¡Hola!
In the interest of growing the Spanish language learning community here, I thought I’d start a Spanish-language-specific study log and share my journey so far and some of the tools that have worked for me, as well as talking about what I’m up to in my current studies.
Japanese is still my main focus, so I can’t promise that this thread will be that active or exciting, but I thought my Spanish language learning journey deserved more than being relegated to a side note in my Japanese study log posts, so here we are.
Because learning Spanish has always been on the backburner for me, it almost feels like I’ve gotten as far as I have by accident? The vast majority of my progress happened as sort of a side effect of 1) developing an interest in pro wrestling, and 2) developing an interest in language learning specifically through learning Japanese.
I started out struggling to read articles in Spanish, and then three years of Japanese study later, I’m able to listen to native Spanish language podcasts with decent comprehension!
Huh? Wait a minute, how did that happen?
The long version is in my Japanese study log over on the WaniKani forum. This post here is I guess the Spanish language counterpart of my WaniKani level 60 post, which sums up the highlights of my Japanese language journey, trials and tribulations and all.
Mandatory high school language classes
I started learning Spanish in eighth grade, purely to knock out some of the high school language credits requirements a year early. I had no real interest in learning Spanish, or any other foreign language for that matter.
Naturally, I didn’t get far. I took two more years of Spanish in high school, then quit after Spanish 3, which was taught by a very mediocre teacher.
I don’t think I even technically made it past A2 in terms of language ability.
Forgetting it all
I stopped using Spanish entirely after my last high school class ended. I live in a city with a large Spanish-speaking population, so I’d see and hear Spanish spoken occasionally, but it wasn’t enough for me to retain any of my knowledge, so over the course of the next eight years or so, I lost basically all the knowledge I had.
And for the most part, I was fine with that.
Reviving my Spanish with Duolingo
I’m not sure exactly what got me to pick Spanish back up. I think I saw someone I follow using Duolingo on twitter and thought I might as well try it out, so I downloaded it and started working through the Spanish course.
It was kind of painful how much I’d lost, but miraculously, I started to get my knowledge back. I remembered a lot of the vocab after practicing it a bit, and the verb conjugations and such also came back to me, though the tenses I had been most hazy on during Spanish 3 (like the subjunctive tense) were still a bit hazy…
I don’t think Duolingo really helped me get beyond where I’d already gotten in class years ago, but it did help me recover what I’d lost.
プロレス and lucha libre
In March 2019, I discovered pro wrestling’s greatest gay love story and went from hating pro wrestling to being absolutely obsessed with it practically overnight. I had no idea that pro wrestling was capable of this level of storytelling.
I started out exclusively watching Japanese pro wrestling, but I ended up trying out American pro wrestling when All Elite Wrestling had their first show, and AEW ended up being my entry point into lucha libre. I discovered AAA, and watched my first AAA show not long after. At the time, my Spanish wasn’t good enough for me to catch more than a handful of words when listening, though I fared a little better reading tweets and such.
Like most English-speaking fans who care even a little bit about Mexican wrestling, I started following luchablog on twitter, and his account and blog were my main entry points into the Mexican wrestling world. However, I still hadn’t found a Mexican wrestling story that really hooked me, unlike with Japanese wrestling or American wrestling, so I mostly just watched occasional lucha libre shows and kept up with the big news in the scene.
Pro wrestling is an extremely global world, with most activity centered around America, Mexico, and Japan (with the U.K. a distant fourth), and with lots of cultural crossover between all three regions. So wrestlers will travel from one country to another, and storylines will get woven across wrestlers’ work in multiple companies and in multiple languages.
At the time, I had several friends who were learning Japanese for pro wrestling, and I wished I could also learn the language, but didn’t think I had it in me. But reading their posts got me wanting to do something with my Spanish as well, so I ended up getting a little more committed with Spanish, and amped up my Duolingo study.
I also started attempting to translate Spanish articles and interviews about LGBTQ luchadores so that my friends could read them. It was my first time reading native Spanish text. My primary interest in pro wrestling stems from an interest in LGBTQ performers and storylines, so I was really interested in learning more about this in the context of Mexican wrestling, since there was limited information about it in English.
There is a dearth of research about pro wrestling in general, but when you add in a language barrier and also add in a topic that is frequently stigmatized and unacknowledged, like LGBTQ issues, the amount of information that is out there about it shrinks even more.
For the first time in my life, I had a genuine motivation to learn Spanish. Despite living in an area with a high percentage of Spanish speakers, and despite needing the language to improve my job prospects, I hadn’t felt sufficiently motivated to actually study, but pro wrestling made me genuinely want to read and listen to materials that were only in Spanish.
Trying out that “immersion” thing I heard so much about
I did end up finally caving and starting to learn Japanese in fall 2020, though I didn’t get very far until I discovered WaniKani in December 2020. Even then, it still took until March 2021 before I really committed to learning. I discovered the WaniKani forums around then and got bit by the language learning bug and fell head over heels for it.
