He Read 1.5 MILLION Words in Spanish

What's up grinders? Welcome back to the channel. So today we're going to be checking out another Reddit post. This one is apparently a reading first language challenge 620 hour update and apparently I get a mention in here. So let's see how this one goes. But this would be the first time I'm actually checking out a reading only challenge because as you guys know I've mentioned on this channel many times before. I'm not like a big reader. I go through periods of time where you know, sometimes I like reading, sometimes I don't but it's like it's not my main way of enjoying input or content I guess overall. But anyway, let's read this one. So the reading first language learning challenge and as you can see this one is quite beefy. Before I get into this and we we go through it. There was a couple of comments in here. So I just wanted to check the the first comment is actually it's a full on screenshot. This is becoming a meme at this point. Whenever someone sees like a good Reddit post, they knows probably just going to randomly get deleted. They take a screenshot of it just in case like I react to it later. And what's this? These two don't want to interfere with actual high quality content it seems or interface sorry. I interfere interface whatever. Too long didn't read please the conclusion gave me nothing. You you got to read a post about a reading challenge and then apparently it's too much to read. >> [laughter] >> Ah people. Humans man, humans. Okay, let's go through this one. So they've done a 50 hour update, 125 hour update and a 300 hour update and this is the 620 hour update. How's this work? You got 50, 125. What's the math behind that? Maybe this is whenever they feel like it. I've been learning a language to test what happens when you neglect listening practice in favor of reading then try to catch up listening when you have a relatively high level in reading. The experiment was originally inspired by several reports of people reaching a fairly strong reading level in Spanish and then finding that their listening caught up to the point of being able to watch movies and such after only 100 hours of listening practice. I can kind of believe this because when you're reading you have time to actually go through every single word that you're processing. I'm curious to see if this is like a stop and reflect and look up words type of challenge or a straight-up C I challenge. I wanted to test the idea that listening practice would be radically more effective once you've attained a high level of reading. My original plan was to focus on reading until I was comfortable reading uh learn natively content around the early C1 level then begin the listening phase. I documented this reading phase more thoroughly in the 300-hour update. Okay, so if they're already C1 level 620 hours. >> [laughter] >> Okay, if you don't understand why I'm crying go watch my Spanish review series. Unfortunately, not long after the 300-hour update I titrated to a higher dose of CNS depressant medication titrated. We're going to learn English, boys. Substance was measured or adjusted gradually in small precise amounts until a specific goal. >> Titrated. >> Titrated? I prefer my pronunciation. No, it's it's titrated. We're going with titrated. >> Titrate. >> God damn it. To higher dose of CNS depressant medication uh de- depress- ant medication. [laughter] And this resulted in the collapse of my reading stamina and speed. Bro, just introducing these words resulted in the collapse of my reading stamina and speed as well as my listening level. Uh this didn't resolve after a few weeks and didn't want to abandon Spanish but the validity of the whole experiment is obviously badly undermined by the sole subject being added by drugs. Okay, grinders, let me know down in the comment section. Should we do a drug-induced reading language challenge. 1,000 hours of OF RUSSIAN ON ECSTASY. NO, I'm just joking. Let's not do that. In the end, I decided to continue doing whatever I could without maintaining the experiment. And whatever I could initially turned out to mean exclusively watching Easy Dreaming Spanish content. You could regard this as triggering the listening phase early. Ooh, okay. So, what's he done? He's got interactive reading 289. See you guys? See, he's counting by hours. He's counting by hours. Everyone who says I should count reading by words, there is someone else out there who's counting by hours. And just you watch. I swear to God, I'm going to scroll down and he's going to have word count, isn't he? He's going to do word count, isn't he? I'm just scrolling. I'm just scrolling. We're just We're just looking. God damn it, he counted words. Okay. >> [laughter] >> Uh okay. So, I guess if I ever did a reading challenge, I'd have to do word count. Everyone wants word count. Okay, free-flow listening, free-flow reading, Anki, grammar study. Wow, this guy really broke it out. Shadowing. Ooh, okay. So, he did do some shadowing. Okay. Pronunciation practice, 3.2 hours. Sound study, intensive listening, flashcard creation. So, he's done some Anki in there by the looks of it or at least some other SRS type of program. Sentence mining while reading. Okay, so this is I guess this is a reading-heavy