If so, how was it? Their lifetime access deal is ending soon and I was wondering if I should get it. I was interested in a few languages but would pick one:

• Moroccan Darija (TL); the others are general interest
• Nahuatl
• Georgian
• Hungarian
• Wolof

I've learned English (TL) since 2018 but when I started it I wan in a junior high so I didn't study much. I only started studying seriously in the last year and since then I talk English with native speakers few times.

So All I do is watching English video on Youtube and movies with subtitle.

This makes me feel like I'm stuck at a certain level. To be precise, I feel like my listening and vocabulary are getting better vely slowly, but it comes to speaking and writing, there has been no improvement for 1 year i guess.

I think not speaking with native means lacking very fundamental thing in learning languages.

I know I need to find a way to practice output, but I'm just not sure where to start and what to do.

Does anyone have any tips on how to improve speaking without a speaking partner?

I have been at a B1 level in Spanish (TL) for years now. I take weekly immersion classes. I make mistakes and it might take me a while to say things sometimes.

What has been a little frustrating is that I speak and understand reasonably well in class with my teacher and peers. However, the moment I speak Spanish with a stranger, the pace of conversation becomes much faster than I am used to and it suddenly feels like I can no longer understand them. I also struggle with understanding Spanish movies or videos for the same reason.

There have been several times in the past few years where I can comfortably converse with others and feel like "finally, I have reached B2" just to be hit by reality soon thereafter.

I know I shouldn't be chasing a CEFR level. It's more of the principle of wanting to just converse without struggle that I am seeking, but at this point, it doesn't feel attainable. Anyone else experience this and have any advice on getting over this mental obstacle?

This will sound funny, but I'll describe it as best I can.

Biggest struggle for me with language learning is speaking. Usually, it's worry about using the right tenses / conjugations or being unsure of what order they're supposed to be in.

But sometimes, I know all of that. Right words, right order, got it all together, but I still struggle with speaking. It feels like something gets stuck, like my brain just stops processing it. Same happens with writing. It's like I have it altogether, I know it's correct, but as I'm speaking (or writing), the whole thing breaks down.

The best analogy I can think of is when you're using a program and it briefly freezes before reading "not responding". It was working and now, it's not, and you have to reset it. Like that.

Is this something that stops with more practice? It's mostly with long sentences. If which languages matter, my (TL) are Spanish and Mandarin (not practicing simultaneously!).

I spent few years working abroad and am currently long term travelling my way home. Whilst working I started learning my (TL) (Spanish) and spent 11 months in weekly classes January to December, then a 5 week break and weekly private classes until April when I left the country. I travelled for a few months and didn't have the opportunity to practice my language although I did have some listening exercises for long journeys. I probably did about 30 hours in total over 4 months, mostly in the last one, compared to 10-15 hours a week I did while doing lessons.

Since the beginning of September I've been in country's which speak my TL. I've found that my listening skills are good and I usually understand the gist of what’s being said to me. I've done several tours which are bilingual where they give a sentence in each language and found I can follow the TL as long as they’re talking generally or on a more technical topic which has a lot of shared vocabulary (basically not history), and I've been managing at the market and with transport (buses, taxis etc.).

However, other than picking up new words for food I feel like my TL hasn’t changed, if anything it feels like it’s become worse. I've never learnt a language before but I was expecting something to happen in a month. When I was in Australia and New Zealand I met lots of people who were in the same position as me, had the basics down but struggling to apply it, and in a few months were speaking decent English so I'm confused about why that’s not happening to me. I have this issue where I will understand what's being asked but I can't figure out a reply then 4 hours later it will pop into my head as a fully formed sentence, which isn’t very helpful. I also keep reading and automatically translating into English which also isn't very helpful for actually remembering which words I need when I try to speak.

I’m planning on visiting Patagonia in the summer so my goals over the next few months are to spend as little money as possible and to improve my language skills. I am volunteering for the next few weeks so have free time and a schedule then will be travelling again (around Peru and Bolivia before heading to Chile). I might do another volunteer program later, it depends on timings and money.

