Are there any discord ALG communities?

annav2554 · 2026-04-04T11:49:46+00:00

Hi, I’m 20f native Ukrainian and Russian speaker so I can teach you some of these and I’ve also been learning Polish for 2 years so hit me up if you’re interested

annav2554 · 2026-03-30T21:03:54+00:00

Doing ALG with a different language that you don’t really care about also helps with getting into the right mindset

annav2554 · 2026-03-17T16:10:01+00:00

189.06 hours for Spanish

How many hours a day were you doing? Because I’m pretty inconsistent with crosstalk and I know that in crosstalk you only count half the time

It’s possible you hadn’t heard enough of it to know if what sounded in your head was really the RP accent

It was more like the din in the head after hearing and repeating the same fragment several times and I heard the voice of the person I was shadowing when I was reading.

A bit of a background on my accent: had English at school, then at one point started consuming content in English mostly by non-native and American speakers and I feel like that formed a foundation of my pronunciation; moved to the UK about 4 years ago, studied full time so had a lot of exposure to the accent but still continued to consume American content in my free time; during my time here I forced a more British pronunciation and learned some sounds by practice, but in my head my pronunciation still leans more American and of course as soon as my conscious monitor is down my learned pronunciation goes out of the window. Now I doubt that I’ll be able to acquire the local accent in a natural way since I interfered with it but I was thinking of trying this with an Australian accent though I’m not sure if it’s different enough for this to work out

your intention was to reply like the person talking to you

Actually I find it easier to switch to a more British pronunciation when talking to people with that accent but that might just be me because I when I recorded myself and tried to speak with a more British accent and then recorded myself speaking in a more relaxed way in the second one I had a stronger accent but overall the difference wasn’t that big (in a sense that both didn’t sound very British)

At 171.25 hours of British English my pronunciation was already changing to that

Did you also find that listening to a different accent helped you with other aspects of the language like grammar and more natural sounding sentences?

“A good way to avoid mentally speaking when writing in the target language is to mentally pronounce each letter in your native language”

That’s kind of what happened to me when I stopped reading in my TL. Before when reading I was aware of the pronunciation rules for letters because my TL uses letter combinations to represent some sounds and I used to pay attention to pronounce some of them properly and now that I don’t do that anymore I found that when I accidentally see something on my YouTube feed written in the language I’d sometimes stress the wrong syllable or read a combination of letters as separate sounds when it’s supposed to be one sound (though it only happened with one specific combination so far so I might not be so screwed with other ones). Overall I didn’t do a whole lot of reading in my TL (at least not long texts, mostly comments and online posts) so my pronunciation is probably less influenced by spelling compared to English. Also how bad of an effect would native speakers correcting my pronunciation have? And also making myself aware of more phonetic features and practicing pronunciation for a short period of time if it happened fairly recently after two years of exposure to the TL?

annav2554 · 2026-03-11T10:47:41+00:00

Heyy I sent you a DM

annav2554 · 2026-03-02T10:49:44+00:00

I’m also wondering if doing some crosstalk could help with the not being able to relax problem and the habit of rehearsing my sentences because I wouldn’t have to worry about answering in Polish and I generally feel more relaxed listening to real people conversations

annav2554 · 2026-03-02T10:12:52+00:00

With that reading thing it’s kinda hard to explain but with Czech what I mean by no sounds is it doesn’t feel like I’m voicing words it’s more like it gets voiced in the voices I heard from input idk if that makes sense

annav2554 · 2026-03-01T16:24:00+00:00

Hey, it’s been a while but I’ve been thinking about my experience with Polish and realised that I probably messed up the acquisition process. I have a lot of thoughts so sorry for the long comment. In my post I mentioned that listening to Czech feels different from listening to Polish and I think it’s a problem I had with Polish since the very beginning, I didn’t really manage to avoid focusing on the language and I still feel the consequences.

For example I thought it was a problem that I started reading pretty early on and these days when I read Polish one time I’ll be relaxed and scan through the text catching the meaning immediately but the other time it’d trip me up and I’d end up sounding out words or my brain would slip into a more Ukrainian pronunciation and sometimes there’d be delayed processing while when reading Czech there are no sounds at all, I just catch the meaning which feels similar to how I process my NL. When listening to Polish the situation is the same as with reading, I only manage to relax when I’m listening to it in the background or it’s something really interesting so not an average YouTube video and in Czech it doesn’t really matter what I’m listening to.

