I have about 4,200 mature cards and I can read a B2 graded reader comfortably. Then I put on a normal Spanish YouTube video and it is a wall of noise — I catch maybe one word in twelve, and words I definitely know go straight past unrecognised. Is my card format wrong, or is this simply a separate skill I have not started building yet?
Start with content far below your reading level. Kids shows, slow news, anything where you already know about 98 percent of the words. Listening does not improve by fighting hard audio, it improves by hearing easy audio at speed until parsing is automatic. I wasted four months on films I could not follow before I worked that out.
Seconding the 98 percent number. Under about 95 percent and you are decoding, not listening, and nothing sticks.
One word in twelve at six months is normal, not broken. What changed it for me was listening to the same 20 minute episode five days in a row. Day one is noise, day three you start hearing word boundaries, day five you are annoyed at how obvious it was.
@xlookup_lena · 8mo ago · 3 replies
Separate skill, and your cards are probably making it worse. If your cards are text on the front, you have learned what words look like, not what they sound like. Put audio on the front of every new card and re-learn the old ones by ear — I did 30 a day for two months and the wall came down noticeably. The other half is that spoken Spanish drops a lot of what the page shows you. Para donde vas is closer to pa'onde vah at speed.
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@perlite_pete · 8mo ago
Do you mean audio only on the front, no text at all?
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@xlookup_lena · 8mo ago
Audio only, text on the back. If the text is visible you will read it and skip the listening entirely.
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