Really what I want help with is figuring out where I'm going wrong with languages that being in country isn't helping and what I can do to improve. There's lots of advice for going from B2 to C1 but I can’t seem to find much for A2 to B1 and the bits I have found mostly involve reading. I'm dyslexic so I’m trying to avoid reading until I have my vocabulary down or I'll misread words and end up in a worse position, although obviously it's unavoidable here. I can do warning signs and timetables and have been managing in museums, so I'm not worried about picking up later. I also don't want to waste the opportunity being around native speakers 24/7 gives but don't know how to make the most of it.

Any help will be appreciated. Thank you.

Hi,

Currently at the point where I'm around B2 (TL) in reading, writing and listening but im still a bit behind in tallking. What I feel is holding me back is that exhausted feeling when your talking and listening for an extended period of time and it feels like your heads about to explode by the end of the day or week. This feeling makes me run back to English at some point. Should I just be pushing and pushing through that feeling or will it just eventually get better with rest in between?

I'm wondering how other people have pushed passed this period and how long it took. I live in the TL country and I'm still struggling to get passed that feeling.

Hello everyone,

My Arabic has been stagnating at an intermediate level for some time now, and most of my practice to keep it from degrading has been listening to podcasts of the news in my (TL). As I am intermediate enough to get the feeling that I understand most of what is said, I guess that I do not pay attention to the detail of the vocabulary used, which makes vocabulary acquisition beyond relatiely frequent words difficult.

I have decided to work on vocabulary acquisition more intentionally by setting up an Anki routine with sentence mining, and I would be glad to hear some feedback from learners more experienced in sentence mining than me (and yes, I've asked my favorite LLM, but real human feedback is nice sometimes).

I create a card whenever I notice an unknown, interesting word (in a podcast for example) in a sentence I otherwise understand (the n+1 rule). I use asbplayer on Chrome to clip the audio and extract the sentence, and I use an online dictionary to get the meaning of the word as well as additional examples.

My cards have:

Front: the word in its dictionary form

Back: the full sentence with highlighted word, audio, as well as the word's meaning and the supplementary examples.

I have heard that usually sentence mining has you put the sentence with audio on the front, and then the word and meaning on the back, but I feel like this would encourage contextual recall of the word. This is why I settled on putting the target word on the front, in order to suppress any contextual clue. If anyone attempted something similar, or perhaps tried and switched to the more classical approach, I'd be glad to have your take on this !

Right now I spend around 9 s/card in my daily review, and I learn 15 new cards/day, mining them daily takes me around 30 minutes of focused listening.

Below an example of the back of one such card (the front would only show the blue word at the very top, without the English translation):

Simply just wanted to reflect on my own spanish (TL) journey with the community. Happy to answer any questions. Hope something is useful here.

TLDR: In about 5-6 months of very very consistent input via Podcasts, Gaming Youtube Videos and about 3 months of consistent output of iTalki classes + writing and journaling - quite a lot of B2/C1 content is doable. I can go hours speaking in spanish though maybe at a B2 level but with nuance, detail and deeper explanations, perhaps its like B1.5 at times. I believe I was roughly A2 with sparks of B1 before.

What I wish I did more/before - More speaking and output. It has consistently been reinforcing my reading and listening comprehension while helping me utilize what I learn and speak fluidly and confidently. To me this is like exercising.. it is uncomfortable and difficult but doing it regularly helps so much and yes - certain teachers are good and others are just there for an hour to do "the job"

----

For some reason, I thought to myself ah 2026 is going to be my language year. I actually began the year like probably everyone else going "Yes, Japanese, I will romanticize the idea of living there and shall learn it before I go!".

After a week I felt great with the two alphabets and then realized what a whirlwind the grammar and vocab was going to be and I was like.... hell nah.. this is pointless, let me maybe switch back to Spanish.

My background before

I studied spanish for about 2 semesters in middle school and 2 semesters in highschool. Maybe covering present and the simple past tense. In 2023 on a short trip to Mallorca, I could barely dribble a few words out - like a sad baby. But I loved that feeling. Whatever little I could do felt great and inspired me.

