I took three years of Spanish and got an A every semester. Even when it was still fresh in my mind, I was nowhere near able to hold even a very simple conversation. And now just a few years later it's all totally gone from my brain.

My mother's native language is Spanish and she never taught me, which I resent her for. But I still find it incredible how shitty my public school education in Spanish was. We really should be teaching kids a second language from kindergarten up.

  • seeking_perhaps [he/him]
    ·
    4 months ago

    In a similar boat. I decided I wanted to actually learn spanish, so a couple months ago I got serious about watching Comprehensible Input (Dreaming Spanish). Between that and self study and speaking practice I'm already well past where I was in high school, though I still have a long way to go to fluency.

    It's frustrating that I have to find this all out years after my education. But I feel that way about most subjects I learned in school, so this is no different.

      • Muad'Dibber@lemmygrad.ml
        ·
        4 months ago

        3rded, dreaming spanish rules. I'm also trying to learn mandarin via a few other comprehesible input channels, but they aren't set up nearly as well as dreamingspanish is.

    • electricaltape [none/use name]
      ·
      4 months ago

      It's sad that so many "leftists" here are super knowledgeable about politics/history yet when it comes to languages turn into complete dumb-dumbs and say stupid shit like "oH WeLl uNlEsS YoU LeArN It aS A KiD MiGhT As wElL GiVe uP hurrrrr durrrrrr!!!" It's not like CI has been some sort of hidden gem, people have used it to learn languages like Japanese for the last decade on youtube and have produced great results. Another reason why I have absolutely zero hope in the west and have resigned myself that it will become ultra fascist.

    • PauliExcluded
      ·
      4 months ago

      A year ago, I didn’t know Spanish. Now, I can watch TV shows for natives in Spanish and have conversations in Spanish (despite making some mistakes obviously). Dreaming Spanish and CI is just a really easy way to learn a language. You don’t need to study. You just watch videos and listen to podcasts that are easy enough for you to understand. Overtime, “easy enough for you to understand” will increase in difficulty. (If you know nothing when you start, then the only way you can understand the videos is by drawings and gestures. That’s fine though, because your brain will still figure things out.)

      https://www.dreamingspanish.com/

      I know reddit-logo is bad, but the unofficial Dreaming Spanish subreddit is a great community. It’s very positive and people share their progress.

      http://old.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish