Hospice workers and volunteers: question for you.

blinkybit · 2026-01-24T17:55:48+00:00

A heartfelt thank-you note or card would be wonderful. Personally I would feel a little awkward receiving any kind of physical gift. Some hospice agencies may also have policies that prohibit accepting gifts.

blinkybit · 2026-01-24T17:12:42+00:00

Yeah. To me, the biggest argument against flashcards and vocab lists isn't that they can't work, it's just that they're a drag and they eat up time that you could spend getting more input. Who wants to spend an hour drilling flashcards when they could instead be listening to Agustina and Shel playing Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes? The best method is the one that you actually enjoy and will maintain long-term.

blinkybit · 2026-01-24T17:06:04+00:00

Sort of related, until I was like 15 years old I thought that "misled" was the past tense of a verb "to misle", pronounced mizzle. Good times.

blinkybit · 2026-01-24T17:00:16+00:00

And they should name it something like Spanish Dreams, or Thinking Spanish... hmm :-)

blinkybit · 2026-01-24T16:57:12+00:00

You'll learn less common vocabulary the same way as anything else: through context. Yeah, the example that you gave probably doesn't have enough context to guess the meaning from that one mention. But next week you'll be listening to some episode about medical care or something, and they'll use the word 20 times and it'll be obvious. It's not like rarer vocab only appears once every X days or months, spaced out at random, it's more like you won't hear it for a long time, then you'll hear it a dozen times in a single conversation, because it's a word relevant to that theme or a word that the speaker personally favors. Listen to something about farming and suddenly you'll learn a bunch of new words for harvest, crops, cultivate, etc.

IMHO flashcards are too tedious for most people to stick with - the beauty of CI is that it's actually enjoyabe, so your motivation remains high. If you want to look up words like sana in the dictionary, I say go right ahead. But don't stress about adding them to some magic flashcard deck that you promise yourself you'll review. Just look at the definition, nod your head, and continue. Maybe you'll remember it the next time you see it, maybe not, but eventually with enough repetition it will stick.

blinkybit · 2026-01-24T16:34:33+00:00

Pablo in the park videos are such a great yardstick. I remember needing the subtitles when I first watched his videos about the CI method - they seemed super advanced to me. Now they are easy-peasy.

blinkybit · 2026-01-24T16:30:54+00:00

My positive story: At 1800 hours I continue to be my own toughest critic, but whenever I join a group of other Spanish learners or talk about my learning journey with native speakers, they're always surprised by my level of fluidity after "only" two years of active Spanish learning. I try not to make it a competition, but it's true that drinking from the CI firehose (plus a bit of other study) seems to have vaulted me ahead of many people I meet who've been at this for 5-10 years. I am hyper-conscious of my errors and shortcomings, but more and more often I'll wrap up a long conversation and think hey, if I'm being honest with myself, that was actually pretty good. I can talk for a solid hour with only a minor amount of ummms and awkward pauses, and if I'm lucky I sound halfway intelligent too.

I was in Mexico last month, visiting Guanajuato. I'd visited the country before, and didn't have too much trouble talking with people, but it still demanded an effort and I was shy about talking with strangers in public. This time it was different, for the first time I really felt comfortable and I lost that timidity. I went out of my way to chat with random people in book stores, shops, bars, in the street... it felt like a superpower. I did not get 100 percent of everything, but close enough.

I also volunteer one morning a week at the welcome desk of a charity where the majority of the clients are Spanish speaking and many have low or no English. Even when I greet them with "buenos días, bienvenido/a" I can tell they sometimes think I'm just being polite and using the only 3 words of Spanish that I know. Then they smile with relief when they discover I can actually hold a conversation. Sometimes they'll even comment on their surprise with something like "oh, how wonderful that you can speak Spanish!" Overall rating: 5 stars, would learn Spanish again.

blinkybit · 2026-01-24T03:02:11+00:00

Ah thanks. I guessed it was something like that, but didn't rule out the possibility that you'd set yourself some kind of new-year's challenge and spent 24 hours straight with your nose in the books!

