Refold Approach to Language Learning: Spanish ~1300-Hour Update
As I get close to the mythical 1500 hour mark, I'm feeling very good about where I'm at, but as with all types of learning, there is such a long way to go
This is my eleventh update for my Spanish learning journey with the Refold approach. Welcome to everyone who is coming to this page from Medium. I’ve moved to Substack because of better customization options (mainly the ability to add other pages to the blog), and a general reduction in click-bait. Articles, as at Medium, will always be free, but there is an option to be a paid subscriber.
For my first update, see here.
For my second update, see here.
For my third update, see here.
For my fourth update, see here.
For my fifth update, see here.
For my sixth update, see here.
For my seventh update, see here.
For my eighth update, see here.
For my ninth update, see here.
For my tenth update, see here.
For more information about the Refold approach, see here. For a basic Spanish Anki vocabulary deck, see here.
General Progress
Reached 1300 hours of immersion. Expanded my domain knowledge away from historical fiction towards other types of books. Got into a consistent output schedule with a couple tutors on iTalki. Took my second fluency test on iTalki. Really improved my understanding of subjunctive. Ramped up sentence mining again.
Honestly things have been going great with Spanish. I didn’t do as much immersion as I wanted during the fall because of falling into a pretty serious relationship. That relationship is now over, or at the very least dialed back a lot, meaning I have more time for Spanish. It was cool to see some concepts finally come together for me in these 100 hours: namely when to use the subjunctive. However, the thing that seems to be holding me back the most is just knowledge of phrases and vocabulary. This is going to take time, and honestly will be a lifelong endeavor. I’m still learning new words in English, and am constantly improving both the clarity and content of my thoughts and speech. The same is true of Spanish, and to think that there will be a “ending point” is kind of hubristic.
iTalki Test and Subjective Language Level
One of the most common questions I get in real life and on places like reddit is “What’s your level of Spanish like?” I can give a subjective answer of course, and I will later in this blog post, but sometimes it helps to have something concrete to point to. I bought a package from iTalki of 4 tests ($30) that looks at your speaking and grammar skills. I took the first test this July, and my second (pictured above) in December. I plan to take the final test in June 2024. The test assess your speaking by playing a phrase and having you repeat it back. I found my understanding of the phrase to be near 100%, but I had trouble repeating back some of the content, especially with grammatical structures I wasn’t that familiar with. iTalki gave me a B2 level for speaking, slightly better than my previous score. I was hoping for something higher, especially after 6 months more of output and immersion. However, I have been neglecting listening a lot, which I will talk about later in the blog post
Grammar went much better than last time. I did a little bit of explicit study with my iTalki tutors, and also thought a bit more about verb moods and tenses when I was doing my reading immersion. This I think resulted in an improved score, but again, I still have a long way to go.
I think this score is pretty accurate, although for certain texts my comprehension is a lot better. I no longer think that my reading is C2: I’ve been struggling with some new authors, and there’s still a long way to go in terms of new vocabulary and grammatical structures. I’ve been exposed to a very academic, and Castilian style of Spanish, which is not representative of the language as a whole. I think improving at this point, up to taking the CEFR C1/C2 test and passing, is going to require a lot more time, probably years of low-level immersion and some explicit grammatical study, with a special emphasis on reading books that are not from Spain. I’ll talk more about my thoughts going forward in the Future Plans section of this post.
Reading
I’m still reading a lot. While there are Spanish speakers in Baltimore, and places I want to travel (Ciudad de Mexico, Camino de Santiago), one of the primary reasons I have been learning Spanish is for the literature, and “culture shock”.
As with last time, I tried to read widely over genres and difficulty levels. However, from looking at my big list of “read” books in Spanish, there’s a definite bias towards Spain. I would like to change that going forward, as I think that it creates inaccurate picture of how the language is actually used.
In the easy category, I read the sixth book in Pedro Urvi’s Sendero de Los Guardabosques series, as well a book about reducing internet use, La Gran Adicción. I’m honestly getting very tired of the Guardabosques books: they’re overly wordy, and the plot is really quite mediocre. I’ve reviewed La Gran Adicción here in more detail.
In the medium category, I read four books. The first was Petrocalipsis, by Spanish oceanographer Antonio Turiel. This was a nice collapse overview, not information I didn’t already know, but lots of new vocabulary. The second book was the first in Liliana Bodoc’s Saga de Los Confines, Los Días del Venado. In addition to being from an Argentinian author, this book was a great read. The plot gives echoes of Lord of The Rings, but the setting is distinctly pre-Colombian, and the writing style is much closer to magical realism than to Tolkien’s fairy tales. Thirdly, I read the (very long) sequel to Roma soy Yo, Maldita Roma. This book was an easy and fun read, but I can’t recommend because of Posteguillo’s extreme bias. Fourthly, and finally I read Sidi, by Arturo Pérez-Reverte. This book was a retelling of a small part of the legend of El Cid, a Spanish national hero. I have found Pérez-Reverte extremely difficult to read in the past, because of the way he constructs dialogue, and this book was no exception. I think this is a sign that I should read more of him. In terms of the plot of the book, I have no complaints, but I wish that Reverte would have chosen a more interesting period in the man’s life.
In terms of hard books, I read another Ortega y Gasset: Historia como Sistema. I didn’t fully understand this, and I plan to reread before I review.
I’ve started collecting all the books I’ve read that were originally written in Spanish and sorting them into these three categories on another page of my blog. This should be updated with each blog post.
