There's a lot of sense in this thread and facing up to reality vs wish-thinking and general language-learning lies. That the true and actual projection for learning a language is generally quite long; especially when you're no longer so young and free. And that the '500 hours of Netflix and now I'm fluent' is just a load of crap made up by people on the internet who self-diagnose themselves as more advanced than they really are.
Stiv_MacRae wrote:A couple of people suggested that I use Anki. I consider myself a one-person study on the effectiveness on input training, so I am required to reject Anki and all other memorization methods. However, I also have to acknowledge that my doing so is probably stupid and self-defeating.
Anki isn't necessarily 'memorisation' in the ordinary sense like memorising a deck of cards. It's also a form of input exposure. Stuff that you are exposed to and which lingers in your brain and unconscious memory. Just a focused, concentrated dose of what you get from 'content'. Something which bolsters that content.
To me what is called 'input' is merely 'exposure', because let's not pretend that this is like some fine-tuned system where things are being entered into a system with 100% input rate. That's not happening. There is loads of inaccuracy and wastage and dead-ends. Groping around in the dark until your eyes adjust and you find the door to the tunnel which is long and the light far away in the distance. It can be speeded up a bit with a little study to help light the way.
I don't think anyone should ever set themselves these short-term targets standing in for long-term targets. If you're learning Spanish, or French like this thread, and five months in you feel you can't understand enough Spanish, it's because it takes a while. Think more along the lines of five
years and then be pleasantly surprised part-way.