challenge with a whole heap of other stuff added on top. So, it's probably quite a healthy way to do things. Total time spent reading is 302 hours. Total time spent listening is 243 hours excluding shadowing, reading aloud, etc. and counting reading while listening as listening. At the previous update, I had done 50 hours of listening. So, since then, I've done around 194 hours. Everything else accounts for 73.8 hours and about 12% of my time. So, realistically, he's done just slightly more reading than listening. Okay. Listening. At my 300-hour update with 50 hours of listening. Okay, so he's done all the listening as of recently, which is, you know, in reference to the drug um bender that he went on. My comprehension level was around 65 on Dreaming Spanish and I was mainly watching easy native travel content on YouTube. Okay, so he was like right at the beginning stage of listening back at the the 300 hour update of of reading. Okay, I feel like the more I read this post the more depressed I'm going to get as I realize he's probably like light years ahead of me. However, my listening although relatively advanced was also relatively mentally taxing mentally taxing wait advanced how's it advanced only after that anyway when the drugs reduced my working memory and processing speed my listening level crashed. I started listening mainly to easy DS content around level 50 55. Previously I had difficulty consuming DS content because I found it slow and boring. Welcome to the club. >> [laughter] >> It is at that level it is slow and boring but I found it was actually much more acceptable while on drugs. >> [laughter] >> Could you imagine that this is like the new DS method of advertising. Look guys, we know our content is slow and boring but if you do drugs trust me boys it's way more acceptable. I'm not trying to diss DS it's just funny how this reads and started spending around two hours a day of free flow listening. You know, when I hear free flow listening I just imagine like there's a dude he's kind of like chilling. He's like having a party. Maybe he's like he's got [snorts] a good [ __ ] I don't know he's he's a reefer in his mouth he's like that's right Augustina. That's where they keep the aliens. You know, like that's what I imagine. Okay, the original hypothesis was that it would take around 100 hours from the start of listening phase to reach the point of being able to understand movies and TV shows. Obviously we have a big confounding factor and I hadn't reached the target reading level I wanted but still did I get there? In a word no. Okay, listening gradually became less tiring. My level increased and I resumed listening to native content over the course of 100 hours. However, even by the end, the range of things I could understand was quite similar to 300 hour mark. My ease of depth of understanding was greater, but nothing new had really opened up. Movies were just a blur. Okay, so this is at 300 hours of listening on top of his Wait, 300 hours on top of his reading already? No, because this is where he's at. So, this must be just in total. This seemed to be mainly due to the phenom perception Right, phoneme. Phoneme. Why am I saying phenom? Man, why is English so hard? I hate this language. Hearing the sounds of the language, clear standard speech was relatively okay, but anything more naturalistic was immediately a problem. But, this is weird because I definitely made steady um progress and phoneme perception over my first 50 hours doing 10 minutes a day. Why would I make almost none in the next 100 doing hours a day? I'll talk about it later. Okay. Once I reached around the 100 hour mark, my stamina was returning and I decided to add some targeted practice to improve my phonological perception. A technique I used for this uh before is intensive listening. Isn't that just listening? Or is that like listening as in you listen to the sounds over and over and maybe use like pairs of sounds that are similar. He does include a link. Let me just quickly go open that link up. I want to double-check. Okay, so this is from the Refold method. Okay. Intensive listening is a style of interactive listening where you listen to content without text, pausing frequently, check whether you understood, and using subtitles as a fallback when you're stuck. Uh okay, so that's what it is. Which is very effective and very tiring, but which for reason uh variety of reasons, I've never managed to turn into a habit. Instead, I decided to use a technique I haven't tried before, which while is certainly um been described, it doesn't seem to have an accepted name. I'm going to call it sandwich listening. It works like this. If this is anything like sandwiching back when I was in school where you're in the back of the bus and you're trying to squish someone between you. Listen to a short piece of audio. I normally use 1 to 2 minutes that's fairly difficult. Re-listen with subtitles looking up the words or expressions if necessary. Listen again without subs. If necessary, repeat two and three. Okay, I would just See, this is what I would call intensive listening. This is basically just a an exercise where you do exactly this. You listen, you try to understand, you read the subs or like you read through all the words