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Comment by chopsuey5540 | Hacker News Reader

Spanish! Open to any tips on the best way to do that :-)

I've been learning Spanish using Comprehensible Input and it's been a complete game-changer for me. Oversimplified, it's learning a language by watching videos where you understand about 80% of what's going on without trying to analyze the vocabulary or grammar. No studying, no memorization. Your subconscious does the heavy lifting. Part of the goal is take conscious translation out of the picture. For example, if you hear "manzana," the ideal is that word directly connects to your image of what an apple is, not to the English world "apple."

It takes hundreds of hours, but for me, it's working, and I'm enjoying it. I'm using Dreaming Spanish [0] which is free for a while, and then pretty cheap if you want to keep going. Strongly recommended.

0: https://www.dreamingspanish.com

As someone who learned the language in about 4 months, my advice is to saturate yourself with conversation as much as possible without worrying about grammatical or structural correctness at first, just learn to talk and use as many words as possible for essential conversation without worrying how well you say everything. Immerse yourself in doing this as much as possible.

Ideally, if you work remotely, move to latin america for a few months. Otherwise, find a digital (app-based maybe) or social way of doing the same where you are. Also, suppress all embarrassment about saying anything incorrectly, just get the essential ability to communicate ideas across first while you converse as much as possible. Refinement can come later, the first thing is to learn the broad strokes rapidly.

My two cents from experience learning two additional languages fluently.

i've gotten pretty good with just duolingo and trying to have basic conversations with my in-laws over the weekends. Biggest problem to me is the grasping sentences as a whole most of the time, i still translate indiviual words. This creates akward delays when i am responding. I would recommend trying to grasp sentences as a whole vs words.

Listen to shows and movies in Spanish (english subtitles), and Spanish music. Then find Spanish-speakers to practice with.

Get a Spanish language book from the library and try reading it.

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