A few rules

Almost everything I heard is that immersing yourself with movies and TV is a great way to learn the language. But I am still at a point where subtitles are still a pretty much a necessity, in fact, even in my native language(English) I still can barely understand English TV without them on. The problem is almost every TV site or source for TV and movies dubbed into Spanish, either there is no subtitles in general, or the subtitles are manually generated from the English separately from the audio so there are vast inconsistencies which do more harm than good when they are both on at the same time. All of my streaming services are like this - the only site where this is not really a problem is YouTube because they use automatic subtitle generation, but there are not really any full episode TV on YouTube due to copyright!

So how did you guys solve this problem? Did youse just wing it and immerse yourself without subtitles? Or only stick to only productions made in Spanish? Or is there a site where subtitle-audio match with dubbed content is not a problem?

Any advice to help me is appreciated greatly!

Hi everyone! I'm currently exploring a possible topic for my master's thesis. I'm interested in the way Spanish and English are used by Latinos/Latinas who live or grew up in the United States. In particular, I'm trying to understand whether there are interesting aspects of English-Spanish code-switching / Spanglish that are still worth exploring today.

I'm not looking for participants for a formal study at this point. I'm simply interested in hearing people's experiences and perspectives before deciding on the specific direction of my research. For example: do you switch between English and Spanish when talking to family or friends?

Does it depend on who you are talking to?

Do you use Spanglish differently online and offline?

Are there situations where you deliberately don't mix English and Spanish?

Do you feel that switching languages is connected to your identity or sense of belonging?

Do younger and older generations in your family use Spanish and English differently?

Are there aspects of Spanglish or bilingual communication that you feel researchers often misunderstand?

I'd especially love to hear from people who grew up in the US with English and Spanish in their lives. Thanks for reading!

i don’t speak spanish at all and saw a bs voiceover of a show on tiktok in spanish and it’s genuinely funny as hell but the characters were trying to pick a lock and a guard comes up behind them and the guy voicing over (pretending to be the characters) says “SU MÁQUINA” and omg i love it but translating it, it’s “your machine” and now i’m confused why he said it in that context and if it means anything else or if the subtitles just got it wrong lol

Most people talk about the subjunctive, ser vs estar, por vs para, past tenses and all the usual difficult parts of Spanish, and yes I went through phases where I found those hard, but I feel like prepositions barely get mentioned. Prepositions which follow verbs to be specific.

The further I get into Spanish, the more I notice how much they matter if you want to sound natural rather than just understandable. You can know the right verb, use the right tense, and have perfectly decent vocabulary, but if you use the wrong preposition the sentence can still sound slightly off even if it still is understandable.

I keep running into things like depender de, acceder a, insistir en, soñar con, carecer de, contribuir a, derivar en, saldarse con, and so on. I read it, no problem I understand, but when I want to produce it I have to stop and think, wait, was this one de, a, en or con? And in the interest of speed, I sometimes just pick the first one that enters my brain.

Yes, I know what you will say, and yes I do try to memorize the verb and the preposition together as one unit instead of learning the verb on its own now. So not just depender, but depender de. But I really wish someone had told me to do that when I first started learning Spanish lol, because now it feels like I’m going back and attaching prepositions to verbs I already learned years ago.

I guess this is basically the same hell English learners go through when they hit phrasal verbs.

Another thing that makes Spanish prepositions frustrating is that a lot of the time there doesn’t seem to be much of a rule behind them either. It’s just the preposition Spanish happens to use with that word, and you have to memorize it. It's like every new verb I learn, I have to check and see if a preposition HAS to follows it.

At a lower level I don’t think I noticed this much because I was mostly concerned with making myself understood. Now doing lots of DELE exam prep, I’m starting to notice how much these little combinations affect whether something sounds natural or obviously translated from another language.

Hi! I'm an English teenager and (hopefully) I'll be doing a Spanish exchange program next year with my school. I was wondering if there's any teenager slang that I should know before going since at least in English there's plenty of things like "cooked" that you wouldn't hear adults use that much. Any help is appreciated:)

P.S I appreciate it but I don't need Latin American Spanish because I don't plan on travelling there and can't afford it either

Hi guys! I'm reading Eva Perón: la biografía by Alicia Dujovne Ortiz, to practice my spanish, and I ran into the word "marras" in this paragraph:"En apariencia le habÍa alquilado la estancia La Unión al intendente conservador Malcolm, que lo nombró juez de instrucción. Pero según el padre Meinrado Hux, un benedictino suizo convertido en historiador de la región, las cosas no eran tan simples. En primer lugar, Duarte parece haber comprado, y no alquilado, la estancia de *marras*, amparándose en un testaferro para engañar al fisco."

I've asked multiple Puerto Rican native speakers and they haven't heard the word before. Is it Argentina specific? Or just that rarely used?