Language learning became my new obsession. I had a preexisting hyperfixation on pro wrestling, which grew into a hyperfixation on language learning, and the two interests fed each other a lot, because as my language ability improved, I started to gain more and more access to things in the pro wrestling world that were previously locked away behind a language barrier.
I heard a whole lot about the benefits of immersion on the WK forum, and lots of people there were reading stuff in Japanese, which got me wanting to try immersion, but I was so new to Japanese, I didn’t have a good enough base to try reading.
So, I thought, why not try it in Spanish?
I did a bit of googling and discovered that many people recommended El Alquimista | L24 for beginners to try reading in Spanish. So I got myself a (print) copy and started reading it.
I said in my second post in my WK study log:
Eventually, I’m probably going to replace the time I’m spending on this each day with reading Japanese material instead, but for now, I’m getting in the habit with a Spanish text.
A couple weeks later, here was my report:
I’ve made decent progress with El Alquimista. Since this is my first time attempting to read an entire book in a language other than English, I wasn’t exactly sure how to go about it at first, so I ended up deciding to try sort of a blend of extensive and intensive reading. The scenes of the book are separated out like chapters, and each one is only a few pages, so I’ve been reading one of them a day. For my first readthrough, I don’t look up any words, and I try to just read it and understand what I can from context alone. I underline any word that I’m not familiar with, or which has a meaning I can’t remember. Once I’ve finished reading the scene, I go back and look up all of the words I didn’t know and write them in the margins of the book along with their meanings. Then I read through the scene again, this time aiming to comprehend as much as possible.
I was very intimidated at the beginning, and unsure if this was an effective strategy at first, but now that I’m 70 pages into the text, I’ve found a rhythm with it. It’s a little embarrassing to sometimes have to look up the same word over and over again when I know I already wrote it down in a previous chapter, but it occurred to me that this method is sort of replicating the SRS process. And sure enough, I’ve definitely learned some new vocabulary by doing this! I’m amazed that I’ve been able to keep up this reading habit without missing a day. It often takes me an hour to get through a scene, so reading the entire novel is quite the time commitment, but I’ve been able to stick with it thus far!
I’m feeling very encouraged by my progress, and optimistic that I’ll be able to motivate myself to read Japanese materials in a similar manner one day when my skill with the language is good enough.
A couple weeks after that, I was nearly finished with El Alquimista, and had backed a Kickstarter for a bilingual flipbook comic called La Mano del Destino, which incorporates themes from mesoamerican mythology, silver age comics storytelling, 1960s lucha libre, and Mexican culture. I also had another book lined up to read after that (Ferno, el Dragón de fuego: Buscafieras 1 | L22??), which was a young adult book in Spanish that I had owned for over ten years, but had never read. I bought it when I was taking classes in the language, thinking that I would try to read it, then never managed to work up the motivation to try.
I wrote in my study log:
I’ve tentatively committed to reading these additional books in Spanish before dedicating that time to studying Japanese instead. I feel like if I don’t do it now, I’ll never actually read them. And my confidence with reading in Spanish has increased a lot over the past month or so that I’ve been working on it every day.
I’m actually really grateful to the WaniKani community for being so enthusiastic and encouraging about reading materials in the language that you’re trying to learn, because I feel like I never would have tried that with Spanish, and it absolutely has improved my comprehension of the language by a lot!
By May 9, I’d finished El Alquimista! I started reading Ferno, el Dragón de fuego, and had finished it, along with La Mano del Destino, a month later. In that study log update in June, I wrote:
It occurred to me that if I want more reading practice, I could buy a digital subscription to Box y Lucha, a lucha libre magazine. I don’t know if I’ll be able to keep up with it, but I decided to try out for one month and see how it goes.
The first issue of Box y Lucha that I read had an unexpected Golden Lovers connection, which was very fun for me! In the weeks which followed, I ended up translating a couple articles about the exotico wrestler Pimpinela Escarlata, and then read a few other articles that didn’t contain anything that I found worth reporting on.
Got distracted by trying to read some stuff in Japanese after that, though, and slowed down a bit on Spanish…
In my next study log entry, I talked about reading some tweets in Spanish, and also watching AAA TripleMania and getting some Spanish listening practice. I didn’t remark on anything I picked up while listening, so I don’t think I was able to glean a whole lot from the show.
By this point, I was starting to read in Japanese, and had signed up for my first WK book club, so my Spanish reading was getting a bit neglected, as I had predicted earlier.
However, I got a new job and started working as a librarian at a community college with a high population of Spanish-speaking students and a burgeoning collection of Spanish books. I don’t think I got any Spanish reading done for the rest of 2021 (I don’t mention any in my study log, at least), but it was certainly something on my mind at work…
I did try out listening, though! In October 2021, I started listening to the Duolingo podcast!
I started listening to the Duolingo podcast to practice my Spanish listening comprehension, and I was pleasantly surprised at how much of it I could understand! I figure trying this with Spanish will help build my confidence up for eventually trying it with Japanese. I also found some Spanish movies and tv shows on Netflix that look interesting. Thanks to a tip on this forum, I changed my language settings on Netflix to indicate that I speak Spanish and Japanese in addition to English, which should give me access to captions in more languages. I’m hoping to try watching something in Spanish with Spanish subtitles.