and then you've kind of primed your brain for it so you listen again. Your brain's kind of knows what to accept. It doesn't have to try to figure out as much, you know, it doesn't have such a high cognitive load as everything's been thrown at it. It kind of knows what to expect and the more times you do that over and over it gets to the point where you can literally understand everything in a small segment but it's it's good for like narrowing down your understanding of words when you're hearing them. I started spending around 15 minutes doing sandwich listening most days mainly with TV series and news shorts from RTVE Noticias. Okay, so guys, let me know what you would call this. I've never heard this term sandwich listening before. I don't think I've given a term to this before. So like I don't know. After that I saw a pretty rapid expansion in the type of content I could understand with RTVE Noticias being one of the biggest gainers but also mumbly content with background music like the YouTube channel Kibana and dubbed TV and anime also began to open up. The recent content I've been watching has mainly been adventure travel UBX. Okay, so these are channels. Okay, so let's go have a look. >> [music] >> Okay, I got to pause that cuz there's literally music in there but I was getting about Yeah, you know, like 60 to 70% of that. Okay, and then Science General from here. I don't recognize any of these channels. Uh for YouTube content with one person in studio talking to a camera almost always have good comprehension. A major exception being Tur who talks like an insane person. I got to go check out this person now. We need to know who Tora is. >> [music] >> Wait, that was pretty comprehensible. Wait, she's actually more comprehensible than the other girl. What's going on here? I don't know. I just seem fine to me. That's an insane person, probably more I'd watch. New special reports from channels like El Confidencial, DW Español, BBC. Yeah, I'm not too interested in all of this type of stuff. I'm more interested in I get comparing my listening comprehension with my old standard candle, Evil Deer. That's me, guys. In the 1,050 hour Pimsleur Dreaming Spanish update, there's a clear difference. I have better comprehension of all the clips that he tried to translate. In fact, effectively full comprehension. [laughter] Okay. Although I had to guess the Spanish term for enlightenment from context, I do think Evil Deer's comprehension is affected by how disgusted and checked out he is [laughter] at this point, though. No. Okay, well, I'm definitely checked out now. I'm I'm checked out of the DS method. But, bros, we're we're going hard. We're we're going we're going to go hard. We're going to we're we're flipping the ship, okay. But, what I'm thinking is because and this is going to be a little bit of a side quest. I'm going to talk about what I'm going to be doing right now cuz I actually haven't spoken about it right now. I actually have a lifetime membership to Rosetta Stone, and I went and did the first lesson Was it first or the first three lessons? I can't remember. I did them like yesterday, okay. And, bros, like brain-blowing how much Spanish grammar that's literally just teaching me. And the funny thing is Rosetta Stone doesn't actually teach you grammar. It just teaches you patterns. So, it's basically direct method, okay. And I was watching it and I was going through and I was clicking on the pictures and stuff. I did not realize that verbs in Spanish, okay, you add an N on them to indicate that the subject is plural. I wasn't even aware that verbs were doing that. Like maybe I was. I heard an encantan encan- encan- Like I'd heard the like the n sound on the end of verbs before, but like I never made that connection that that meant the subject was plural. And with from one lesson of Rosetta Stone, I was like Oh. Oh. So, it's you know, los hombres comen. Or you know, um What what's another one? Uh I'm trying to think of like a las niñas nadan. You know, like these are just like I I didn't realize that I like if I was speaking Spanish before in my crosstalk sessions, I would have said something along the lines of las niñas nadan. Actually, I would have never said nada because I wouldn't have known the word. I probably would have said something like nade. Something, you know, something random. Um but it's it's good. Rosetta Stone is good if you've done what I've done. I would not recommend this as like the general direction most people would take, but it's good because I literally understand everything. And now I get to see why it works the way it is. And I get lots of speaking practice. So, I'm going to do that. I don't know how long. I might actually just do a full Rosetta Stone review series uh just because I actually haven't seen any good ones on YouTube. And lots of people search up Rosetta Stone, so it'll be [ __ ] great for the clicks type of thing. But it is 300 hours, I think. But by the end of that, because I spoke with AI, cuz you know, me and AI we're best buds, okay? Based on the patterns of that, I should understand most grammar in Spanish except for um subjunctive and may- maybe some subjunctive, but like I should understand most grammar based on my background. So, it's like that