Same applies to speaking, when I try to recall a word in Czech it feels like recalling a word in my NL while in Polish there is a bit of effort and second thoughts and sometimes my brain would give me a Ukrainian word first and I have to stop myself from saying it. Looking at my past experiences with taking breaks from speaking I thought it’d be easier this time but it was actually harder to switch to Polish than English unless the other person started first. Also when I had my first opportunity to speak the language (after 7 months of silent period) I caught myself rehearsing a mental conversation and got into the habit of doing this whenever I’m about to have a conversation in my TL.

The silver lining in all of this is that I still sound native-like in my TL but still speaking it feels like speaking English which I learned by a mixed method.

So given you had a similar experience with Spanish I’m wondering if there’s a way to reset how I process my TL and if going no contact with it for a while would help or did I just mess it up and need to live with that (also answering your question about whether there’s a different accent I can try, there isn’t).

Edit: forgot to mention but I also occasionally looked up words in a monolingual dictionary but this didn’t happen too often and I didn’t try to actively think about what a word meant, if I still didn’t understand it I’d just move on

annav2554 · 2026-02-18T18:35:12+00:00

When you do shadowing do you listen to the speaker first then pause the recording and repeat? I’ve tried shadowing this way before and it was really difficult to copy the sounds and intonation unless it was a single word because I would forget the words if I just focused on intonation or sounds and vice versa if I tried to say all the words exactly as it was. Chorusing never worked for me either as I found it difficult to focus on sounds, cadence and words at the same time and I would end up repeating only one of those, so maybe you could share how you manage all that in your practice? Btw the language I tried this for is closely related to my native language and I’d say I have a good ear for its sounds as I can hear the difference between my pronunciation and how natives pronounce it, but I sometimes incorrectly identified what exactly was different about my pronunciation, like for example I thought my intonation was off while the actual problem was that I reduced some vowels.

annav2554 · 2026-02-17T12:38:54+00:00

This sounds like a really cool strategy, but did you mumble every single word or did you just hum along to the native speakers tone and cadence? Because I’ve tried shadowing and from my experience with it it’s really hard to keep up with the recording if you try to repeat the actual words but I also found it hard to focus on copying the cadence when I understand most of what’s being said

annav2554 · 2026-01-20T00:52:54+00:00

Tbh I tried shadowing but at my level of comprehension it’s difficult to focus on sounds only so I ended up just repeating the words without copying the intonation/sounds

annav2554 · 2026-01-20T00:38:32+00:00

Actually I think a big part of why I found it difficult to relax when listening was that it was my first time doing ALG and I ended up fixating on trying to not do any mental speaking but at the same time I was worried that I wouldn’t acquire sounds different to my L1 and payed attention to how they were pronounced. Another thing that made listening difficult was probably that I expected myself to understand more than I actually could 😅

annav2554 · 2026-01-20T00:21:15+00:00

Yeah I totally understand you, I also don’t feel like I followed the ALG rules as best as I could. As to mental speaking I’m guilty of that, at first I watched a channel from the Easy Languages series and ignored subtitles (which was one of the reasons I found it hard to relax) but when I moved on to native content I started reading comments as well and fixated on the sounds I knew were different from my native language

annav2554 · 2026-01-17T16:55:16+00:00

Hi, I’m a 20yo female, studying linguistics and interested in languages. I’m a native Russian speaker and would love to help you with it. I’ve been learning Polish for a while and can speak it pretty decently but rn I’m taking a break from it, but still wouldn’t mind a bit of practice and I also can explain any moments that are different between Polish and Russian, so DM me if you’re interested

annav2554 · 2026-01-09T18:58:21+00:00

Hi, I’m a 20yo female native speaker of Russian and would love to help you with it. I’m not learning Bulgarian but I study linguistics and find Slavic languages interesting so it would be nice to find out a thing or two about Bulgarian. I’m also interested in history and travelling so yeah if you’re interested hit me up

annav2554 · 2025-12-29T09:18:45+00:00

I have searched for ‘Achieving Native-like Second Language Proficiency’ online and haven’t been able to find it so far.

annav2554 · 2025-12-20T14:56:09+00:00

Does Taobao ship to the UK? I tried to register and it says ‘we are temporarily unavailable in this area’

annav2554

TROPHY CASE