I didn’t talk too much in detail about my early attempts at listening to the podcast, but from what I can remember, I was able to follow the majority of the episodes, but it took me a little bit of time for my brain to adjust to the speed. The first several I listened to, I felt like my brain was always a half-step behind the dialogue.
The end of 2021 came with the bitter news that my favorite pro wrestling translator was leaving his position, which meant that my favorite company, Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling, along with DDT Pro Wrestling (both Japanese companies) no longer had English translation.
This marked a pivotal point in my language learning journey, because this was the start of me going down a path I never expected to take: I became a fan translator.
I didn’t want to do it. With my N5 Japanese, I wasn’t at all prepared for it, and the workload was incredibly high, and with extremely frequent deadlines, which meant a lot of stress, but since no one else was translating, I stepped up to do it so that I could keep following my favorite pro wrestling company alongside my friends with no Japanese ability.
It did mean that my free time took a bit of a hit, though, because I had to funnel a lot more time and energy into translating pro wrestling stuff. My book club participation sort of floundered as a result, though I was engaging with more native Japanese material than ever.
Poor Spanish was left by the wayside, though…
A particularly ambitious Read Every Day Challenge
On the WaniKani forum, we have something called the Read Every Day Challenge, which happens in the form of four seasonal threads that are basically always ongoing (the official challenge period for each challenge is for two months and then a one month break, but many people just keep going without taking a break).
I signed up for my first one in January, 2022, figuring that I was already reading pretty much every day to keep up with the translations anyway, so it should be easy for me to keep up with a daily reading challenge in Japanese (I was right).
I did set a bit of a stretch goal for myself, though. I said: “I might also be trying to read some in Spanish, depending on how much time I have. We’ll see!”
I ended up reading in Spanish for 10 of the 61 days total of that initial challenge period. I had picked up the novel Tempestad: El Legado de los Primarios | L30?? from an artist I really liked, and I tried reading it, but it was too hard for me, and I was having a hard time getting through it.
I also tried using a monolingual dictionary to read in Spanish, which I think was a mistake. It added extra time to doing lookups for a book that was already taking me too long to do lookups for…
In March 2022, I switched to reading Wonder - La lección de August (NUBE DE TINTA) | L29??! Here’s what I said about the decision to switch to a different book:
I ended up putting Tempestad aside for now, because I was processing some of our new Spanish language books at the library I work at, and when I flipped through Wonder, I noticed that it seemed extremely readable, so I thought it would probably be a better choice for my current level of skill. I checked it out without knowing really anything about the actual plot, haha.
Having read the first few chapters, I definitely think it was a good choice! Wonder is a great book for a beginner because it’s written in first person present (!) tense, and it’s a young adult novel with very straightforward, everyday language. Plus, the chapters are extremely short. It’s by far the easiest book I’ve read in Spanish so far, and I only have to look up a few words each page instead of a few words each sentence
.
In April 2022, I signed up for the spring Read Every Day Challenge, this time with the explicit goal of reading in Spanish every day in addition to Japanese. As you can see, I was immensely more successful this time around, and finished the challenge with a perfect score.
Here’s what I said about Wonder in April:
The book is going very well for me so far! It feels almost like when I first started reading chapter books in elementary school, haha, and read a lot of stuff that was above my level and somehow managed to figure them out. Most of the time, I can guess what words and phrases mean from the context, so I’ve been tempted not to even look many of them up, but I want to make sure I’m actually internalizing as much as possible so that my next book is easier.
I switched to using Reverso Context for my main dictionary instead of a monolingual one. The monolingual one was just taking too much time, and with as fast as I’m able to read this book, since I’m largely mostly just confirming what I already thought a word/phrase meant, I’ve really been benefiting from reading the example sentences and their translations. It helps confirm the tone. I think I’ll save the monolingual dictionary for when I’m at a more advanced level.
An update a couple weeks later:
As I mentioned in another post, it has been an extraordinarily cool reading experience because it’s the first time in my life I’ve been able to read a book in a language other than English and actually feel like I’m reading. I never even dreamed of being able to reach this point (with any language) a few years ago. It makes reading in Japanese feel like a much more achievable goal to me.
A couple weeks after that:
Everything is still going well here! I finished part two and am on page 165. I did start to wonder (ha) if this book really was as easy as I thought, or if my Spanish has simply improved enough to make it seem super easy now. I feel like my reading comprehension has just improved across the board. I guess it’s the intermediate plateau at work, since I’m right in the midst of that with Spanish.
I finished Wonder in June 2022 and picked up another book, this one a parallel text book about local history. Then I basically just kept reading books from there. I spent a lot of time wishing that Natively had Spanish, because I wasn’t really using it for Japanese at all (the vast majority of my Japanese reading and listening was pro wrestling stuff that was impossible to log in Natively). As you can see from my example with Tempested, I had a bit of trouble finding appropriate books for my current level, so I started just picking up what seemed most readable at the library, and I would read that.
