When you're on a language learning journey, stop trying to cram and force-feed your brain the language. This causes burnout and makes you take long breaks with your language.

I remember when I first started learning Spanish, the process took me decades and I was nowhere near being fluent. The reason why was because I was trying to memorize and "master" the language in a short period of time. I had an on-again/off-again relationship with Spanish.

Then, in August of 2023, I decided to take things a lot more seriously. At first, I was focusing on learning how to speak and sound more like a native. Then I saw a video by a man by the name of Steve Kaufmann. He knew around 20 languages and he said he learned them through reading.

It was like a light went off in my head and I was like,

"Of course! This is how I was able to achieve such a high proficiency in my mother tongue of English."

Then I was introduced to videos on Comprehensible Input from a man by the name of Dr. Stephen Krashen, where you learn your language through "pleasure reading" and easy content where you understand about 90% of what you hear and read. I started reading on my Kindle because you can translate as you read. I shifted into reading books that were more advanced and the sentence structure was more for native Spanish speakers and not language learners (which is similar to English, so all you have to do is focus on building your vocabulary).

If you're stuck in the "Intermediate phase" of your target language, it's because you're not branching off into more complex content written for native speakers of your target language. I started reading Harry Potter, which is at a 9–12 year old level, but as a non-Spanish speaker, it might as well been at a college level. If you're re sticking to short stories and books written for language learners, you're gonna plateau at a certain point. You need to go through a period of reading things where you're confused about the structure of the language, the vocabulary, and certain colloquialisms. This is how you move on to being more proficient in the language and surpass that plateau.

Anyway, as I mentioned already, I was reading Harry Potter books and it felt like drinking from a fire hose. Every other word and phrase I had to look up. The way the sentences were structured confused me to a point where I had to look up videos on grammar and sentence structure in Spanish. I knew basic grammar, but I needed something more specific to what I was reading.

The beauty of reading a book series is you get a lot of repetition and you find yourself looking up fewer and fewer words after each book you complete. Along with reading more advanced books, I was listening to audio books at native level speed. I couldn't understand a word and everything sounded like gibberish. I had YouTube channels where I would tune into videos regularly. They were from native speakers who spoke at native speed as well.

This process is frustrating in the beginning, but it's not to understand what you hear, but to get accustomed to how people speak at native speed. I've noticed that the more I read and built my vocabulary, the more words I started to hear and speed was becoming less and less of a problem.

Fast forward to December of 2025 and my reading speed has increased and I can understand native speed Spanish better than ever. With two, short years, I've learned more Spanish than previous decades earlier. However, I still have a long way to go.

Tips:

  1. Focus on being a better listener than try to speak. If you can't understand what people say, speaking is useless. Communication requires speaking AND listening, but I would place a huge emphasis on being a better listener.
  2. Listen to content in native speed levels. Don't worry about understanding what you hear. The goal is to get used to listening to the language as an adult who speaks your target language. When you actually start speaking, you can flow more effortlessly because your ears are more sharper. This process takes time, but don't rush the process… it will come. It's better to passively listen to the language because it requires little to no brain power, which means you could do it for hours at a time. For active listening, it should be done no more than 5–10 minutes max. When your ears become more fine-tuned to the language, you'll be able to actively listen longer, just as you can with English.
  3. Switch your devices and apps into your target language. Start off with your social media and YouTube apps. By engaging with your devices in your target language, you get daily exposure to the language without much effort. For people with a target language that has a whole other writing system, you may want to do this once you're more familiar with the script.
  4. Read every single day. It doesn't matter if it's a sentence or a whole book, read as much as you can and stop when you don't feel like reading anymore. What I like to do is read as soon as I wake up, even if it's only one sentence the whole day. I highly suggest investing in a Kindle or Apple Books subscription.
  5. Put your target's language dictionary app on your phone so you can look things up as you see them. For example, you may be looking at YouTube videos and the title is in your target language. You may see an unfamiliar word. A quick search will give you a quick answer.
  6. There is a learn/forget process you'll go through. You WILL forget things after reading them minutes ago. This is okay. Just keep looking the word up each time you forget. Trust your brain power. You will memorize it with enough exposure in due time.
  7. Read more books than blogs as a beginner. Some people make grammatical and spelling errors. Published books, on the other hand, have teams of proof readers who make sure the book has little to no spelling or grammatical errors. When you have a better command and foundation of the language, you can enjoy blogs and social media posts full of spelling errors and social media abbreviations (lol, brb, etc.)
  8. Have fun. If you can't have fun in the language, you'll give up very easily. Keep in mind that this is not school and you're not gonna be tested so don't try to cram the language into your head with reptition drills. Daily exposure is more important than forced memorization.

Take the organic approach to language learning. Trying to force-feed the language into your head will burn you out and it's very unnecessary. You will forget things no matter how much you've drilled them into your head in one given time. This is why reading is so powerful because you naturally drill words into your head without using brute force.

Don't be surprised if you've at a very high level in your target language in just 3–5 short years. If you take the life long approach, it will only get better… just like your English.