How Long Does It Take To Learn A Language Duolingo

Fluent in 3 years?! What I Learned From a 1,033 Day Duolingo Streak — Plus How to Actually Learn a Linguistic communication Fast

I learned Spanish, every day, for 1,033 days. That's a long Duolingo streak.

That'due south learning every day for 1,033 days—24,792 hours. When idea about it, I should have felt proud. Don't they say that information technology takes ten,000 hours to master something? But I didn't feel like a chief.

Studying for 1,033 days meant almost three years of Castilian learning. Merely I wasn't even fluent after those three years…

After reading nearly Benny's approach to learning a language in 3 months, three years seemed like a long time. As well long.

In my start iii years learning Spanish, I was dedicated. I increased my vocabulary. Got decent at reading and writing. Just I couldn't understand anyone speaking naturally. The phrase ¿Puede hablar más despacio, por favor? ("Tin y'all speak more slowly, please?") was my all-time friend.

Three years and I was stuck around lower intermediate level.

How did this happen?

My decision is that I got stuck at this level because I'm so good at studying.

What?

How I Bankrupt My Duolingo Streak and Started Really Learning Spanish

I spent 3 years steadily floating forth a Spanish plateau. Why? Because instead of thinking critically about my goals, I let Duolingo set my goals for me. The attraction of gamification gave me a feeling of daily progress. All I had to do was put my time in and I'd go rewarded.

Really, it was too like shooting fish in a barrel.

Only why did I want to learn Spanish anyhow?

Similar almost other successful language learners, I wanted to be able to heed and speak—to communicate with the people around me.

It turns out learning new vocabulary spoken past a robot and always with a transcript, wasn't actually getting me there.

It was time to go dorsum to first principles and define what I wanted to accomplish and then that I could make progress on my terms. I researched the most effective ways to prepare goals and stay motivated and realized I needed to supplant Duolingo with new routines.

That was the 24-hour interval I broke my streak and started really learning Castilian.

Here's What I Did to Learn Real Spanish While Withal Getting the "Gear up" of a Streak

Luckily, ending my Duolingo streak gave me plenty of fourth dimension to explore better approaches to learning Castilian. Even assuming that I was just spending five minutes a day, three years of try is about xc hours!

I decided that if I wanted to speak and understand Castilian, I needed to focus on 2 things:

Listen to Castilian (a lot)
Speak Spanish (at least a little)

As an introvert, listening was much easier for me. In fact, Duolingo had a lot of listening. So why wasn't it helping?

After doing some more inquiry, I realized there were a few reasons:

Grammer practice wasn't exposing me to all the about important Spanish words
I needed to hear a variety of accents, spoken at a natural speed
Most chiefly, the app was mainly focusing on single words and sentences are different

Here'southward what I did to change what I was doing:

I started to make progress past learning the five,000 most oftentimes used Spanish words in Memrise, a spaced repetition system (SRS) app with a focus on listening.

This new arroyo helped to build up my vocabulary faster and exposed me to more Spanish accents, equally spoken by real people. Also, the daily cadence of an SRS was similar to Duolingo, so it was my natural tendency to stick with information technology. This was an comeback, but not the whole answer.

Why not?

The main reason is that hearing unmarried words does not teach you how to listen. Connected speech just doesn't sound the same as unmarried, well-pronounced words. Consider "going to" and "gonna" in English language. You're not going to learn "gonna" unless you hear it in a total sentence!

Similarly, in Castilian, I was learning what words meant, only I never practiced identifying how they sound in full sentences. In fast spoken communication, words get connected together, syllables become dropped, and even the pronunciation of sure sounds tin can change. For example, va a andar ("he is going to walk") becomes vandar and hard bs start to sound more and more similar vs, at least to my ear. I wasn't learning any of these nuances one word at a time.

To get sentence level practice, Glossika was cardinal. Over the class of 300 sessions, I got exposure to over a thousand total sentences, spoken at natural speed by a native speaker.

Glossika'southward sound-first approach also taught me to end relying so much on transcripts, which can become a crutch. They also do some cool things to betrayal you to dissimilar types of grammar. But for me it was really just the amount of comprehensible input that made a divergence. By the finish of the program, I could understand spoken speech much, much better.

