I’m wanting to start learning Spanish, and I’m looking for a free option that isn’t Duolingo.
I don’t like the gamey fomo aspect of it.
Anyone have a favorite place they found?
Language Transfer is free and teaches you why the language is the way it is rather than just memorization.
My recollection is you can get to a 3000 word conversational level much faster than via straight memorization (ex. Duolingo).
Thank you! I’m also going to check it out, I had been trying to use duo lingo to learn French but it was pure garbage.
Language transfer is amazing! Gets you to a level where you can start learning on your own - I was able to start reading children’s books in spanish and work my up from there.
The Italian course is also excellent, gave me enough skills to feel comfortable traveling & speaking Italian
This looks awesome! Never heard of this one before.
I also want to learn Spanish. I’ll check it out too.
Second this. It gives a really good baseline.
I second this too. I listened to all 90 episodes of the Spanish course.
A vocab primer pdf or website with like 200 of the most common words and phrases & listening to people talk is probably going to get you through the majority of conversations. Word frequency in natural language follows a Zipf’s law distribution, so focusing on the most common words & phrases first is very efficient.
Practice, spaced repetition, and quizzing for memorization and long term retention. Beyond that learning verb conjugations and maybe a English/Spanish book that has one language on the left page and the other on the right for more expanded vocab and variety.
To practice listening, dreaming Spanish has a ton of videos spoken slowly for different levels. There’s a YouTube channel and a website: https://www.dreaming.com/spanish
Thank you!
This is how I got to fluency over the last 2 years. Highly recommend.
I love Dreaming Spanish too! So far I have 150 hours on there.
It’s paid once you get to intermediate level, but the beginner stuff is nearly all free
I don’t think so. There’s definitely free stuff all the way to the top, maybe less of it.
At least when I did it.
Huh, didn’t realize that. They definitely have some intermediate videos on YouTube for free but I guess not as many as on their page.
I always imagined that if I really wanted to learn Spanish without living among Spanish speakers, I’d put on Family Guy or some other show with simple English and that has good subs and dubs. Then either use English audio with Spanish subs and perhaps after getting used to it a bit Spanish dubs with English subs. And after getting the hang of basics, Spanish with Spanish dubs. As Family Guy is so simple you’d get the context from the show, know a word here and there and your brain fills in the holes. Not at first, and then quite badly, but I think if you have like the very basics down, like a weeks course or something, and then you just start binging a show you know like that, constantly on the background, I’d assume you’d be a somewhat functional speaker in a year or two at least. Or you’ll just learn what “giggity” is in Spanish and nothing else. Either or. Or something in between. Or not.
Nevermindme just passing by I’ve no actual suggestions
This lady, Butterfly Spanish. And Anki flashcards - the app seems really backwards at first but it really works.
I agree that Duolingo is annoying. Felt like I got somewhere with it but it wastes so much of your time.
Anki is incredible if you use it regularly. Super customisable as well
Thank you!
Edit: is this the right flash card app?
That is the correct one, yep! You can also get it from F-Droid!
Cool, thanks!
Do you know of a good spanish Anki deck?
Pimsleur works well for that.
TIL: https://comparelanguageapps.com/index.html
Evidence-Based Language Learning Research
Discover which language learning apps actually work through rigorous statistical analysis by Dr. Roumen Vesselinov and his team.
tbh if you just use the free version of duolingo i don’t think you can do many lessons now, the energy runs out after like 2-3 lessons max
im learning french so i use it just as a daily reminder to do something in french but outside of it, there should be loads of music and podcasts and audiobooks on spotify that you can use, i can’t be specific but there is things like news in slow french that surely must exist for spanish
if you have a decent video card with 8gb vram can look into lm studio with eurollm and run your own chatbot locally
can say things like, i am an a1 spanish learner, give me a word in English to translate to spanish and tell me if i get it right or wrong
give me a sentence in spanish to translate into english etc
mistral.ai is your best bet if you want something online, they are a french company but do a lot with european languages
hellotalk is good if you want to listen in on people learning to speak but the quality of audio depends on the persons mic quality so might be better for later in learning journey
there’s tons of stuff, best is usually just to seek out books/music/sites and do your best to spend as much of your day learning, the more time you do the faster you learn but it is tough! good luck!
My problem with LLMs for this use is that the language learner is not an expert and can be misled by a bot’s hallucinations
are you able to point some out on a1/b2 content on mistral for me? im interested to see if you’ve found some
They probably cant because they dient storend time using AI to learn a language their already proficient in. That exactly why is problematic. You can’t know if the explanations are good unless you get an actual human who knows the language to verify it.
so the irony is that you guys are hallucinating an answer confidently, AI is really good at translation and language
https://www.deepl.com/en for example is far better than google translate was because they leapt onto ML/AI earlier
If you don’t want to straight up use Mistral/EuroLLM which are trained on European languages:
The company, which launched two years ago, released on Tuesday Mistral Large 3, which the startup claims maintains the same level of performance in “a large number of languages,” particularly European ones.
“Most AI labs focus on their native language, but Mistral Large 3 was trained on a wide variety of languages, making advanced AI useful for billions who speak different native languages,” the company said in a press release.
If you don’t want to directly use a chatbot there’s also https://morpheem.org/ and https://languatalk.com/try-langua which uses AI but builds it around the games specifically, vs just straight up telling the AI bot what to do
AI is really good at translating, but not nearly as good at explaining grammar. I have tried before to get a mistral tutor explain to me when a verb takes the gender of the direct object or of the indirect object in Hindi. It gave me a wildly different answer than chatgpt.
yeah mistral is weak like that, I would say they’re at least a year away from chatgpt and claude but they just don’t have the compute
I would recommend to use AI for basic games like translate sentence, anki style flash cards, fill in the sentence, eg. unlike duolingo it won’t annoy the hell out of you with ads and energy
When I asked my teacher on italki it turned out that both mistral and chatgpt were wrong.
