Getting Conversational in a New Language in 6 Months

Buenas! Cómo estás. Ojala tu dia sea mejor que mi español. Quiza podemos practicar juntos un dia.

I never considered myself a language person. Despite being half Japanese and half Chinese I was never raised speaking my native tongue. After all, I’m 5th generation American on my Chinese side and 4th on my Japanese one. I’m typically the “banana” of the asian groups I’m in, meaning asian on the outside and white on the inside. In high school, I took 4 years of Japanese and even went on an exchange to Japan for 2 months but came back just as unconfident as I started. Language was always something I thought others had a talent for but that I could never seem to grasp. Finally, I decided to make a run at changing this last year.

In the last 6 months, I prioritized learning Spanish. There were many reasons. First, it was a mountain I had yet to successfully climb. I like challenges in many parts of my life and this was always one that allured me. Second, latin culture. Having traveled to many parts of Latin America throughout the years, I always found the culture to be refreshing, open, loving, and warm. There is an openness and expressiveness that’s in the air. A welcoming as if you’re a neighbor or family that doesn’t exist in the States. Third, latin dance. Why not learn the language with the other core piece of culture? Dance!

I’m writing this post to share my experiences with learning a new language from scratch. I’m by no means fluent, but I would consider myself conversational with normal daily topics. And more importantly I started to truly enjoy the process of learning language. I’m going to share some of my process in learning and hopefully it can help guide others or simply be a data point for one way to do it.

Where I started 6 months ago

• I knew ~10 words in Spanish and had never taken a Spanish class

Where I’m at now

• I think and speak in Spanish at nearly the same speed as English. Speaking no longer requires conscious thought
• My grammar, use of accent marks, and verb conjugations are not great
• I can express ~75% of the ideas I want to and can understand 25–50% of the words in a daily 1:1 conversation. But given the context and mannerisms I’d say my overall comprehension of the message can be double that
• I’ve still never taken a formal Spanish class

The journey has been a short 6 months but it’s been consistent. There’s only been a handful of days where I didn’t practice. I began using Duolingo but I found that more hours put in was not correlating to becoming more conversational. It’s at this point I stepped back to learn how to learn better. I watched many hours of Youtube of people comparing different strategies and applications to learn more effectively. These videos helped guide me towards some apps and away from others. Duolingo, though fun, did not seem like a good way to become conversational. I began testing different apps, broke out language learning into different categories (creative speaking, structured speaking, comprehension, reading, typing, verb conjugation, structured lessons), and then made sure I had an application or approach to learn each. My approach focused heavily on apps to give myself flexibility to learn on-the-go and my daily learning rarely spanned more than an hour. About half of the learning was in the background via audio.

Principles

• Immersion — The most common way people think of immersion is by traveling to the country that speaks the language you’re interested in. This is no doubt the best approach. But even if you can’t travel to the country, there are other ways to immerse. Immersion without being in the host country still can mean trying to make it so that everything you read, hear, think, write, and say is in the language. For reading you can obviously practice with apps, Netflix with subtitles, or change your phone to the language. For thinking and writing, you can start doing some of your self talk and journaling in the language. For hearing and speaking you can use conversational apps like Pimsleur, do language exchanges like Tandem, or get friends or a partner that speaks. The more hours per day you read, hear, think, write, and speak in the language, the more “immersed” you are. Think about every task you do in the day that involves language, consider how you could do it in the other language, then do it.
• Mess up constantly! — This is one of the biggest areas that was different for me now versus when I went on the exchange to Japan in high school. I’m no longer afraid of messing up. I think it mostly has to do with having grown up a bit, becoming more comfortable being uncomfortable, and enjoying the process of miscommunication as much as communication. No one is judging a beginner on their pronunciation or conjugations. You can’t improve unless you speak and you can’t speak unless you lower the bar for how perfect something needs to be for you to say it.
• Train yourself like you would a dog — No I don’t mean giving yourself treats after every success, but you can do that if you want. If you want to teach a dog a new trick, you have to teach them iteratively. You can’t just teach a dog to sit pretty on your shoulders. You start by teaching them to put the front paws on your back, then you lure them farther forward, then you get them to stand, then sit pretty. To learn a language, I believe it’s most effective to be consuming content that’s barely within your grasp but not overly far from it. Some instructors recommend listening to local podcasts, which I think is a terrible idea. You will burn so much energy to focus and yet you won’t even understand 2% of it. I think better early on to listen to easy short stories on LinQ that have transcripts you can read, easily repeat 10 times, and can save words and phrases as flashcards. You should always feel challenged but not like you’re drowning.
• Feelings to speech — I think the goal of getting conversational is to be able to directly translate feelings to speech. The slow intermediary step you want to eventually avoid is thinking or visualizing the words in your native language then translating them. My personal view is that too much of an emphasis on reading gets in the way of this. Reading is certainly essential to have more confidence in how to structure words and to match patterns but it can also get in the way of speaking faster. This is why I think apps like Pimsleur are so effective. The emphasis is on speaking.