I think I bridged the reading gap from B1 to B2 mostly with comics and with young adult books without fantasy vocabulary.
Getting past the intermediate plateau
Midway through June 2022, someone started a Listen Every Day Challenge, which I signed up for. Naturally, I committed to listening to something in both Spanish and Japanese every day, not wanting to break the streak I’d started with the reading Challenge.
I talked about it in my study log:
As far as listening goes, I’ve been splitting my time between listening to the Duolingo Spanish podcast (which I can listen to while walking, which is awesome), and then on days when I can’t exercise, I’ve been watching La casa de las flores | L30?? with Spanish subtitles on Netflix.
I’m trying to do extensive listening, so I’m resisting the urge to pause and look stuff up. I was really amazed to realize that my Spanish is good enough, I can actually more or less follow La Casa de las Flores as long as I have Spanish subtitles! Parts of the plot are a little complicated, and there is definitely nuance that I’m missing, but I feel like I’m able to follow the story well enough to get invested in it.
I talked to my coworker (whose native language is Spanish) about the show, because she really likes it as well. She told me that one of the characters in particular has a certain way of speaking that’s considered stereotypical for upper class Mexicans. Once she pointed it out, I was able to hear what she was talking about, haha. When I mentioned that I was using the show for learning, she said: “You’re going to start talking like a rich person!”
It’s actually a huge milestone for me that I can watch a show like this, with native language subtitles, and find myself still wanting to watch more episodes without feeling fatigued.
I would say that at this point in my studies, La Casa de las Flores was primarily reading practice for me more than anything, as I was hopeless without Spanish subtitles. So I don’t think it benefited my listening comprehension a huge amount, though I suppose it’s possible I could be underestimating how much I was picking up.
I only did the listening challenge for a month, so I went back to focusing mostly on reading, though I’d still do a bit of listening when I was out walking, because the Duolingo podcast helped pass the time.
I picked the Listen Every Day Challenge back up in September 2022, once again doing it for the off month between Read Every Day Challenges. Here’s what I said in my study log about where I was at with listening at the time:
When September started, I got back into watching La Casa de las Flores! Since I’m refocusing on listening for a bit, I resumed where I left off in season two of the show. It’s still going pretty well, though I’m still missing a lot. It’s kind of funny because I’ll be pretty sure that something is happening in the show, but won’t be entirely certain that I understood it correctly, and then I’ll need to wait until the climax when everything comes together to find out how well I picked up on what was happening, haha.
I think I might honestly be at a point where I could move on from the Duolingo podcast? I’m not going looking for something else quite yet, because I do like the podcast, and figured I might as well listen to the remaining episodes, but I don’t really have trouble comprehending it at this point. That’s pretty cool!
I also had my Spanish study and Japanese translation work dovetail in a surprising way. A few luchadoras came to Tokyo Joshi Pro Wrestling on September 11, 2022, and they of course did their post-match comments in Spanish. I tried my best to transcribe the Spanish, then translated it into English, drawing on the help of one of my bilingual friends to correct my transcription as well as my translation. It was an incredibly cool language victory for me because I got to use all three of my languages.
That month, I also started watching other Spanish content on Netflix with Spanish subtitles, including Elisa y Marcela | L30??. Then I switched gears back to reading again for the next couple months.
In October 2022, I surprised myself by signing up for an intermediate conversational Spanish course at the college I worked at! Here’s what I said about it:
It’s a little bit scary, because speaking is still really intimidating to me, but I do really need it for work. It’s kind of funny because before, I used to be very afraid of the thought of attending a class entirely in Spanish, but I actually wrote on the feedback survey for this one that I would prefer it if they taught as much of it in Spanish as possible. I’ve learned that my listening comprehension of Spanish is way better than I thought, and I don’t think I’d have trouble with beginner level Spanish, as long as the teacher doesn’t speak too fast. No idea if they’ll actually do it that way or not. I guess I’ll report back on how it goes.
A few weeks after that, here’s my report on how it went:
The conversational Spanish class is going alright so far. The Spanish is definitely below my level, but that’s okay because I’m not really able to speak at the level I’m able to understand (the consequences of going hard on input without practicing output for years…). I’m happy to report that the instructor has been teaching a lot of it in Spanish as I requested, and I am in fact able to more or less understand it just fine.
It’s kind of interesting how the class material and style of teaching differs so much from the Spanish classes I took in high school, as well as Duolingo’s Spanish program. This class touches on some grammar that wasn’t taught to me until Spanish II, and teaches it in a much more quick and dirty way without really dwelling on memorizing full conjugation charts or any of that. We practiced some common grammar/vocab that I hadn’t learned until I saw it a lot in La Casa de las Flores and the books I’ve been reading. I’m not sure I’d like learning this way if I didn’t already have a base of knowledge to work from.