As I stated last time, I’ve been chunking reading into 30-60 minute segments, and making sure I summarize my thoughts afterwords. This has been great for the philosophy books I’ve read. I’ve also noticed the slowing down paying off in increased awareness of sentence and grammatical structures. That awareness, coupled with sentence mining, is slowly turning into understanding. I also have been more okay with reading multiple books at once, or switching to English books when I’m feeling tired. An English book is better than mindless scrolling!
Finally, in order to facilitate Italian, I’ve been rereading the Harry Potter books in Spanish, reading the same chapter first in Spanish and then in Italian. I’m still finding new vocab in the Spanish books, which is cool, but these are generally very easy to understand. I’ll talk more about my justification when I make my first Italian update.
Total Immersion time: 665 hours, approximately 5.3 million words
Future Plans: Do some deliberate rereading. More Pérez-Reverte. More new authors from outside of Spain!
Open Questions: Book recommendations from Latin American authors
Sentence Mining
I’m up to 1765 cards now with a 92.51% lifetime mature retention rate, but a higher 93.71% rate in the past month. This retention rate is back to being too high again, probably because I’m adding too much context to my sentences. I might start marking cards as easy to increase interval time more quickly.
I’ve added new cards from the various books I’ve read and from new vocab that I’ve learned in my italki lessons. I haven’t been that good at doing this recently, which explains the slowdown in reviews. I have been feeling inspired to do more Anki recently, so hoping to get some more sentence mining done soon.
The A/B/C test is over. I’m going with images or Spanish definitions as frequently as possible. Sometimes the English definition is the only thing that can get the phrase to stick in my brain, but I reserve this for rare exceptions.
A sort of meta question I have: when is the Anki endgame? When is it no longer worth it to make and review cards, as compared to doing something like reading?
Open Questions: when do you quit Anki?
Writing
I’ve continued to write Goodreads reviews for the books that I’ve listened to and read. I’ve started posting them weekly-ish on this blog, and I also go over them with a tutor on iTalki. I’ve also started taking notes in Spanish while reading in Spanish. Kind of cool to feel the thoughts flow. As I wind-down intensive immersion in Spanish, and wind it up in another language, writing will be something I focus on more.
Open Questions: What methods do you use to practice writing?
Listening
The main source of my 40 hours of listening between this and the 1200 hour update was relistening to audiobooks I’ve already read, such a Olvidado Rey Gudú, the Magicians, and Harry Potter. I also listened to Ursula K Le Guin’s Un Mago de Terramar, which was frankly beautiful.
I’ve watched a few shows: Isabel and Chicas de Cable, and a variety of short podcast episodes for my iTalki lessons, but I’ve been finding it hard to be consistent with these. I think my best bet moving forward is to concentrate on making time for audiobooks, and regular conversations with either iTalki tutors or Spanish speaking friends.
Total Immersion time: 600 hours
Future Plans: 30 minutes of listening to audiobooks daily, biweekly conversation practice, and 30 minutes of an interview conversations every other day.
Open Questions: Do you sentence mine musical lyrics? Film recommendations?
Speaking
I want to echo what I said the last few times about outputting: it’s extremely motivating. Since the last update, I’ve had at least one iTalki lesson a week, although the fall was extremely busy (class+relationship). Unlike past breaks from Spanish, these lessons kept me accountable and doing at least something every week. I also think I’m a lot more extroverted than I like to think, and it’s really fun to hear from people on the other side of the globe. I’ve noticed my speaking improve tremendously in the past ~40 hours. One huge win for me has been the natural use of the subjunctive in conversation.
I still have a long way to go however. Many of the grammatical structures and vocabulary I understand while reading are not available to me speaking. And according to my tutors, I’m often resorting to anglicisms for word order or phrasing choices.
I’m taking iTalki lessons with three different teachers from different Spanish-speaking countries. Rafael from Spain, Alejandro from Colombia, Misael from Argentina. You can see my last post for the descriptions of each of the tutors, but Rafael is currently not taking any new students.
One other thing I’ve started to do is to do about 10 percent of my reading out loud. This was a recommendation from Alejandro, and has also been touched on by Steve Kaufmann and Alexander Arguelles.
Output time: 39 hours
Explicit Grammar
None, but I think I need to. I know when I need to use the subjunctive, but I don’t know all the conjugations. So I end up using the standard verb form in conversation, w
Future Plans
I’m nearing the end of my explicit Spanish learning journey. However, I want to echo what I said last time: there’s not really ever going to be a time when my Spanish is finished. I just need to keep reading and having conversations.
Other Languages
I will be focusing on Italian this year: starting with LingQ and reading through the entire Harry Potter series. More on this in the 100 hours Italian blog post
Health
My sleep and anxiety have been pretty hard to deal with recently, which has made immersion difficult. I’m hoping to deal with some of these problems through therapy and jungian self-analysis.
Overall Impressions
Things are frankly going great. I hope to be back soon with a 1400 and 1500 hour update. I’ll then do two more updates at 2k and 3k. I think these granular updates are becoming progressively less useful. Anyway, happy immersing!
Open Questions: How did you go about transitioning to beginning an L3?
Full immersion link data link.
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Deus ex Vita
> Open Questions: Book recommendations from Latin American authors
I've read The Sound of Things Falling by Juan Gabriel Vásquez (Colombian) and loved it, but I read it in English. I want to reread it at some point in Spanish but can already tell that my Spanish wouldn't cut it yet. Reputations was pretty good as well.
I've also read good things about Roberto Bolaño (Chile) but never read anything of his myself.
If you can spare the time, I would HIGHLY recommend a 2 week in country immersion class if you haven't done this yet. It's been transformative for me in French. It's filled in some gaps, if that makes sense and has given me a more holistic sense of the language that I was not able to get out of the country.