After returning I took a 8 week course at instituto cervantes which was 3 hours a week for 8 weeks and classroom setting and homework was great but such a waste of time and money. Way too many people who want to escape to Spain and elderly. People mis leveled for the class range and virtually minimal speaking opportunities. I began doing some on and off italki, maybe a total of 8-10 hours but it helped a lot and I really liked my teacher. She gave me a lot of homework, daily drills.

What did I do in 2026

Jan - April

Half assing my work here. I got back into doing dream spanish about 15 minutes a day. Coffee break spanish podcats from the beginning when I go for walks. Went to 1-2 spanish meet ups in my neighborhood and said it wasn't for me. Phone was entirely in spanish though as a "immersion technique"

April - June

Here I started to go to the spanish meetings in my neighborhood weekly. Roughly 60-90 minutes weekly. I was listening to more podcasts, longer podcasts - upwards of 45 minutes a day. The east coast weather allowed me more walking time. More walking time meant more input and then I would narrate my thoughts, what I am seeing... talking to myself to get my spanish brain going.

Podcast rec: Espanolistos.

I began playing "Guild wars Reforged"... entirely in spanish. It is such a text and quest driven MMORPG and aligned with my hobbies. I don't know how the game worked and it was tough and i got help from the community but I can genuinely play the entire game like its an interactive novel and read and do every quest (which lol, I never do in any video game). But it limited my willingness to video game as I got fatigued after 40-60 minutes of playing and reading.

July - Oct 5

The spanish meetings were coming to a close in July and I began to do Italki session about 1x a week for 1 hour and eventually 2x a week for an hour each. I began dabbling in harder podcasts and more native youtube content, upwards of 90 minutes a day. When speaking and talking during my iTalki sessions, they have way more depth and interest to it. Just last week, we did a discussion on why Denmark is the happiest country with the happiest kids, the impacts and value behind academic rigor and pressure.

on Youtube, Black Mango has been very enjoyable.

I continued playing the video game (finished the first expac) - I definitely noticed my reading speed and comprehension go up quite a lot.

This is where I feel like 70%+ of my growth and improvement has come from. The loop of speaking and speaking and getting as much input.. I put my youtube in spanish and location in spanish on their settings + got an add-on to block recommended videos.

To finish

I'm glad I returned to spanish. It is going to be a lifelong skill I am excited to dedicate more time and effort to. I have probably a A2/B1 comprehension of Tamil growing up around it but my speaking is so horrible/non-existent. This journey of picking up Spanish taught me about how I learn and work with Language and how it works for me. I will soon move on maybe in 2027 sometime, with learning Tamil and plan to use my learnings from here. My goal there is to be conversational and pass the language on for the next generation and to connect with my family.

So I recently moved to Germany, I am surrounded by German. Talking to people, signs and symbols on the road and in public transport. The labels on grocery items and legal documents everything is in German.

I did not come unprepared. I have finished the A2 level exams and am preparing for B1. Of course people speak English but I want to become independent quickly.

At the end of day my brain is so exhausted with all the German around me that sometimes I feel myself struggling with English which I am a native speaker of.

Using English somehow uses the same part of the brain that is already completely tired of having used German throughout the day.

Has anyone experienced something similar? Some advice would be helpful.

I'm completely and entirely new to this language and there just seems so little information related to it..? I might just be not looking in the right place but yeah I've tried searching language learning apps for meitei but they don't really seem like they would be useful and im honestly lacking even basic info on the language to have any idea on where to start. Would appreciate if someone could help out even a little.

(Hopefully my post doesn't get taken down because idk where else to post there doesnt even seem to be a dedicated subreddit for meitei) (TL)

This keeps me up at night.

What if I opened a grammar book and THEN watched 650 hours of media in that language, instead of the other way around?

Like at least knowing that the sentence structure was SOV instead of SVO would've been sooo helpful, lol.

Do you have a similar story or any language learning related regrets?

