A short summary of my journey so far:
End of 2016 - start of 2017: Got part way through Spanish Duolingo tree, gave up
Mid 2018: Decided to learn Spanish again. I'm somewhat bad at sticking to courses, but I do what I find enjoyable so what's the harm? Anyway, since then I've done the following:
- Learnt ~3200 words from https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/2134488481 (started in June 2018, currently learning 19 per day)
- Created my own Anki deck of ~600 conjugations of some of the most common verbs, I finished this a long time ago, but still review a couple of cards per day which can be useful
- Completed Spanish All Talk (I have started many courses, but this is the only I have completed and I highly recommend it)
- Created an Anki deck with 9000 cloze deletions which I am about 1,500 cards through, mostly revision for me, but it's really helping with the subjunctive which I feel I could use with ease in some cases now (you can download it if you'd like https://ankiweb.net/shared/info/1713698257)
- Read 5 books, so far all graded readers which is fine, I'm currently finding a reader graded at B1 reasonable because I can get through most pages only needing to look up a few words (reading on a Kindle is excellent!), and sometimes I've gone pages or even chapters without looking up words, depends on the author
- Listened to a few audiobooks of the above books I've read
- Watched hours of Pablo's fantastic Youtube channel Dreaming Spanish (a must for Spanish learners imo), mostly intermediate videos as I prefer the pace, I usually speed them up as well to get closer to native speed speech, but I'm still not there
- Watched several episodes of Extr@ in Spanish
- Watched hours of Peppa Pig (my comprehension here is very good apart from words a beginner is unlikely to know like the words for pumpkin, hiccoughs etc
My challenge for 2019 is to get my listening comprehension to a point where I can watch some more advanced materials. I haven't done language exchanges, and for me that is OK, I am unlikely to enjoy them and learning Spanish is a hobby.
A day in the life of my Spanish learning would tend to be:
- Learn 19 new words, 22 new cloze deletions and review everything in Anki
- Watch a Dreaming Spanish video if there's a new one, or look in the back catalogue for an interesting one
- Read a chapter of the book I'm reading, listen to the audio afterwards (sometimes the order changes, but this way is easier)
- Procrastinate a lot
I'm trying to focus on Spanish from Spain with the distinción, yeismo, use of vosotros etc, so I am trying to consume material from Spain mostly especially when listening because I don't want to learn a new word that has an /s/ sound when it would really have a /θ/ sound with the distinction. It's for that reason that I never listened to Language Transfer or watched Destinos. Foolish? Maybe.