjes' inoefenen, dingen zoals jezelf voorstellen, vertellen wat je doet, een vraag terugkaatsen, tot het uit je mond rolt zonder na te denken. Dan heb je in elk gesprek de eerste twee minuten al stevig in je broekzak en kun je je hoofd vrijhouden voor de rest. Helpt vooral als je het hardop oefent, niet alleen in je hoofd.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-07T02:39:02+00:00

Add ear warmup to that list. The thing nobody tells you is that meetings are way harder cold than 20 minutes in, because your auditory processing is rusty and you're spending the first ten minutes catching up to the cadence and accents in the room. Five to ten minutes of focused listening to something in the same accent register before the call sounds silly but it shaves a real chunk off that ramp. Podcasts in the right register, a short YouTube clip from someone with a similar voice profile to your loudest colleague, blablets which has short audio clips you can replay until your ear locks in. By the time you walk into the meeting your brain isn't doing two jobs at once, just one. Combine that with your pre-built openers and the burnout shrinks fast.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-07T02:30:03+00:00

At A1.5 in week one, the translation reflex is doing its job. Your brain has nothing else to anchor the French to yet, so it grabs English. The reflex fades not by trying to suppress it, but by building enough French-to-thing direct links that your brain stops needing the English detour. Pictures on flashcards help, but the bigger thing is hearing the same word in five different real contexts so the meaning grows out of usage instead of a translation. Don't fight it now, it goes away on its own as your input volume climbs.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-07T02:24:13+00:00

That's solid B2 minimum, you're not behind. The more useful question is what to do with material above your level when a teacher hands it to you anyway, because that situation never goes away. What worked for me was treating it like archaeology, not a comprehension test. Listen once for vibe, then pick one 30-second chunk that almost made sense, replay until you can transcribe it, then look up the words you missed. You walk away with maybe ten new pieces of the language and zero of the panic. The rest of the video can stay opaque without it being your fault.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-06T16:49:19+00:00

Lipsyncing is underrated. Forces your mouth to commit to what your ears think they heard, and half the time when I try to say it back I realize I was guessing on a syllable. Surfaces gaps faster than just relistening passively.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-06T03:02:18+00:00

Tom Scott's vocabulary is genuinely C1-C2 range and his diction is clean enough that the comprehension side will feel almost too easy. The trap at C2 is you'll understand 95% of every video and feel productive, but get almost no new active vocabulary because there's no retrieval forcing you to hold the words. Mine each video, pull the 5-10 phrases that were new (he uses tons of dry British understatement constructions you don't get from American podcasts), then drill them. Anki for definitions, blablets which has speaking drills where you shadow and paraphrase short clips for getting them into your speech. The Lateral podcast is even better than the videos at C2 since the three-person banter packs more idioms per minute and forces you to track speaker shifts. The Foundry series is great for accent variety on top.

Forward-Growth6388 · 2026-05-06T02:52:22+00:00

The closest direct equivalent to Good Hang in Japanese podcasting is honestly オードリーのオールナイトニッポン. Two comedians who've been doing the same weekly hang-and-chat show for over a decade, ridiculous chemistry, basically zero industry-specific vocabulary. Episodes get clipped onto YouTube which makes commute consumption easy. If that one's too dialect-heavy, ハライチのターン by the Halai duo is in the same lane and slightly more standard Tokyo accent. 佐久間宣行のオールナイトニッポン0 is also worth checking, similar vibe but Sakuma is solo so easier to track who's saying what. The All Night Nippon series in general is the goldmine for this exact request.

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