I also watched a Mexican wrestling show for the first time in a while, which was once again AAA’s Triplemania. I talked about it in the same post:
I haven’t been actively practicing my Spanish listening, but I did tune in for the latter half of AAA’s Triplemania show on October 15, and it ended up being my biggest listening comprehension victory thus far! The show had Spanish commentary, and I was blown away by the fact that I could… actually understand it for the most part? I had probably 80% comprehension, even without subtitles.
I’m not sure what exactly changed since the last time I watched lucha libre, since I haven’t really been watching/reading much wrestling stuff in Spanish lately. I guess it was probably a combination of reading (which improved my vocab) and then listening to the Duolingo podcast and then the TV show and films I watched for the summer listen every day challenge, which boosted my comprehension speed as well as gave me practice with recognizing words when I hear them.
It made the show a lot more fun because I was able to get more context on the wrestlers I wasn’t as familiar with (the commentary would point out notable moves and explain some of the characters’ history), and I also caught what felt like a fun easter egg lol when the commentary mentioned that Kenny Omega wanted to be in the match for the Megacampeonato belt, but his AEW suspension prevented it. That is more than has been officially said on AEW television regarding his current status. Being multilingual with pro wrestling gets you all kinds of fun bonus information haha.
It was just really cool! Felt like all of my studies were really starting to pay off. It’s super neat to watch native content without subtitles and actually understand it.
That month, I found out that I didn’t get the job I’d applied for, so I was going to be unemployed after my current employment contract ran out at the end of December, and was also going to lose access to the library’s collection of Spanish language books… I had a bit of trouble picking my Spanish reading projects to fill out the rest of the challenge period, because I didn’t want to commit to reading any book I’d be unable to finish in the few months that remained of the year.
My conversational Spanish class finished in November. I didn’t have much more to say about it:
My conversational Spanish class wrapped up this week! It was a good experience for me, I think! I’m still slow and awkward at conversing, but I’m able to understand a lot.
In December 2022, focusing on listening once again, I tried out a couple more shows in Spanish:
I tried watching the Spanish show Élite | L37 (with Spanish subtitles), thinking that since it was in a high school setting, it’d be easier, but as it turns out, there’s a lot of violence and sex and drugs and stuff, which my vocabulary (which has so far come from reading children’s books…) is not very well-equipped to deal with, and on top of that, Castilian Spanish is harder for me
Instead, I started watching Frontera Verde | L30??, which is a Columbian crime drama. Happy to report that even though this show also includes murder, the Spanish is a lot easier for me! This show also includes indigenous languages like Tikuna and Huitoto, which I have no familiarity with, but I haven’t had too much trouble following the Spanish subtitles.
In my last study log update for December, I had another breakthrough:
My recent big breakthrough with Spanish was realizing that I can watch Bob Esponja | L30?? (Spongebob) in Spanish without any subtitles whatsoever and actually follow along with it pretty well! My former coworker said that she grew up watching that show in Spanish, haha, which gave me the idea to try it. I’ve sort of been alternating between that and Frontera Verde (which I’m watching with Spanish subtitles because it’s much harder).
I saw some Spongebob as a kid, even though I was never a huge fan of the show. It’s a good choice for language learning because I don’t care if I don’t have perfect comprehension, haha. The episodes are also self-contained, which means it’s not a big deal if I don’t perfectly follow one of the plots, since it’ll have no bearing whatsoever on what happens next.
I kicked off 2023 by signing up once again for the Read Every Day Challenge, this time with an even more ambitious goal: In 2023, I wanted to complete alternating Read Every Day and Listen Every Day Challenges with a perfect score, 365/365 days, in both Spanish and Japanese.
I started out by reading Sí, si es contigo / Yes, If It's With You | L29??, which was my first time reading a Spanish book on kindle. Unfortunately the book is formatted as images, so the text was not selectable, which did not make it more conducive to lookups as I was hoping it would be…
I accidentally sort of inhaled the book once I reached a certain point, and I finished it in the first half of February 2023.
My reading pace picked up a lot as I got further into the book and more invested in the story. I’ve been trying to fix my terrible sleep schedule, but haven’t had a whole lot of luck, haha. One night, I started reading at 5:30am, telling myself that I’d just read a few pages and then go to bed, then ended up reading for TWO MORE HOURS
… I think that’s the first time this has ever happened to me with a non-English book? So on the one hand, it’s really cool that my Spanish has gotten good enough for a book to pull me in like that! On the other hand… it’s not exactly good for fixing my sleep schedule
I ended up finishing the book much sooner than I expected, thanks in part to reading like 20% of the whole book that one night. Next, I tried picking up En el jardín de lirios, which is that academic study of GL media I linked a while back ago. I got through the prologue and am still interested in reading the rest of the book, but I had to do so many vocab lookups, I’m not sure it’s really worth trying to read it now. I’d look up words like “eje temático” and the dictionary would give me “thematic axis”, reminding me that I sure am reading academic theory
I chose to read Cantoras | L34 instead, which was another book I had discovered on recommended lists of LGBTQ Spanish books when researching possible books to add to the library collection. I tried to look for an amazon preview so that I could see if the writing style looked to be at a good level for me, but they only had an audiobook preview. I listened to that and was able to understand a surprising amount, so I figured it was probably a safe purchase.
