As I mentioned in my previous post about how I plan on writing about my language learning progress for a while, I’m currently learning Spanish. I studied it for a bit and then took a long break, so this first post will be about what I did before that break, how much I already know, and what I’ll be doing going forward.
What I’ve done so far
Initially I tried to learn a bit using the mobile app Fluent Forever because I backed it on kickstarter and got a free subscription for some months. However, the subscription eventually ran out and I was busy with other things.
I chose to not continue learning at the time.
If anyone wants to know what Fluent Forever is, it (at least the phone app) is an app which focuses on learning new words using spaced repetition. Some of the things that may set it apart from other similar apps is that it uses images instead of English translations of words, and that there are a lot of voiced example sentences included in the app. It also has some pronunciation videos I personally found rather nice. That said, the app is also somewhat expensive for what you get.
Anyway, with that out of the way, to actually answer the question: what I’ve done so far is to study about 50 hours using the Fluent Forever android app, then stop for a long time. By my definition that is something between six months and a year. Unfortunately I can’t remember precisely how long it has been.
How much I already know
So at the point when I stopped using it I would guess I had probably spent slightly less than 50 hours studying and had learned just over 1200 words according to the stats in the app. However, that was a while ago. I’ve almost certainly forgotten some of those words by now. If I were to guess, I probably know a few hundred words that I could understand the meaning of at the moment, and obviously many fewer I could actively produce myself, but that later part is just a fact of language learning.
Why I won’t be continuing with the same approach
I managed to learn some things using the app, and it’s not like I didn’t like it. If anything…
