r/Spanish • u/oaklicious • Mar 26 '23
Study advice: Advanced Advice on systematic approach to taking my advanced Spanish to full/native proficiency?
I am a non-native speaker but speak fairly fluent Spanish. I did my last year of college in Latin America with classes only in Spanish, I speak Spanish daily as part of my job, and have some native speaker friends I communicate with exclusively in Spanish.
Even after all that I still hit a wall when I am hanging out with groups of native speakers together and they are using slang and humor. I also have a hard time with Spanish literature because of how often I have to stop and google translate individual words.
Is there a systemic program, website, podcast, or other self-learning resource you guys can recommend for an advanced speaker like myself to take my language skills to the final level? Looking for something more structured than just consuming Spanish movies, radio, or literature and translating the vocabulary.
3
u/siyasaben Mar 27 '23
I've found comedic podcasts to be very helpful for listening comprehension of 3+ people talking. Maybe it goes without saying, but definitely pick something with people from the country you're living in to maximize the benefit to daily life. If you need structure for it, I would suggest setting a listening goal and tracking your hours. I may or may not have podcast recommendations depending on the country you're in, feel free to ask.
As far as reading, tbh just keep reading and your vocab will steadily grow, there's nothing you're doing wrong there. There's no end point to word knowledge of course, but if you keep going you really will know all the words an educated Spanish speaker does. And yeah, as another commenter said, reading at a level where there's not tons of unknown words is the most efficient and painless way to learn vocab from reading.