So far, I think that was a correct assumption! The book uses a lot of more literary words that I don’t know, but I found out the incredible benefit of reading it as a (properly formatted) kindle book is that I can use my kindle’s built-in dictionary to do instant look-ups, which is way quicker than having to look up words manually by typing them out. Currently, this is the most convenient media format I’ve found for reading in Spanish, and I’m really happy with it.
The next few months passed pretty uneventfully. I kept up with the alternating Read Every Day/Listen Every Day Challenges, never missing a day with either Spanish or Japanese.
I picked up podcasts again once the weather improved and I started getting out more.
As I mentioned above, getting back into walking has meant that I’ve gotten back into listening to podcasts! I’ve listened to 26 episodes of the Duolingo podcast so far this month. The podcast is definitely easy for me now, so I probably should move on to a harder one, but just when I was thinking about setting it aside, I looked at the episode list, and the next episode was titled “La lucha libre de hoy”…
I ended up enjoying the episode far more than I expected to because not only was it about pro wrestling, but they interviewed an indie wrestler who is an exótico!! His ring name is El Demasiado, and I hadn’t heard of him before, but I found his story super fascinating because I’m really interested in LGBTQ wrestlers. It was surreal to hear the Duolingo podcast explain concepts like what a rudo and a técnico are, haha.
I was also fascinated by the “El mate de hoy” episode because the characters in Cantoras (which takes place in Uruguay) drink mate all the time, and the professor of my conversational Spanish class had mentioned that mate was also popular in Argentina, where she was from, but I was shocked to learn that even though Uruguay consumes more mate than any other country, almost all of it is imported.
As a regular tea drinker, I’ve tried mate several times in my life, but I was never especially a fan of it. I wonder if maybe I’ve just never had it prepared the right way. I had the sudden realization that I’d seen one of these mate gourds before, and sure enough, I had inherited one from my grandpa, which I’m not sure had ever actually been used before.
Maybe I should try the traditional preparation someday?
I did finally move on from the Duolingo podcast in June 2023.
I finished the Duolingo podcast! Or, well, not quite; I stopped right before the latest season, because they were re-releasing old episodes with a bit of new content added, and I tried listening to one of them and just didn’t have the patience for that, so I decided to move on.
I did want to say, though, that the last season I listened to, The Mystery of the Itata, was genuinely incredible. Legitimately gripping stuff! I was enjoying it completely independently of language learning practice. It told the story of the Vapor Itata, which was a boat that sank in Chile over 100 years ago, but for a very long time was basically entirely forgotten about, despite the fact that like 400 people died, most of them exploited laborers who were traveling to work in the mines on false promises of a better future.
I searched around for another podcast that was a bit harder than the Duolingo podcast, and ended up trying out Radio Ambulante, which was actually made by some of the same people, and which covers similar content. It’s an NPR podcast that is made for native speakers, which intimidated me a lot at first
I still have far to go, but it’s nice to see that I am in fact making real progress. I’ve watched a lot of Spongebob in Spanish, but this is my first time listening to purely auditory native media in Spanish, and one meant for adults, at that!
With hindsight, this was really a major watershed moment for me with Spanish. I feel like this is when I really started to make the transition from intermediate to advanced, both in listening and in reading.
As it turns out, a year of reading and/or listening to your target language every single day really does add up.
In July 2023, I had another major breakthrough with reading:
On a lighter subject, I ended up not going on a walk for the last day of June because I’d already finished my walking challenge, so instead of listening to Radio Ambulante, I watched an episode of Bob Esponja.
I was amazed at how much my listening had already improved since the last time I’d watched any of the show! The podcasts have absolutely been helping my listening comprehension improve. It really made me want to double down on the Japanese podcast listening, too, because I could see how many gains I’d made with Spanish.
As far as reading goes, I found out that a book that I’ve had on my English to-read list for ages, Aristotle and Dante Discover the Secrets of the Universe by Benjamín Alire Sáenz, also has a Spanish edition! It’s titled Aristóteles y Dante descubren los secretos del universo | L29??. I bought it on kindle because I can use the kindle dictionary to do fast look-ups that way.
I started reading that book on July 1 and it ended up not being too difficult, and to my surprise, I basically ended up completely inhaling it, haha. I finished the whole book in just six days! I’ve never read a non-English novel that fast in my life.
I bought the sequel (Aristóteles y Dante se sumergen en las aguas del mundo (Edición española) | L29??) that very day, also on kindle. It’s a couple hundred pages longer, and I am currently, uh, 29% of the way through already
It’s kind of funny because one of the characters has a pretty large vocabulary and the other character talks about frequently having to look up words in the dictionary after talking to him, which is obviously what I’m doing all the time, pretty much every single page. Though most of the words that have confused Ari were not actually words I really needed to look up, because they’re words that are very similar in English and Spanish, and I was able to guess what they meant, haha.
