I’m up to a 22 day streak now! My life has been so crazy, I did a whole bunch of awesome things recently, but wasn’t taking care of my body and I caught a cold. When I have some time to relax and I’m feeling better, I’m going to get all my goals back on track and hopefully progress more dramatically at Spanish. But for now, I’m proud of myself that in spite of everything I’ve been learning a little bit of Spanish every single day for nearly a month! (And yes I’m sure I’ll continue my streak for the rest of the month!) 1 day ago

I’m not quite doing all the things I should be doing to work towards fluency. I’ve been doing really well with doing one DuoLingo lesson a day (16-day streak!), which is great because now I’ve learned enough vocabulary that I’ve moved onto useful phrases and idioms. Like I said before, this is completely useless if I don’t use it in actual attempts to communicate or understand Spanish-language media.

But the thing is, when I try to say a specific sentence in Spanish, like one that I am about to say in English, I never know how to say it! I guess most of the sentences on Duo Lingo aren’t that useful and it’s hard to adapt the words and phrases to novel sentences for some reason. I’m hoping I just need to do more lessons, so I’m going to let myself focus only on the lessons until I feel more comfortable, although of course if I feel like watching something in Spanish in the meantime that’s great. It’ll be helpful when I’m done with the lessons to do the “Practice all skills” quizzes every day (as I’m trying to listen, read, write, and speak in Spanish) so that I can mix together all the different topics I’ve learned and not forget everything from one week to the next. 1 week ago

I started out with DuoLingo.com as a complete beginner (well except a year of Spanish in the sixth grade which I swear taught me nothing but colours and the numbers 1-10), which is really great for a beginner. I’ve learned so much basic vocabulary and how to form basic sentences, without ever having to read vocabulary words or grammatical rules. (With DuoLingo, you don’t learn anything but complete sentences, which makes it so much more fun but has its downsides as far as learning goes.) The two biggest problems are I have no fluency in speech because I only know a limited number of sentences and have no experience trying to express things spontaneously, and the only verb conjugation I know is present-tense.

After I finish all the DuoLingo lessons, which should only take another month or so, I’m going to start watching a lot of Spanish TV and movies (which I’ve already started doing a little but I really have to commit to it), and I’m also going to try to keep both a written and audio diary in Spanish. That way, when I don’t know how to say something (especially a type of verb conjugation), I will do some research into it and hopefully after a while everything will sink in. 2 weeks ago

I took an introductory class and had a lot of fun with it. It’s not a huge challenge because I am a native speaker of a Romance language, but I like the sound of Spanish and it is useful.

This summer, I plan to take the next level or maybe a higher one if I place into it. 1 month ago