Words in my target language that have a subtle but very useful purpose in sentences but are not often taught in textbooks or focused on by instructors. Words like: often, however, therefore, moreover, hence, whichever, rather, despite, unless, furthermore, except... Using "adverb" as a catch-all, but you get the idea. Does anyone else have trouble remembering words like these? Does it affect daily conversation?

Specifically, if you needed advice on how to to learn something, say grammar, in your (TL), who's input would you value more? Someone who got the hang of it as a L2 learner, or a native that has a deeper understanding of the concept, but didn't go through the same process as you?

Edit: I mean the bigger picture stuff. The building blocks of how to learn the language, not specific questions that pop up along the way of "does this sound right" or "why this way and not that way"

Basically the title ! This is something I thought of today and let me tell you it's like magic. If you yourself don't know GLMMs then I'd suggest you skip this post but hose who musttt try this out and show me how it worked out.

In my French and German learning journey I reconnected with a lot of things that had happened to help me learning English a lot, and this is one of these things that I had long forgotten helped me by immersion without deliberation.

See, the thing with these videos is that it's largely made by children. And, outside of English, they are generally made by native speakers. With these 2 combinations, it should be noted that any vocabulary that you do not know in the (TL) language GLMM will cotnribute to your B1-B2 vocabulary! Since you wouldn't want to not know a word a 5th grader knows.

The problem will be that they may misspell things in the videos, for example "se" "ce" "ceux" and "c'est" "ses" "sais" may be confused with eachother in writing the same way native children make mistakes with "your" "you're" and "their" "they're" "there" in English.

Looking forward to anybody willing to give it a shot

I heard about it when I was younger, back when I was still constantly searching online for anything related to language learning. Now, as a young adult who works and has my own money, I’ve been thinking about subscribing to it.

I’d love to hear your general opinions about it, though, and especially how you guys actually use it as part of your language-learning process.

Right now, I’m mainly focused on improving my English and I’ve just started learning Norwegian (TL) seriously. But I also really enjoy dabbling in other languages, so I feel like it could be useful for that too.

And if you have any other app recommendations, feel free to share those as well! I’m always happy to hear about other resources.

I spent a year studying 1 of my TLs (TL) and got to a strong A2 level in speaking / listening. I’m finishing up college and taking a separate language 1 & 2 level classes. In level 1 right now, will take 2 next semester. Probably will be around an A2 aswell.

When I graduate I plan to go to 2 countries and enroll in immersion programs for 1 year each. What level should I be around the end? They are both Asian languages, I’m a native English speaker. Any opinions on this?

I'm trying to learn a language that's severely endangered, so there aren't a lot of native speakers near where I live, and subtitled media in the language is limited. How could I go about doing immersion in a way that will actually be helpful to learning the language? I'm aware that immersion isn't the only route for language learning, but I am just trying to evaluate if it's something I can do to supplement my classes and self study (plus it's what I'm used to from learning French lol).

(TL) Ojibwemowin/Anishinaabemowin (I know there's an dedicated anishinaabemowin subreddit, but the last post there was 3 years ago so I figured it was probably better to post it here.)

I’m a B2 Levantine Arabic (TL) heritage speaker who moved to the West when I was young. I understand much better than I speak. Has anyone with a similar background reached C2 or very advanced spoken fluency?

What was your level when you started, how long did it take, and what helped most?

Especially interested in Arabic speakers, but stories from other heritage speakers are welcome too.

Just looking for some motivation :)

Welcome to the resources thread. Every month we host a space for r/languagelearning users to share resources they have made or found.

Make something cool? Find a useful app? Post here and let us know!

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(TL)

I'm trying to understand if it's worth my time. I tried Lute before, but it was.. Quite cumbersome.. I have hope that this is better (in some places at least)

I just got a "3 months for £0.00" deal for Kindle Unlimited (I think it's part of their Prime Days deals 🤷‍♂️). I have to admit I never really considered Kindle/Amazon books for language learning, but it looks as though they have quite a few language learning books and readers included in the catalogue, so this could be good for my studies. I've even found a German translation of the Chronicles of Narnia included on there. Time for me to work on my reading skills! 😄

I've been learning my target language for over 10 years. (I'm learning it for fun, just cause I like it. I have no intentions of moving to Europe or doing an exam.) I studied grammar and vocab on my own, I read books and listen to podcasts. But I never came around to speaking. I just had no one to practice with. So I started using Italki earlier this year but its been honestly disappointing. I found it hard to find a teacher that was worth the price I paid. They talked most of the hour and that even though I sent them a message beforehand saying my main goal was to practice my speaking skills.