Obviously I’m enjoying the series a lot! I’d recommend the first book if you want to read a gay coming of age story featuring two Mexican-American teens that takes place in America in the 80’s. The second book is good so far, too. Though it very much is a young adult book, with some of the quippy dialogue and other stuff you often find in the genre. That aspect doesn’t really bother me as much in Spanish, haha, because I’m just glad that I can understand the jokes
.
But, well, I wasn’t home free yet. In August 2023, after such massive gains in confidence with regards to reading in Spanish, I was quickly humbled by another book:
Speaking of which, I ended up totally devouring the Aristóteles y Dante sequel. It took me I think twice as long to finish it as the first book, about two weeks, I think. I liked the sequel alright! I think I liked the first half better than the second. It was a great series for me to read at my current level; reading it on kindle made lookups extremely painless, and there were relatively few of them, so I wasn’t reading honestly that much slower than I’d be reading it in English.
After I finished it, I picked up Las malas Andanzas | L36, which I think has an English translation available, but I’m not quite sure. It’s about a community of transgender sex workers in Argentina. There are some magical realism elements, like one of the characters is 178 years old.
I’m enjoying it so far, though it’s way, way more difficult to read than the other stuff I’ve read in Spanish, haha. It’s an adult novel with proper adult-level prose, and it uses a lot of evocative language that I have to look up. So progress has been much slower on this one. Especially since I’ve been enforcing a bedtime for myself recently, so I often end up with only about 15 minutes or so to read, which isn’t a whole lot of time.
I toughed it out with Las malas, though. And I kept making tremendous progress with listening, since I was doing a lot of walking, which meant a lot of podcast listening. Here was my report in September 2023:
Overall, my listening comprehension has improved loads with Spanish! There are still episodes of the podcast that are randomly difficult for me, but by and large, listening feels much more doable just in general. I also started watching Bob Esponja again (on days when I’m unable to go out on a walk so podcasts are less viable), and my comprehension is noticeably better since the last time I watched the show earlier this year. Sometimes it feels like I’m able to catch 99% of the episode, which is pretty miraculous.
For the first time, I found myself considering whether I should attempt to move on to a show that’s a little harder. I don’t think I’m quite ready for that, though. Maybe if the language aspect gets easy enough that I find myself getting bored of Spongebob haha.
And that’s about where I’m at now! I finished Las malas at the end of 2023. I’m also probably done watching Bob Esponja, though I haven’t picked another show to watch yet. I’m planning on picking Radio Ambulante back up as soon as the weather is nice enough for walks.
It’s hard to estimate my level, but I would say that with reading and listening, I’m high intermediate, on the cusp of low advanced.
Not bad for someone who never planned on getting anywhere with Spanish.
Tools and advice
So after getting so far with Japanese, to achieve success with Spanish, surely I applied the same methods and have an elaborate SRS setup with Anki sentence mining and a really high-tech array of tools at my fingertips that I diligently use to practice every day—Nope!
I actually made the decision early on not to use any SRS at all to study Spanish. I suppose I could change my mind on this at some point, but not using it has been working out great for me, so I currently have no plans to introduce SRS into my Spanish study.
Why? The main reason is because I already spend a lot of time on SRS for Japanese every day and I don’t want to increase my daily SRS workload further. I’ve also heard that it’s a good idea to keep your tools for learning different languages separate, and as long as I’m making progress in both languages and I’m having fun studying with my current setup, I see no reason to change it.
Tips
I credit almost all of my progress past the beginner phase to engaging in near-daily reading and listening practice! I found it really helpful to sign up for read/listen every day challenge threads, because I had the public pressure and accountability of committing to something and then feeling obligated to follow through.
With regards to balancing learning two languages at the same time, here’s what I said about it in my WaniKani level 60 thread:
This is another thing that people generally don’t recommend doing, but, well, it worked for me! I would recommend reaching at least the upper beginner stage in one of your languages before starting another, though. You want to have the foundation down.
The main con to learning two languages at once is that it will take you longer to progress in both of them than if you were focusing on one at a time because you simply have less time to devote to each of them each day. You’ll need to be very good at time management. You’ll also need to be patient. Japanese has a very long beginner phase. It will be even longer if you are learning another language at the same time. If both languages are important to you, the cost might be worth it, but you need to be pretty dedicated to keep it up without getting too frustrated or discouraged.
I’d recommend using different tools for each language. My Spanish was intermediate level before I started learning Japanese, so I was able to work on my Spanish just by reading books and listening to podcasts. I made the choice to forego SRS entirely with Spanish because I wanted to save my energy there for Japanese. I think this was a very wise choice!
Spanish is an easier language for native English speakers to learn, so it was encouraging to see my progress there while Japanese was much more slow-going. I could put a lot less time into Spanish each day and still see huge gains in comprehension, compared to Japanese.
Resources I used as a beginner:
As mentioned above, I took three years of Spanish class in high school, then totally dropped the language for years afterward, until I eventually picked up the Duolingo app and regained most of the knowledge I had had in high school. I have not done any sort of formal grammar study outside of those resources.