My Recommendations

S Tier (highest)

• Pimsleur (paid) — Hands down the most crucial app that I used. Pimsleur comes in 30 day courses and each day you listen and practice speaking with a 30 minute lesson. It’s 90% conversation-based and uses spaced repetition to efficiently get your brain to retain what you practice. At first I thought it was really slow, but then I realized that I was retaining everything I learned and was able to effortlessly use it in conversation. After that I leaned into it more and would often repeat lessons the same day to get more practice. They do a great job of balancing repeating old words and giving you just the right amount of new words. Also you’ll rarely repeat the same thing between sessions. Instead you’ll often use the same words but in different combinations, which is essential for getting your mind to gain mastery over the language instead of memorizing phrases. And since it’s almost entirely auditory you can easily learn when you’re in transit, doing chores, or otherwise occupied. They support over 50 other languages.
• Living in the country — It can’t be understated how important this one is. You’ll not only pick up the language but also the culture, mannerisms, slang, and quirks. You’ll also probably come home with more motivation to learn because you’ll see how useful the language can be. It’s important not to forget that you still have to make an effort to engage. I’ve seen people who have lived in a foreign country for 10+ years and still can’t speak because they only hung out with expats and never immersed.
• Getting a girlfriend, boyfriend, partner, or friend that speaks — It’s a double win. You can grow a relationship and learn language the whole time.
• Tutor — Getting a tutor is critical because it’s a chance for you to practice conversation and also they can show you gaps in your knowledge. They can make custom plans or exercises to help you work on problem areas. Often tutors can be on the order of $5–15 / hour.

A Tier

• LanguageTransfer (free) — I would rate this S except for the fact that it’s a bit short. The app is a similar style to Pimsleur but you get to hear the instructor teach a woman Spanish from scratch. She has no prior history with the language. So you get to follow along with all her questions and difficulties that you’re likely running into as well. They also teach you more structure and rules versus Pimsleur which can help streamline learning. For example: Words in English that end in “…al” are the same in Spanish. Words that end with “…ity” become “…idad”. “…ly” become “…mente”. And “…tion” become “…cion”. Voila! Just with those 4 rules you now know 3000 words in Spanish! They also support 9 languages and all for free.
• LingQ (paid) — This app is amazing. They have libraries of audio stories in many languages. Even some popular books and podcasts. Their content is fully transcribed meaning you can read along as you listen. You’re also able to highlight words or phrases to save them as flashcards. When you save them you can look the word or phrase up against the crowd and see everyone else’s definitions too. This app came in very handy at the start because I wanted to work on my auditory recognition. They had a section for latin short stories, each about 5 minutes long. I would listen to some of the stories 20x times and what I noticed is that after a few listens they would start to sound slower and more clear. Additionally, my retention was extremely high compared to podcasts because I could see all the words and easily save any new ones for later study.
• Google Translator (free) — Swiss army knife for translations. Never leave home without it. You can type your text in, speak it in, or even take a picture and get the text translated.

