I traveled to Japan for a few weeks last year and had grand plans to learn a bunch of phrases, but got lazy and punked out. I still had a great time, everyone was super kind, but it was embarrassing how well so many folks spoke English and I couldn’t even be assed to put in a bit of work.
My wife is half Mexican and we’re in California, and she gets a lot of people initially talking to her in Spanish, which she can’t speak beyond an ordering food level, and would like to change that.
What’s the best way for us both to get to a beginning conversational level in Spanish? I tried Duolingo a while ago and it was eh, and I’ve heard it’s all AI these days. Any other recommendations?
Combined-Arms:
EVERY dimension you can stack, syncopating between them, so that whichever leverage works for you, it’s dismantling the unconscious-mind entrenched non-knowing you’re working on displacing.
Pimsleur is the standard for making language automatic.
The problem is that it doesn’t show you how your form the sounds ( may not be your problem, definitely is a problem with more-foreign-languages, for me ).
yt videos in the other languages, showing both simple-basics & social-situations, or whatever it is that you want to be watching ( maybe high-school science would be more interesting to watch than social-drama/stuff ).
Flashcards for getting the has-to-be-imprinted stuff, like verb-tenses, automatic…
intentional-socializing: asking some specific friend/group to help one learn…
Tandem, where you pair-up with someone for sake of learning: you help them learn, & they help you learn…
In short, use every angle/leverage you can, & keep applying them, until the ignorance yields, leaving language-facility in its place.
Young-people are essentially learning-sponges, so this perspective makes no sense for them, but for old people, this is how it works.
Oh, & learn songs, too: they’re learned by one’s non-linguistic hemisphere ( right, for 85% of the population ), so that’s another angle/lever to be using in learning language, too.
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