I took a week off from learning languages, and something remarkable happened: I realized I could understand most Spanish in all places that had it for the first time!💡

I’ve noticed that after last week off, starting from last Wednesday, I’m benefiting a lot more from the two months of immersion in Spanish I’ve been doing from home.

This morning, for example, after what seemed to be a bit of a “cooling period”, which I recommend after months-long, hardcore, language-learning periods, of “taking the hot, boiling water of ‘[enter target language] at high frequencies’ off the stove” for a week, I had another monolingual Spanish lesson that was excellent ✨: I hadn’t spoken to my Spanish tutor in a while, so we talked about so many different, nuanced topics — even complex ones (like Spanish grammar in Spanish! 😆).

In other words, like Neo told Morpheus after Morpheus walked up to him while “combat training” was being downloaded into his mind in the Spanish dubbing of the first Matrix movie:

Ya se español. (“I know Spanish.”) 🧘

⚠️ Now, do I still listen and read things in the media in Spanish that I have no idea what the speakers are saying?
Absolutely, that’s the majority of the time, honestly.

⚠️ Do I still have basic problems conjugating fundamental Spanish verb tenses from time to time?
Yes, I still do. No lie.

⚠️ Most importantly, is my Spanish anywhere near sounding like that of a native speaker?
Of course not.

☝️However, there’s one key factor that allows me to say, “I know Spanish” not from a place of arrogance (confidence + ignorance, as a great friend once told me), but out of clarity + the simple feeling that I’ve accomplished my goal of reaching a more-or-less B2-level of Spanish.
Specifically, it’s the point at which your target language can be learned in the target language itself through methods of recursion 🤯 In other words, the point at which you use the words, expressions, and sentences that you do know in your target language to look up the ones that you don’t know in that same target language vis-à-vis monolingual language learning. 💡

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That’s all for now.

I’ll continue maintaining and expanding my Spanish.

I’m also currently learning Korean.
I plan to learn a lot of Korean Soul music, as it’s a very dear genre of music to me and makes me feel deeply connected to my roots. I’ll do this at the beginning of my Korean-learning journey, outside of my Korean lessons.

Furthermore, in my Korean lessons, I’ll be using the language laddering techniques to learn Korean before going monolingual with it at the B1 and B2 levels.
For those who are curious, I have two different tutors for Korean: one who teaches me Korean in Chinese and another who teaches me Korean in Japanese.

🌐 Lastly, if you’d like to read my blog post about my fundamental method for learning foreign languages, you can check it out here:
https://pjnalls.dev/blog/en/foreign-immersion-environments-at-home/