Would I recommend the path I took? No, I would not . Spanish classes can be great if you truly take advantage of the opportunity (I did not), and if you keep practicing after your class is over (I did not). The Duolingo app served its purpose for me, though I can’t speak to the quality of the teaching in its current state, as it has changed a lot since I used it, and I also can’t say how good it would be at teaching you the language if you come in with zero knowledge.
Resources I used as an intermediate learner:
Reading
My favorite setup is buying books on kindle, then reading them on my kindle device. That way, I can read in bed without needing a computer, and I have the ability to do instant look-ups by simply highlighting an unknown word or phrase and using the built-in dictionary/translation software. This greatly speeds up the reading process and makes it a lot easier.
My preferred genre for the early-mid intermediate range was young adult novels about everyday subjects, told in first person so that they’re more conversational and use less literary language, and which don’t use a lot of fantasy/sci-fi vocab.
These are the books I feel like I got the most out of:
- El Alquimista | L24
- Wonder - La lección de August (NUBE DE TINTA) | L29??
- Sí, si es contigo / Yes, If It's With You | L29?? (warning: kindle edition is not formatted for instant lookups)
- Aristóteles y Dante (series) | L29??
Listening
By far the most helpful resource for me as an early intermediate learner was the Duolingo podcast. A lot of thought, research, and work has gone into simplifying the podcast material in a way that is consistent and easy enough but still compelling for listeners. The podcast is genuinely really great! I was surprised by how interesting I found the episodes. There’s something for everyone in there. My favorite was The Mystery of the Itata season they did, which is genuinely an incredible story just as a narrative.
I’m pretty sure that the app and the podcast use a lot of the same language research as their base for vocab, so I didn’t really encounter many unknown words in the podcast. My main issue was that my processing speed was slow enough, it was hard for me to comprehend Spanish at spoken speed, even if I knew the words. So the podcast helped a whole lot with getting me to stop translating in my head and also really drilling the intermediate set of vocab into my head because over the course of all those episodes, I got to really familiarize myself with that pool of words.
I also think I benefited a lot from watching Bob Esponja | L30?? (the SpongeBob SquarePants Latin American Spanish dub), which I started watching when I reached the point where the Duolingo podcast was easy for me. The vocabulary is fairly everyday, and the episodes are essentially entirely standalone, so you don’t have to worry if your comprehension is only spotty for one, because the plot will resolve by the end of it and it’ll move on to something else.
Bob Esponja was my first foray into watching Spanish media without subtitles (Spanish or English), and it was a good choice because it’s entertaining enough to keep my attention, and I had some familiarity with the series already, but had zero real investment in it, so it doesn’t bother me if my comprehension isn’t perfect.
After the Duolingo podcast had gotten too easy for me, I moved on to Radio Ambulante, which is an NPR podcast primarily aimed at native speakers. It’s similar to the Duolingo podcast in terms of overall tone and topics that it covers (some people who worked on the Duolingo podcast were actually with Radio Ambulante initially), but there’s no English, and the Spanish is spoken at native speed, and the vocabulary is not artificially limited.
It took me several episodes of Radio Ambulante before I feel like I was able to adjust to the difficulty, so my comprehension for the first few was much lower, but now I feel like I’m able to grasp most of the Spanish (though my comprehension varies depending on the topic), and I’m really enjoying it! I feel like I learn a lot from it.
Here’s where I’m at currently
(levels are self-assessed and are just my best estimation)
Listening—B2
I’m able to understand native media and everyday conversations, assuming the dialogue is spoken clearly and there isn’t too much specialized vocab. I can follow harder media with Spanish subtitles at spoken speed and have decent comprehension.
Reading—B2
I’m able to understand most tweets and most non-literary writing without a dictionary, and I can read literary writing and academic texts with a dictionary. Some genres, like young adult novels about everyday subjects, I can read very quickly. For more complicated texts, I am almost always able to at least get the gist without using a dictionary.
Speaking—B1
I haven’t practiced speaking much, but when I last took an intermediate conversational Spanish class, I was able to follow almost all of the instruction in Spanish, and could respond when prompted, though I was often slow.
Writing—B1
I also haven’t practiced writing much, but I’m able to express my thoughts pretty well when I have tried, and I can write about everyday things, but would have to look up more specialized vocabulary, and writing something like an essay would be difficult.
Goals
I don't have any! No concrete ones, at least. Currently, this is all I’m aiming to do:
- Maintain my current level of language ability
- Read/listen to more than I did the year before
Eventually:
- Become proficient in speaking Spanish
Output is much more energy-intensive for me, and Japanese is still my main focus, so even though speaking is probably the most important language skill with Spanish for me, it’s not something I’m planning on working on in the near future.
Plans for this study log
I’ll probably mostly just be talking about whatever I’m reading/listening to at the moment, and any other interesting finds along the way. Feel free to chime in at any time! Interacting with other learners is part of the charm of having a public study log.
I currently have no plans for any sort of regular update schedule or anything equivalent to what I have going on with my Japanese study log.
), but was easily able to follow the story.
So even the Costa Rican friend I lived with who I wanted to be casual with would always answer me in usted form. It was so strange…
”
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