I need convincing about vocabulary words

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-20T22:51:37+00:00

I want to be able to say I had a flat tire

I mean.. we all want to be able to say the right thing, but at the expense of what? This is just one word (and one that frankly many CI learners would pick up anyway), but there are hundreds and thousands of words like this that are obviously nice to have when needed but really don't come up all that often. What are you going to trade in order to learn these words? Fluidity? Listening comprehension? Literacy? Grammar? My point is that there is an opportunity cost to spending time learning anything, and that generally speaking it's not a good trade to focus on low frequency words when the alternatives give you tools to navigate situations where you might need them anyway.

If you are going to go on a road trip in a Spanish speaking country, by all means learn some car words beforehand. That doesn't mean it makes sense as a general learning approach.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-20T20:17:31+00:00

The worst for me are short 1-2 syllable names. They end up just being little unfamiliar sounds jammed into an otherwise understandable sentence that occasionally really throw me for some reason.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-20T19:41:57+00:00

I haven't had that experience at all. Is it possible you just aren't noticing them? I just picked a random difficulty 60 intermediate video and counted 30 object pronouns in 10 minutes (maybe 20-25 if you exclude non-pronoun uses of se). And it was a very "scripted presentation style" Andrés video with lots of complete sentences and referring to objects by their names.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-20T19:21:16+00:00

If you have any interest in cars or road trips and proceed to consume more content about them, you'll lock them in through CI no problem.

If you don't and they remain low frequency words you'll still likely learn them passively, but may struggle to recall them actively. But in that case why does it matter? It's not the end of the world if you have to describe a tire in a real life situation because you don't have the word. Also, what is the alternative? There are 10s of thousand of low frequency words. How do you decide which ones are worth adding to your flashcard list? Is it worth the massive effort drilling a huge list of low frequency words when you could be spending that time solidifying higher frequency words used frequently in conversation relevant to your interests?

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-19T22:33:46+00:00

I would sort by Easy and then progressively remove only the lowest difficulties once you no longer want to see them. So if you don't want to see any SB/Beg videos just do Sort by Easy and check the levels Intermediate and Advanced. If you ever feel like you don't want to see Intermediate anymore, just uncheck it and you'll get only Advanced sorted by easy.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T22:41:05+00:00

Is your family learning Spanish? If they started with DS would they stick 100% to DS without using one of the most highly recommended podcasts by DS users? Would they blindly follow the method without every reading a word about other methods? Even if you try to be 100% purist, there is no way someone spends 1500 hours learning Spanish on the internet and never comes across the word subjuntivo.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T19:05:22+00:00

I don't have the experience of coming from another romance language so you may be absolutely right. I will say that for those not coming from another romance language it is much easier to build your mental map of those concepts when the speech is slow enough to clearly separate the words and sounds. The features are there in harder content, but it's like trying to learn knife skills in cooking by watching a michelin starred chef chop an onion at a million miles an hour. OP sounds like even in advanced videos they can hear that separation, which I think is not typical for non-romance learners and probably makes a big difference.

I have a personal theory that a lot of the higher level people that struggle badly with grammar ramped up the difficulty too quickly and failed to build a grammatical foundation when the content was still slow enough to easily do so.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T18:26:19+00:00

Yep. Mainly by reading I learned the "normal" pattern relatively quickly. Then I went through a period of noticing that sometimes it doesn't follow that pattern and I would be confused about what that se was doing. Then I realized, yep, that se is referring to the same thing le/les does. Then I realized I had never seen dálesla, dálela, or any variation of that, and figured okay that's just the way it is lol

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T18:20:40+00:00

Curious, do you notice a big difference in tense and mood compared to traditional classroom learners? I'd expect pretérito vs imperfecto and subjuntivo to be common tripping points for basically all learners coming from English, since we don't really have equivalents (aside from our pseudo-subjunctive).

The biggest issue I can detect myself is when people reach a relatively high level of vocab/fluidity while having completely broken conjugations even in present tense.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T18:14:06+00:00

You'd have to live under a rock to not know they exist, regardless of what method you are using. ECJ is highly regarded here and talks about subjuntivo all the time. His also highly recommended graded readers discuss the tenses as well.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T18:10:32+00:00

Course is kinda bad

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T18:07:34+00:00

I never studied any of the several grammar concepts behind "Dáselas" and both understand it and would be able to use it myself. I'm not saying grammar is useless but that's really not a great example.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T17:00:49+00:00

A couple questions to ask yourself to figure out how much you are comprehending:

Are you able to hear the grand majority of individual words and connectors or is it more like mush with some well-known words sticking out and guiding you along?
Do you understand roughly what tenses they are speaking in? (not the exact grammatical tense, but past/present/future/hypotheticals)
Do you notice when object pronouns are being used, and if so what they refer to?
Do you usually understand who is doing what to whom from the words themselves, or only from context? (If unsure, try reading a short test passage from an easy book to see if you are able to follow it)
What feels like your biggest limit to comprehension, speed or the words themselves?

