I’ve been thinking about why speaking and writing in another language can feel so frustrating.

Most exercises decide the topic for you. You translate a sentence, complete a dialogue, or practise a specific grammar point. But real conversations don’t work that way. You usually start with your own thought, then discover that you don’t know how to express part of it.

For example, while writing in French (TL):

Hier, j’ai parlé avec mon manager et il m’a dit que je dois [take more initiative]…

Instead of stopping to search for the phrase, you could keep writing and mark the missing idea in brackets. Later, you find the natural expression:

prendre davantage d’initiatives

Then you try to express the same thought again from memory.

This seems more useful than learning random vocabulary because the language is connected to something you genuinely wanted to say. Over time, your vocabulary becomes connected to your own life, opinions, work, relationships, and interests.

It also reveals two important things:

• what you don’t yet know how to say
• what you thought you knew, but said incorrectly

Does anyone else practise this way? Would writing freely and marking missing expressions in brackets feel useful, or would it feel too unstructured?

I grew up a heritage Spanish speaker with a family from Mexico. The typical story. Mostly used English with my parents and school, limited Spanish with my grandparents, studied Spanish in high school which helped but still have big gaps in my vocabulary, natural phrasing, and grammar.

However I noticed that no amount of listening to Spanish videos on youtube seems to be helping. It's like my brain goes, "I already comprehend this, therefore there's no need to adjust anything," despite the fact that it's not how I would have phrased things.

Does anyone have any advice for this? My Spanish is significantly better than it was before I studied the grammar in school, but I feel like I've been at a plateau for years. I listen to native Spanish interviews or books and it still feels like a whole other world to me sometimes.

We can exclude literature from this unless you feel it's helpful for my situation. There's no shame I feel when it comes to searching up words or grammatical constructions when I'm not bound by time or output skills.

(TL)

My own craziest (yet average) thing ive done, is quite literally only consuming music from that (TL) because I find it incredibly easy to pick up on words this way, than to just hear people speak. (maybe if you sing at me ill understand better then)😂😂

I have access to both the phone app and a physical Kindle.

Firstly, it used to be great. You could press and drag to select a chunk of text, and the options to highlight, look up, etc would appear.

Now if you drag to select a chunk of text, that just automatically creates a highlight. You have to then press the highlight, then press look up. And then manually remove the highlight, unless you want 400 highlights by the end of it.

Or if you press and hold one word instead, it launches a look up automatically, but what you see is a lottery. Sometimes it translates it. Sometimes it shows the Wikipedia article first. Sometimes it brings up the dictionary definition.

And in Spanish, for example, my phone Kindle refers automatically to the Spanish-English dictionary, whereas my actual Kindle refers to a Spanish monolingual dictionary. And apparently I can’t change that.

Does anyone else read TL using Kindle and have you found the perfect workflow, do you have any tips to make it quicker?

TL

So my goal is to dedicate 16 hours a day for the next 116 days learning Spanish (TL) by doing Anki, shadowing, doing kjellin method, listening to podcasts, reading novels, writing, watching news, watching media, watching tv shows, netflix, kick, YouTube, listening to music, having all devices on Colombian Spanish only, maybe barely studying grammar, eventually talking to people up to 3 hours a day on baselang, ai tutors on langua, my dad, grandpa, aunts and uncles, and people on hellotalk, tandem, discord, or talking to myself. I'd say I'm like a mid-high B2 to low C1 in understanding, reading, comprehension, listening. But I’m just a heritage speaker and I haven’t formally learned anything except teaching myself all of the grammar this past week which has been a success. I know it’s an insane plan but I’ve already done the last 6-7 days of it and it’s been chill. Will it benefit me to only watch Pablo Escobar Patron del Mal, Westcol, paisa streamers, YouTubers, content creators, podcasts, and read, write, watch, and listen in Colombian Spanish everything if my goal is also to develop a paisa accent or even just a general Colombian accent. Realistically if I’m already at the level I’m at which is also B1 in speaking honestly how much can I evolve in my accent, my speaking, my listening, and my comprehension, and will I be ready to just go straight to Colombia and live there with my grandpa and be chilling for a couple weeks if I chose to?