would be a heavy listening approach. It teaches grammar via the language. It kind of falls more in line with what I was doing with the the the challenge of being like very input heavy. So, I think I think it's probably a it's a good way to go, but we shall see. But what about native movies and TV series, which was the original question? Although I hadn't checked in about a month, I expected to have to report that I still had no real comprehension. Then, I turned to La Casa de las Flores as a test and realized that although my understanding was quite imperfect, I was actually following the plot in spite of the section I watched being largely dialogue with minimal visual context. Testing more shows around level 27 and on Learn Natively, it looks like I have a similar comprehension of around half of them. I don't even know what this Learn Natively is. Let's go find out. Natively is a website dedicated to helping language learners engage with content in their target language. While there's no shortage of sites that focus on teaching grammar and vocab, we feel learners are almost left to themselves when transitioning into native content. This can be terribly daunting and often dejecting experience. It shouldn't have to be. You can tell this is This is written by people who love reading. Like, look at this. They're using big words like dejecting. How dare they? Daunting. Daunting's not big, but it feels big. Uh we aspire to make this transition easier. What languages do they have? Spanish, German, English, French, Korean, and Japanese, I'm assuming? Or is that the translation of the website? Okay, so it looks like a reading website. I don't want to over hype this. My comprehension on most series is still below what I want from CI and say I understand them, that ridiculously binary word would be a stretch. But, it's good enough that I could enjoy watching a range of movies and TV shows. Well, based on what you've just told me, bro, you're at 620 hours and you're better than me. You're better than me. So, [ __ ] you. [ __ ] you. No, I'm joking. It just goes to show that, you know, straight up reading from the beginning helps you get better at listening than just straight up listening all the way through. Okay, but for real, why was my listening progress so slow for the first 100 hours? I'm guessing it's because your brain just not used to the sounds of language. That'd be it. The obvious answer is that I was, well, drugged. That might contribute a little bit, I guess. But, here's the odd thing. I've been studying Mandarin parallel with Spanish. Is everyone studying Mandarin What's his Mandarin level at? I need to know. And at the same time as ramping up my Spanish consumption, I reduced my Mandarin consumption dramatically from several hours a day down to two uh sorry, down to 10-20 minutes plus some audio flashcards. I expect to see a near total slow down of the improvement in my Mandarin phoneme perception, but as far as I can tell, I didn't see a slow down. Tones are much sharper and clearer now, and when I recently put on C-drama I struggled with before, I was surprised to realize I could follow it quite well. Wow, that implies his Mandarin is actually quite good. If you're actually following a C-drama, your Mandarin is pretty good. Put these things together and one hypothesis jumps out. Could there be a daily limit to phoneme perception progress? Don't know. Never done that test. Perhaps some kind of mechanism that only accepts one update to a particular phoneme per day. I don't know. It's probably the drugs, bro. I think it's the drugs. I thought it was pretty silly sounding, but I did some digging. Nothing in the SLA literature touches this topic, but this is very interesting paper on auditory discrimination of frequencies. How dare they discriminate against a man? That's racist. Improvement of frequency discrimination required 360 trials of training per day while learning on uh temporal interval discrimination occurred with 360 training trials per day, and additional daily practice did not increase the amount of improvement. It therefore appears that the accumulation of improvement over days on auditory discrimination discrimina- I I keep I swear to god I'm not reading that word right, but it is right. Tasks may require some critical amount of training per day. The training uh beyond that critical amount yields no additional learning on trained Okay, so basically, this is scientist speak for if you do too much of a good thing, you make no progress. And I think that's pretty much the same with like literally anything. You do too much of something, your brain just gets cooked. Okay? Your brain's cooked, it's like, "No, I don't want to." Okay? Like, you don't need a a a big fancy schmancy scientist to tell you that. This is pretty much the effect I'd imagine applied to a closely related phoneme. And if this is so, then it could also explain the people reporting understanding movies after a hundreds of hours of listening practice. See, this is the thing. I understand movies, but I don't understand movies. Like, I can follow along. See, whenever someone says, "Oh, I I can follow along with a movie." What does that mean? Because I can do it, no problem in Spanish. But, if you ask me to give a rundown of