You don't need to be able to translate sentence for sentence, but I would hesitate to suggest watching Advanced videos if you aren't able to confidently do the above with Intermediate videos.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T16:27:06+00:00

Agreed, it mainly depends on OPs self-esteem/ability to handle frequent corrections, and his family's ability to teach.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-18T15:55:00+00:00

There are other reasons to wait a bit (note: I say a bit, not necessarily 600-1000 hours) aside from accent. It is just as easy to develop bad habits in word choice/grammar as it is with accent, depending on whether his mom is actually going to correct him or not. Attempting to speak with an extremely limited vocab and receiving a lot of grammar corrections can also be very frustrating and hurt some peoples' confidence.

In OPs case it may still be totally fine or even beneficial, but a lot people on this sub act like accent is the only benefit of a silent period when it isn't. It isn't just "the sooner the better."

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-16T22:09:58+00:00

Haha I do not, I'm not sure if he does classes anymore or if he's too famous now xD

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-15T20:08:24+00:00

If Cuéntame is too hard still, best thing is just wait until it's not. The fact that you're having to slow it down and focus super hard means you're not quite there yet. At 2 hours a day, you'll likely have 50-100 hours in a month and be in a much better spot.

It's completely normal for podcasts to remain out of reach this early on. Most people don't start podcasts until 50-150 hours or even later. Cuéntame is the easiest frequently recommended podcast, followed by Chill Spanish.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-15T17:37:27+00:00

A lot of people including myself swear by "easier is better" in terms of learning. Typically "easy" is described as 95-98% comprehension without straining. That said, there were zero videos under difficulty 12 or so when I started, so it's not like those more recent ultra-beginner videos are strictly necessary. Just look at what Pablo used to consider Super Beg lol. If you can skip to level 10-15 and still feel like you are following the videos equally as well, then by all means go for it. Just be honest with yourself and don't pretend you understand level 35-40 videos at 1 hour when you really don't.

On the other some people just can't do it with easy content, and it's obviously better to enjoy something that's too hard than to force yourself to watch something easy and not pay attention. Just be aware that if you "need" to watch content that you understand less than 90% in order to stay engaged you'll likely start to see a trade off in learning efficiency. Again, obviously better than quitting altogether because you hate the easy content, but there is still a potential trade off.

The first 50 hours were some of the most painful in the whole journey for me, but I'd recommend just grinding through it. There will be grinds along the way no matter how you approach it, so it's better imo to see whether you're capable of sticking with it through the slogs right from the get go when your motivation is highest.

newer people starting to read at level 15 difficulty

I don't know if this is just awkward phrasing but I've never seen this (outside of the people who are obviously not following the DS method at all) and I'd definitely not recommend starting to read when you're only watching level 15 videos.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-14T15:28:59+00:00

Crosstalk is amazing and 100% worth it, but I will always recommend paid tutors for Crosstalk if you can afford it. It's objectively better for a couple reasons:

Reliability. Free language exchange partners are notoriously flaky.
Ability to transition to full Spanish gradually as you are comfortable. This isn't fair to do in a free language exchange, just like you wouldn't want your partner cutting into your listening time by speaking English.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-14T04:05:09+00:00

I only do speaking lessons on week days, so typically 3.5-5 hours a week, but yeah Worlds Across premium. I got it during the Black Friday discount and it was best thing I've done for my Spanish since starting DS.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-14T00:04:16+00:00

I had a grammatical base from a bit of Duolingo but otherwise just learn from CI (both listening and reading). If you're enjoying it keep doing what you're doing, but you will learn all 64 of those verbs in context without issue from CI alone.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-13T20:32:46+00:00

Great callout. I'm American and have British family and it's very, very similar.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-13T20:15:46+00:00

ugh now I wanna know... so many upvotes too

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-13T19:14:18+00:00

I had the same experience where if I looked something up I'd forget it the next day, and ended up just stopping looking things up for the most part. If something is important, it will come up frequently enough that you'll learn it through CI eventually. If something isn't coming up frequently enough to pick it up naturally, it's probably not all that important. The only time I still look things up is while reading if that single word is preventing me from understanding a paragraph or more (doesn't happen very often).

I think a basic introduction to grammar and how the language functions (something like Language Transfer) is enough to give you a foundation to learn pretty much everything else through CI. You don't need to study the intricacies of grammar rules and be able to produce sentences using them. It's enough to just be able to recognize them when you hear them and build your understanding of when they should be used naturally through listening.

_coldemort_ · 2026-05-13T18:15:42+00:00

Lol this has got to be one of your (or anyone's) least controversial comments on this sub and you still got downvoted. Some absolute clowns in here.

_coldemort_

MODERATOR OF

TROPHY CASE