But because Glossika wasn't gamified, I initially struggled to stick with it and make progress every day.

Enter Beeminder, a website that not only allows y'all to set gamified goals for yourself, but besides to strengthen those goals by putting existent money on the line. It seems ridiculous, but the threat of losing $v if I lost my streak forced me to establish a really solid Glossika addiction. Every morning time, Glossika was the first thing I did, and every day I felt like I was making progress again.

Within a year, I'd learned the v,000 nigh common words in Spanish, and I'd completed Glossika Spanish. But then I started to get bored…

I'd Finished Glossika and Memrise – What Next?

Discussion and sentence lists based on usage frequency and grammar patterns are efficient, but they tin be pretty dry out.

Fortunately, I plant that I had enough listening comprehension to swoop into much more than interesting Spanish material. Think that my goal is communication. That meant it was a bully time to starting time communicating about things that mattered to me. This newfound meaning and interest was another boost to my motivation.

With the potent Castilian foundation I'd congenital, I found I could expand my listening practice naturally. The two things that worked best for me were simultaneously reading and listening to a Harry Potter audiobook in Spanish and watching Society de Cuervos on Netflix, supported with Castilian subtitles when the going got tough.

Honestly, annihilation would have worked as long as it involved listening to natural speech and had skilful transcripts to autumn back on. Information technology was very frustrating to lookout man movies where the subtitles didn't friction match the audio very closely. In my experience, audiobooks and Netflix original programming don't take this problem.

Once you know how to mind to connected speech, the world opens upwards and you can learn vocabulary the way native speakers practise—by reading and listening to things you detect interesting. I didn't bother to make SRS flashcards to call back the words I learned, simply you certainly could if you had the time and wanted to supercharge your language conquering.

Ane final benefit is that when you cull cloth that'due south relevant to yous, you acquire words that you're more likely to employ. You don't demand to learn many words to sympathize 80% of what y'all hear, only you need far more to get to xc% (or higher). The all-time way to combat these diminishing returns is to focus on words that are important to y'all.

How to Gamify "Speak from Solar day 1"

Benny encourages you lot to speak from twenty-four hour period one. I concur in principle, just in practice, this was by far the hardest role for me. As an introvert, I found speaking to be hugely taxing on my motivation. I can expect at flashcards for hours, simply a fifteen-minute conversation makes me desire to sleep the remainder of the day!

Here, my gamify everything approach won out in the end. I just broke my quest to detect a language partner into a agglomeration of tiny steps and used Beeminder to forcefulness myself to brand progress each 24-hour interval. I mean, things as small as:

Sign upward for italki
Message one person today
Do a 10-minute introductory conversation

It was tough to exit of my condolement zone, but once I found the correct partner, it was simply a matter of setting a goal to do one exchange per calendar week and never breaking the chain!

I recognize now that I should exist speaking to more people, with different interests, accents, and points of view. But I can also look back proudly and say that I did manage to have at to the lowest degree forty substantial Spanish conversations this yr without traveling or doing some other kind of more extreme immersion.

While getting to fluency can be a sprint, meaningful communication is a lifelong endeavor.

Fluent in iii years?

Hither I am a twelvemonth subsequently, having made more than progress in 12 months than I made in the previous 36—fluent by Benny'southward definition in that I can listen and communicate comfortably. I still have plenty of words larn and grammar to perfect, simply I tin antipodal!

More importantly, I know what I need to practice to reach my adjacent level of fluency: regularly reassess my goals, adjust my language input in service of those goals, and use my "don't break the chain" method to keep chipping away at it. I just need to be careful not to plough "don't break the chain" into "chain yourself to something that isn't helping anymore."

How I Broke My Duolingo Addiction

In summary, I broke my Duolingo addiction and went from:
Learning unmarried words to learning whole sentences (or stories)
Focusing on grammer to focusing on frequency and relevance
Reading a lot to prioritizing listening in every exercise session
Watching an capricious number of days in my streak get upwardly to goal based cocky-evaluation
Playing a game to gamifying everything

Information technology turns out that the means are the end. Set your goals offset, and then marshal your practice effectually them. Don't permit your practise define your goals.

I wish you every success in learning Spanish. ¡Buena suerte!