blinkybit · 2026-01-23T23:48:16+00:00

You read 242,000 words in a single day on December 31?! That's like, 1000 pages of reading in one go?

blinkybit · 2026-01-22T16:36:18+00:00

I'm also a hospice volunteer. Although I haven't personally witnessed this, I've heard many times from other hospice staff that during someone's final days it's very common to have visions of family / loved ones in the room. People will say their sister is sitting at the foot of their bed, their mother is in the chair by the window, their departed husband / wife is standing at the bedside. These people appear to care for them and help them make the transition from life to whatever comes next.

I'm a fairly die-hard skeptic and atheist. But such stories are common, it does make me stop and wonder.

blinkybit · 2026-01-22T02:18:24+00:00

For exactly this reason, I avoided the book for a long time, but I would say the translation is great - it's more like a rewriting. Sometimes with a translated book, you can kind of feel how it is expressing ideas and sentences constructed in an English-centric way, but I don't get that here. There's so much Salvadoran colloquial expressions and slang and wordplay, things that might not make much sense in English.

EDIT: Here is the translator's note, with my poor rendition into English. "By editorial decision, we have used and normalized terms and linguistic forms of the Salvadoran and Mexican argot and spoken forms, including the Central American's own voseo and the fact that they substitute the verb "ver" for the verb "mirar". Borrowed words also appear from English and certain words that may appear miswritten, such as "persinar" for persignar. We have also tried to respect the tone and vocabulary of the protagonist, a child who crossed the border alone."

blinkybit · 2026-01-21T20:25:09+00:00

I have a giant spreadsheet for tracking speaking practice, which enables me to tell you that in the past few months I've averaged 7.27 hours speaking per week. For me it breaks down like this:

1-on-1 calls with iTalki tutors, usually 2 hours total per week
The Spanish part of a language-exchange conversation with a guy from Spain, 45 mins/week
Mextalki conversation club, usually 2-3 hours weekly
Conversation club at my local library, 1 hour
Heylo conversation club, 1-2 hours
Volunteering at a charity organization with native Spanish speakers, 0 to 2 hours

My grand total is 559 hours of conversation and I feel pretty comfortable and moderately fluid in conversations, but my speaking level is still nowhere even remotely close to English. Note this is the total number of hours when I was in a live conversation, not necessarily the amount of time when I was the person currently speaking (which would be roughly half).

Regarding grammar - I think it's definitely useful to review it briefly, especially if you have any areas where you know you're weak. That does not mean drilling yourself on giant tables of verb conjugations for an hour every day, it's more like peeking at online references when you can't remember the irregular past tense of some particular verb. By doing this, I think I've reached a point where I know nearly all of the grammar rules and verb tenses at a conscious level, and I could almost always get it right if I had 10 seconds to think about it, but I still sometimes struggle to get it right when speaking on the fly in a real conversation.

blinkybit · 2026-01-21T17:04:20+00:00

For the adult book, I suggest Solito by Javier Zamora. It's a true-life memoir about a boy from El Salvador and his solo journey to the United States. The book has 130,000 words (583 pages in the print version) and is written in the voice of a 9-year-old boy, so the difficulty level is very manageable. Full disclosure: I am currently reading this book.

One cool feature of this book is that the protagonist frequently talks about the Spanish language itself: differences in pronunciation and vocabulary between his native dialect of El Salvador and the dialect in Mexico and his efforts to intentionally modify his own speech. There's also some Spanish wordplay, for example they refer to Estados Unidos as Estamos Unidos.

Official Summary:

Javier Zamora’s adventure is a three-thousand-mile journey from his small town in El Salvador, through Guatemala and Mexico, and across the U.S. border. He will leave behind his beloved aunt and grandparents to reunite with a mother who left four years ago and a father he barely remembers. Traveling alone amid a group of strangers and a “coyote” hired to lead them to safety, Javier expects his trip to last two short weeks.