the specifics of the conversations these people are having, it's going to be very birds-eye view. Let's conceptually separate listening into three sub-abilities. The general language model that's shared between reading and listening, phoneme perception, and what I'll call listening fluency, which does the stuff like resolving difficult sound-word mappings and some chunking that's done visually when reading. Listening fluency is the bit that can be compensated for with working memory and processing speed, and was exactly the bottleneck for me at 50 hours of listening. However, movies put a very low demands on listening fluency. There are few complex sentences, and the lines of dialogue are usually followed by a pause. Instead, they stress mainly phoneme perception and general model. Yeah, I would say movies uh this is true. Obviously, complexity of dialogue really depends on the the genre. Like, for example, if you're watching sci-fi [ __ ] like I like to watch, it can get a little bit complex. However, the issue is your brain needs to sort out the sounds of the language from the sounds of the background. And figuring out, you know, what is actually relevant to understanding and what is just background blur. So, if we really have a docile before phonological update, someone could reach a high level on reading, then do a small amount of high-quality daily listening amounting to about 100 hours spread over, say, 18 months, and reach the point of understanding movies. In reality, with pretty wonky, effortful comprehension, but enough to justify to themselves while still having very weak listening fluency. And that would explain the exact form of the claim that keeps popping up, 100 hours, because 18 months sounds lame and can understand movies a a leading. Man, I hate readers. Readers love to use big words. >> elided >> eliding So, it is actually true. The evidence here is pretty thin and circumstantial and largely dependent on my memories and impressions, which may be fallible. And you were on drugs. Okay? I wouldn't put a lot of weight on it. And although sleep consoli- consolidation effects are well known, bro, this guy's pushing me to the limits of my English. Blo- Why? It's odd if it is true and no one noticed, but it would be very interesting to see if tested. Do I sense a new test coming up? A new challenge. Reading to fluency and then see if 100 hours is all you need to convert that to listening fluency. That is actually a very interesting challenge. I'm not a big reader, but maybe this would help me become a better reader and a better evil deer overall. And maybe maybe by doing this I can finally push my English to the C1 level. >> [laughter] >> You know, the funny thing is I've probably done more reading in Esperanto than I than I have in English. Actually, I'm almost certain I have. Cuz like when I read in English, it's usually stuff like this, in all honesty. And like Wikipedia articles and stuff, but like I don't read books really in English much. I haven't since I was like my teens. So, my English reading's probably decrea- No, it in fact it has. I'm reading using Kindle with Merriam-Webster's Spanish translation dictionary still for lookups and long proce- and long press. They're doing literally dictionary lookups as they're reading. Makes sense. You know, I've actually got a Kindle, but the problem was with it feels so artificial when you're reading and you're trying to like swipe the screen then you see as it moves across the page. Like it doesn't have the same And also when you complete a book, it doesn't have the same feeling of like success, at least for me, as compared to having something physical and holding it and going, "You know what? You know what? I read this. I read this. I'm going to put this on my red pile, which in consists of one book." You know, like I don't know. Maybe that's just me. Maybe that's just me. I probably should fire up my Kindle, you know, charge it up, do a reading challenge. Maybe Japanese reading challenge, but then my Japanese would probably sound freaking atrocious. I generally read material that's at an easy level for me, but usually read in the intensive style, looking up almost all words that I don't know or can't infer, and trying to get a full understanding of the text. I don't I don't get I documented the observations that led me to the strategy in the last update. Okay, so here is all the things that they read. I'm actually 1.5 million words. They are at fluent. This is what I was saying my Dreaming Spanish challenge, okay. When I was doing it, I was saying the fact that Dreaming Spanish says you need to read 1.5 to 3 million words in order for you to get to that, you know, that 1,500 hour milestone. You don't need any of that 1,500 hours, apparently. You could just do the one point, you know, the 1.5 million words, which and then a couple hundred hours of listening, and that's what, 620 hours and you're ahead of me. Ahead of me quite a bit. That just goes to show that is like the man, I'm still pissed about that. I'm pissed because it's almost like a hidden way to get like, let's say with AOG, you're not quite there. You start reading, you read 1.5 to 3 million words. Doesn't matter what method you do. 1.5 to 3 million words, you're probably