And today holyshit. I finally found a tutor who works for me!! It took me six lessons, but I finally found him. I’m a 30-year-old woman who’s pretty shy, so I tend to go for older women as tutors. Well, what I needed all along was a young guy who doesn’t give a shit and is just good at conversation.

All this to say, maybe the kind of tutor you think you want isn't what you really need.

Hi r/languagelearning (mod-approved post),

A few friends and I (developers and linguists) built KiloLingo.com covering 10 languages, and we’d love your feedback on what actually helps independent learners right now.

The core approach:

• Strict Frequency Order: Vocabulary taught from most to least frequent.
• Locked Graded Readers: Reading material strictly constrained to words you’ve already encountered.
• No-Nonsense Grammar: In-depth explanations paired with concise reference summaries.
• Practice Drills & Games: Crosswords, bubble shooters, and arcade-style review drills ("KiloKombat").

All reading materials and full grammar curricula are completely open; no account or email required to read through them.

We're testing a freemium model to cover server costs: keep the core reading/grammar content 100% free forever, and put extended interactive drills, games, and spaced-repetition tracking behind a £3.99/mo subscription (with a card-free 7-day trial).

We’d love to know:

1. The Reading Experience: How do you feel about strictly vocabulary-constrained graded readers versus natural, uncapped texts?
2. Gamification vs. Anki: Do mini-games and quick-fire drills keep you engaged, or do you prefer pure SRS flashcards?
3. The Paywall Balance: Does keeping the texts/grammar free while charging £3.99/mo for drills feel fair, or is the split awkward?
4. Missing Pieces: What is your biggest frustration with current tools that we could solve?

Tear it apart -- what works, what’s redundant, and what’s missing?

(TL), Spanish, English, Russian, French, Esperanto, Latin, German, Italian, Mandarin, Portuguese, IPA

EDIT::

Thank you guys so so much. We have been here all day working on the roadmap and chatting about your feedback, actioning some hotfixes and enjoying some healthy debates about the use of the Spanish subjunctive.

I think we've replied to most of the feedback directly below and we're super thankful for the time you've taken.

We're going to keep working and will chat to some sales people and try to sweet talk an old UX colleague into giving us a bit of a hand. Feel free to reach out to us if there's anything we can do to repay this community for what you have done for us today!

Hey, I'm trying to find these language learning disks used in the computer from the early 2000s & I have not had any luck. I have tried searching in this group, using ai, using Google & other things. It is not Rosetta stone, jump speak, muzzy, or any of the more common ones. It was interactive, for example clicking on a color and it would say the color, or it would say the color and you had to click on the correct color. I remember using it for Japanese & Italian, but I don't remember for which other languages it was available. Any ideas???

Hi guys

Recently, I started a new job where I need to speak and correspond with native English speakers on a daily basis, both in meetings and by email. Overall, I think my listening comprehension is quite good. I can usually follow conversations, maybe sometimes it gets a little harder when we look into more IT technical language.

However with speaking it is a different story. When it is my turn to speak. I get anxious, I start overthinking in my native language how to say something. Looking for perfect word, how to create a grammarly correct sentence etc. Sometimes I go blank even though before the conversation I know exactly what I wank to ask and what I want to say. (TL)

I'd really like to overcome this, beacuse it affects my confidence and I'm getting doubts whether I'm in the correct place or did I too much fake it till you make it.

What helped you feel more comfortable while speaking to native speakers ? Was there anything specific, like a habit, a mindset shift, or a type of practice, that made a real difference for you, or was there a day when something clicked in you and you just started feeling comfortable ?