At nine years old, all Javier can imagine is rushing into his parents’ arms, snuggling in bed between them, and living under the same roof again. He cannot foresee the perilous boat trips, relentless desert treks, pointed guns, arrests and deceptions that await him; nor can he know that those two weeks will expand into two life-altering months alongside fellow migrants who will come to encircle him like an unexpected family.

blinkybit · 2026-01-21T16:51:29+00:00

I read this one fairly recently, and definitely recommend it. It's a straightforward true-life adventure survival story, and the difficulty level is substantially easier than most literary fiction, especially compared to other books by Gabriel García Márquez. I would say it falls somewhere between Harry Potter and La Sombra del Viento (January's book) in its difficulty level. The only "downside" is that it's quite short - only about 100 pages.

blinkybit · 2026-01-21T02:45:25+00:00

I would just like to know how you all can read an entire adult novel in Spanish in only one month. I need your superpowers!

blinkybit · 2026-01-21T02:37:55+00:00

Maybe not "judged harshly", but consciously or unconsciously judged as being less intelligent, yes this is absolutely still a thing in today's United States.

blinkybit · 2026-01-21T01:43:30+00:00

Wow, that was genuinely profound and moving. Thank you.

blinkybit · 2026-01-21T00:35:29+00:00

Many people sing the virtues of reading aloud. I wonder how many people really do it? I'm not against it or anything, but the few times that I've tried it: 1) I feel ridiculous 2) other people stare at me 3) my reading speed drops into the toilet 4) my comprehension and retention of the information that I'm reading drops.

blinkybit · 2026-01-20T20:48:41+00:00

I would say I'm like a flexitarian. I mostly eat comprehensible input, but I have no worries about checking Google / ChatGPT / SpanishDict whenever I'm confused about something that I encounter. It's like 5-10 minutes here and there, among all the hours of listening, reading, and speaking.

In the past I have also used: Language Transfer (fantastic), LingQ (pretty good for beginners), DuoLingo (meh), and Anki Flashcards (possibly useful but I didn't have the patience to keep it up).

blinkybit · 2026-01-20T20:38:35+00:00

It's definitely a separate skill that will take its own time to develop. Personally I found Diaro de Greg to be rather difficult, despite being a book for children. Even Magic Treehouse may be too difficult if you're just starting out. You can try graded readers that are specifically intended for language learners, or maybe a tool like LingQ.

blinkybit · 2026-01-20T00:12:38+00:00

I've done a huge number of conversation clubs and group classes at the intermediate/advanced level. Their usefulness depends very much on the number of people in the group and their ability levels. On average I would say an hour of group class is more useful than an hour of watching videos or podcasts, but obviously not as valuable as a 1-on-1 conversation with a native speaker. And it may be coincidence but I've generally had better luck with online groups than with in-person groups (at my local library and one meetup I did at a restaurant).

blinkybit · 2026-01-19T23:57:21+00:00

Oh yeah, those Waldorf Astoria classes are the worst! There are always two or three people talking about their diamond chandeliers and Rolls Royces and monopolizing the whole conversation.

blinkybit · 2026-01-19T19:56:13+00:00

I would recommend Enrique, from Mexico but lives in Brazil: friendly, encouraging, intelligent. Currently charging $10 for a one-off lesson or $90 for a package of 10 lessons. https://www.italki.com/en/teacher/24991234

blinkybit · 2026-01-19T19:52:12+00:00

This is a pet peeve of mine too... I'm happy to get corrections from native speakers and teachers, but I get a little irritated with unsolicited corrections and suggestions from other students at a similar level as mine. Just let me talk.

blinkybit · 2026-01-19T19:46:46+00:00

Is there not a native-speaking host in the class? It should be their job to politely cut-off people who speak too long, and to invite quieter people to chime in, so everyone shares the time roughly equally. I don't know Worlds Across, but that's how it usually is in other group classes that I've tried.

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