going to reach fluency anyway. So, it's like then they can claim that as a success and say, "See? See? All you had to do was finish reading." Bro, I spoke about this before. In the language community, they talk about reading that many words, 1.5 to 2 3 million words, in order to reach fluency via reading. That annoys me. Forgatos um Casilleros Casilleros. In early books, the word counts were mainly drawn from the web. For the later books, they're now mostly drawn from Corvo with a few estimated based on number of pages and words per page. Although immediately after 300 hour update, my reading ability was wrecked. Overtime, my stamina returned and eventually I continued with El Alma uh del Brujo. Since then, my reading stamina has improved steadily and has my reading speed. In spite of my relatively narrow approach to reading 45% of the words read are from books about witches. That's all right. I love like [ __ ] video games. So like a lot of my vocab comes from video games. Vocabulary no longer seems to be the bottleneck in reading books. As an example, I sampled two random pages from a few different books El Infinito and Un Hunso? Hunso? Hunso? I don't know what that is. And in each case I have 98% of higher lexical coverage doing more explicit vocabulary study would have been a mistake I think. Obviously cognates are doing a lot of work here. I doubt this would replicate in Chinese or even German. I do fall below this coverage on some topics when reading news with the main example being the current corruption scandal in Spain. I've read relatively little news so this would probably be an easy fix. Currently my main blocker on reading more difficult books is my difficulty in tracking more complex narratives with multiple threads and indirect implications. I suspect that tracking this comes down to better automating what I can already do. Freeing up some working memory for more abstraction. Like the way this guy talks is somewhere between a programmer and like a hardcore reader. Like somewhere between those two. Because like the way some of this terminology is used is exactly how a programmer would talk. Like literally freeing up some working memory for more abstraction. This that sounds like it's straight out of a programmer's handbook. In which case perhaps at this point it would actually make sense to start reading some books more extensively. Output. Although I would have linked liked to have been speaking at some point due to issues with my throat and tongue I'm still not able to speak for very long. Don't know what's going on there. I There was no mention. Maybe some health issue. I've spent a few hours thinking in the language and done a small amount of writing practice. However, I have as much for physical therapy as for language learning have been spending a small amount of time each day practicing shadowing and similar activities mainly by blind shadowing German Spanish videos. I haven't really noticed any improvement in my accent from doing this. That's an interesting observation. Usually when people talk about doing shadowing, after doing it for I'm not sure how long did he say? He only did a few hours, okay? A few hours you don't really get much. I've heard from people after they've done it for like, you know, 10 plus hours, they start feeling like a difference. So, here are their updates. Here are accent samples for each. Oh, okay. >> [snorts] >> It's I would say he's Okay, so he seems to have a I'm I'm just going to throw this out there, pretty heavy accent, okay? But I could be completely wrong in that regard. Don't know. Um let me know down in the comment section. But he seems to be able to put like if this is not scripted and this is just straight off the top of his head, he's probably conversationally more fluent than me. Okay, so this is all present tense, basically. So, did I ruin my accent by reading earlier as people warned me? Possibly yes. However, accent quality seems to have an enormous amount of individual variation, so I don't think we can conclude much from my end of one. Most probably a major factor is simply my being a terrible mimic as well as some uh psychological resistance. Yeah, so that's what I was saying, like if you're going to do a like a straight-up reading challenge, oh god damn I just banged my freaking knee. I would probably just start with like some like mentoring, or maybe not mentoring, tutoring at the start with the sounds, like reading a page with someone. Obviously depends on the script of the language. If it's a Latin script, you could probably figure it out pretty quickly. As long as it is like it's a logical script. Like Spanish, it's you know, written Spanish sounds like spoken Spanish for the most part, okay? If this was English, good luck on that one. Could you imagine if you learned English just from reading? Bro, your accent would be cooked. Not just your accent, your literally comprehension. Next, I'm going to try uh some other methods to see if I can make my accent more native like. My current plan is to record myself saying various individual words and compare to a reference and to focus on perfecting one passage from an audiobook. Anki, previously I did the Refold 1K deck and a little sentence mining, but I deleted all my Spanish Anki