B Tier

• ConjuGato (paid)— This app is good for getting faster mastery of conjugations. You can select which infinitive verbs you want to practice then select the tenses. Once you do that, you can randomly practice them as flashcards.
• Tandem (paid)— There is no substitute for talking to actual people. Tandem and other language exchange apps make this very easy. You can quickly see a list of people who are also looking to language exchange. Then you filter based on language and minutes later you can be in a video chat with someone in your desired language.
• Reverso Context (free) — Google Translator is decent at translating things word for word, but there are often cases where you don’t want the exact translation. Sometimes there are colloquialisms and slang that don’t make sense when translated word for word. For example if you type “once in a blue moon” into Google Translator you will get the exact translation of “una vez en una luna azul” when what you meant was closer to “infrequently”. Reverso Context uses millions of bilingual texts and runs it through AI to predict which words match up to which. You can then search for words and phrases to see what it thinks are the equivalent translations given actual human translations. In this case, a closer translation given actual texts would be “muy de vez en cuando”.

D Tier

• Duolingo (freemium)— I struggled to rate this one because this is where I started. Duolingo makes language very approachable and fun. Everything is gamified and at the start you’re learning a bunch of essential words and it feels like progress. The problem with Duolingo is that each module is just a pack of new words. They don’t teach you how to properly conjugate verbs, don’t teach critical rules of the language, don’t seem to care about proper grammar, and don’t use spaced repetition to help you retain what you learn. I think it can be a great place to start warming up the muscle of language but I think you will also find that it’s not a great tool to become conversational.
• Podcasts in the language — I mentioned it before but I don’t think listening to podcasts for locals is an effective way to start learning. The percent you can understand and retain is too low. I think it’s better to train yourself like you would a dog and start with the basics like sit and stay. That said, I’m sure this is a great way to learn once you already have a foundation.

Other Apps / Approaches

• Busuu (paid)— I haven’t used this app but I heard it’s similar to Pimsleur. One additional feature it offers it that you can record yourself speaking and send that recording to the cloud. Native speakers can then give you feedback on your pronunciation which seems like a useful feature.
• Anki (free/paid) — No matter what your approach, I think it’s essential to have a means of saving words that you learn. Anki offers a basic open-source flashcard computer version and a paid mobile version. If you want to make own cards from scratch this can be a good avenue. However I found it more effectively to use LinQ and pull definitions from the cloud.
• Quizlet (freemium) — Another cloud based flashcard app. They have many “decks” of flashcards you can simply copy, however I think it’s more effective to build your own list.
• Youtube / Netflix — One strategy I came across was to use dual translations with Youtube and Netflix. You can watch content in your language of choice and see the subtitles in both languages. The advanced version is to read the translations ahead of time and study them in 5 minute blocks. Then you’ll already be primed when you watch the show to hear the phrases you have already studied.
• Rosetta Stone — I’ve never tried it. I just know that nearly every person rates this program as the worst of all apps. It’s no surprise that it’s also the one sold in malls.
• School — I’ve still never taken a Spanish class but I imagine they’re effective and potentially a good way to connect with other language learners. One issue is simply that you have to “go” somewhere. Hopefully the commute itself isn’t as long as the class. Another issue with classes is that you move at the speed of the slowest person. If you can afford it, I’d assume getting a daily tutor is a more effective means to learn.
• Getting a job in the language — Haven’t done this but in terms of immersion it is a great way to have a majority of your day be immersed.

If I could do things over, I would have started Pimsleur earlier, quit Duolingo earlier, not used podcasts, and spent more time in Latin America. All in all I’m pretty happy with how things turned out. Certainly the process is different for everyone and hopefully there are some nuggets in here to help with your learning journey.

Buena suerte,

-Guy