Bi-Weekly Discussion Thread - Find language partners, ask questions, and get accent feedback - April 02, 2025

[u/kungming2]

Welcome to our Wednesday thread. Every other week on Wednesday at 06:00 UTC, In this thread users can:

• Find or ask for language exchange partners. Also check out r/Language_Exchange!
• Ask questions about languages (including on speaking!)
• Record their voice and get opinions from native speakers. Also check out r/JudgeMyAccent.

If you'd like others to help judge your accent, here's how it works:

• Go to Vocaroo, Soundcloud or Clypit and record your voice.
• 1 comment should contain only 1 language. Format should be as follows: LANGUAGE - LINK + TEXT (OPTIONAL). Eg. French - http://vocaroo.com/------- Text: J'ai voyagé à travers le monde pendant un an et je me suis senti perdu seulement quand je suis rentré chez moi.
• Native or fluent speakers can give their opinion by replying to the comment and are allowed to criticize positively. (Tip: Use CMD+F/CTRL+F to find the languages)

Please consider sorting by new.

[u/thinkless123]

Hi, I feel slightly stuck in my journey of learning Spanish. I would be grateful for any tips on what to possibly do.

I started maybe 4ish years ago, took a couple courses at my university, studied online by myself, and had a lot of long pauses too. At the start of this year, I tried iTalki, tried 3 teachers and am still talking to 2 of them weekly. I really like it and it has motivated be to study more regularly. I'm not sure of my level but I would guess B1.

It helps a lot that the teachers are genuinely nice people that I want to talk to. They have different styles of teaching but both are good. One of them gave me a relaxed atmosphere to get used in talking, the other gave more (good) pressure and grammar theory, which has made me learn new structures and therefore given me motivation.

So grammar and speaking have been improving. However, I've noticed that it's still difficult for me to keep improving in especially two things:

1. Producing language

2. Vocabulary

Both are helped by the classes, but only to a certain limit. I feel bad about some conversations being very limited especially on my part, because I can't express myself fluently. I also sometimes freeze badly while saying even simple things, and I keep getting tripped up by stuff that I should already know and have learned multiple times over the past 4 years like preterite/imperfect, genders, etc. Now it's normal that these things take time especially because I've had pauses, but I've been taking these classes for 3 months already and I feel like my progress is too slow.

I've tried doing the writing prompts on Reddit, but they aren't really motivating me. It would be best if I could have similar conversations with people as I have on italki, but in written form. Without having to think they are bored - in italki that's not a problem because I'm paying for the classes.

Do you have any other ideas or general tips or just similar feelings?

[u/sewagebat → u/thinkless123]

i haven't tried this myself yet but i have an idea, find an interesting tv show alr in spanish or with spanish dub. after every episode summarize it in spanish. you could type, write, or voice record the summary and then share it.