cards shortly after 300-hour update since they were mainly mature cards and at that point I was struggling uh with keeping up with Anki reviews. I did eventually start using Anki for grammar as I described in the next section. Ooh, okay, let's let's see. Let's see how he did this. I've been studying Collins Spanish Grammar on and off, mostly off, if we're being honest, which is straightforward grammar reference that covers up to B1. I read the explanations and examples. Then, if it seems like something I couldn't produce, I select a few examples and create N L uh so, native language to target language translation cards for them. If the example is complex and contains multiple things that I haven't automated yet, then I add more cards with sub-expressions. I only use examples that I have already understood or I already understand. Otherwise, the card becomes drastically harder to remember. For learning to produce conjugations, earlier I tried the typical close exercise methods with various resources. Okay, so, close is something I like to recommend. This took a generally unreasonable amount of effort and the conjugation still don't seem to be available when I'm trying to output. That was obvious from the speaking example because he was literally speaking just in like first-person present tense. More surprisingly, conjugations that I could produce without thinking were not even reliably available when doing the close exercises. I gave up on this approach. Instead, I've been uh creating native language to target language translation Anki cards for simple sentences that demonstrate the use of irregular verbs that seems less time-consuming and more effective. This kind of takes me back to while I was doing Rosetta Stone because I already understand probably up to, you know, like a B2 level in Spanish, maybe. Like like if we're being you know, kind. I understand up to a B2 level, which means that all I have to do now is to recognize how the the patterns of the language fit together and then practice them. And Rosetta Stone is actually pretty good for that. It shows you the patterns and then there's this lots of speaking practice. That's pretty much it. So, I'm thinking I will possibly go do the entire Rosetta Stone course, make a video series about it, and then after that I'll return to Worlds Across and then I'll just do a [ __ ] ton of speaking practice. I know a bunch of you guys actually asked me to do language transfer and I did 30 minutes. I don't think it's a good idea for me to do it at this Actually, I don't think it's a good idea for me to do it for Spanish because it assumes that you don't already understand in Spanish and it teaches you in a way which kind of like it adds all these intermediate trees which I don't need because I already understand the language. So, all I need to do is practice like to become aware of the rules, the grammar rules, practice them, automate them, and then that's it. That's That's what I need to do. I realistically like the biggest just downside of my entire AOG experiment I was doing was just the fact that I was unaware of the the grammar rules or the patterns that underpin the language and how to utilize them and I I feel like once I know how to utilize them, I'll make much better progress. I'll be able to return to Worlds Across. I'll be able to do speaking and then I'll be able to more comfortably, you know, continue on reading. For a favorite language, I'd ideally do the same thing but start it earlier. Conclusion: The net result of all this craziness is that my level is pretty much where you'd expect it given the work I put in. The one possible casualty of this approach was accent. This doesn't matter a a for me personally, although it will to some people. I plan to continue with Spanish for the time being and I might do another update to the series if circumstances allow me to start speaking the language. Otherwise, thanks for reading. That was very fascinating. You know, there's so many challenges that I want to do, which realistically I don't have time to do because, you know, I work full-time. Like, I would like to do a challenge where it's just pure Anki. Literally no nothing external to Anki. Never like and see how far I can get doing that. Don't recommend it, by the way, guys. Don't I recommend it because, well, one, I've never done it and I've never seen anyone do it. It'd be absolutely bonkers insane, but it'd be funny as [ __ ] Uh the second one is like a pure reading challenge and see cuz like based on this, in half the time he's better than me. So, that just shows that a reading input heavy approach with obviously look-ups and, you know, some grammar study is better than a input heavy approach with no grammar look-ups and stuff like that. So, that's it seems pretty definitive to me at this point, okay? So, yeah, there's just so many challenges I'd like to do. Maybe one day when this YouTube channel, you know, gets big enough and I can make money off of it, I can make it literally my job just to be a [ __ ] guinea pig. But anyway, I hope you guys have enjoyed this video. Let me know down in the comment section. I'll see you all in the next video and if you're not there, well, then I will look for your Reddit post that mentions me. And I will end you.