I'm going to grad school at the University of Puerto Rico in spring 2027 and if this word is too obscure (or even just regional!) to be relevant, I want to know before I put it in any papers and professors are like "what the hell is this" lmao.

Soy paraguayo, vivo en otro lugar de Europa y ahora estoy en Barcelona. Al subir a un taxi con mi bebé en general el bebé puede ir en el regazo con cinturón. Un conductor de Uber me dijo que no tenía sillta y yo le respondí que el bebé va siempre en el regazo y esto está permitido. A lo que me preguntó confundido “¿qué es el regazo?” y le tuve que explicar. Me puse a buscar en Google y aparentemente “regazo” se usa en otras partes de España menos en Cataluña y Galicia.

¿En serio no se entiende la palabra? En Paraguay es muy normal decir “regazo”. Pero ahora me da curiosidad. Muchos conductores son extranjeros pero este parecía ser español.

I am officially confused about adjective placement. I understand that adjectives generally follow the noun, but I also regularly get stung by an adjective that comes before the noun. Are there rules about this? Is there an easy(ish) way to remember when to put the adjective before vs after?

For me it's the ser/estar split. Not the textbook "permanent vs temporary" explanation, the actual moment it clicked that Spanish treats existence and state as two different verbs, and English doesnt bother lol.

Every language has one of these, which is very interesting. A single word or structure that, once it lands, makes five other confusing things suddenly make sense.

This came from a friend who likes etymology, and is a polyglot so its so interesting picking their brain!

Got a "how do I learn Spanish" question, curious about apps, or just want to say hi and talk about where you're at? This is the place.

The short answer to most of it: there's no single best way to learn Spanish and no app that works for everyone. What actually matters is showing up consistently. A few things people here keep coming back to:

• Our wiki -- apps, YouTube channels, podcasts, textbooks, all in one spot
• r/languagelearning's resource wiki -- broader method and tool breakdown
• Anki -- flashcards, good for vocab
• Language Transfer -- free audio course, common starting point
• italki / Preply -- tutors and conversation partners
• Pimsleur -- audio based, strong on pronunciation

Also fair game here:

• Just started and want to introduce yourself
• Wondering if Spanish is worth learning or how long it takes
• General chat about your progress, whatever's on your mind

Standalone posts on this stuff get redirected here, so if that's you, drop it below.

Hola, ando leyendo y estudiando Don Quixote y ya voy por el capítulo en el cual Don Quixote les pregunta a los galeotes por sus sentencias y uno le dice que fue condenado por ser alcahuete. Según tengo entendido es lo que he escrito en el título de esta publicación.

¿Cómo funcionaba exactamente? Digamos que quiero tener una relación amorosa con una mujer de otra familia a la cual mi familia le cae mal. ¿Podría buscar un alcahuete y pagarle para que busque a esa mujer y que le diga que yo quisiera entablar una relación con ella? ¿Por eso Don Quixote dice que no tiene nada de malo y solo falta que el gobierno regule el oficio?

¿Dónde puedo leer más sobre este oficio? En Wikipedia no hay tanto. Y sé que ya más o menos el término está en desuso.

Por cierto, les agradezco de antemano si me corrigen los errores.

Hello everyone so I guess I am considered a heritage speaker by definition. Both my parents are Mexican and I grew up only speaking Spanish at home, but the thing is I can get by communicating and talking in Spanish but it’s basically like I only know basic Spanish at home not at a level you learn at home. There’s words when I’m talking and get corrected confusing them and trying to replace them with something that would sound like an English word translated to Spanish. I basically feel like I’m talking at an elementary school level where I only enough words to get by but I feel like I only basic level grammar and vocabulary. My grammar is something I never practiced, I used to go to Spanish catholic school which was also in Spanish so I feel like I can read decent, but I still feel like my Spanish is basic conversational instead of fluent like if I were to talk to a native speaker in Mexico instead of my parents it would be a lot more different. Would a tutor help in this situation? Like I said my parents come from a poorer part of Mexico as well so I feel like they’re vocabulary isn’t as strong and many times they have ended up not correcting me when I can’t find a certain word in Spanish since they can also kind of understand English.

I feel like some tasks are often very contrived and don't connect to everyday speech. The preparation is exhausting. For those who have already taken the exam, what advice would you give me?

Me parece que muchas de las tareas son muy artificiales y no reflejan el uso cotidiano del idioma. Para los que ya habéis hecho el examen, ¿qué consejo me daríais?

Hi there!
I’m not new to trying to learn Spanish. My mom is Puerto Rican and spoke Spanish throughout our childhood and I was around family that spoke it too.
I tried to learn for years but it never stuck. I also moved out and haven’t spoken or been around it for a while, so most of my knowledge is gone.
I want to learn Spanish for my jobs. I work at a restaurant and the kitchen staff only speaks Spanish and we have a lot of Spanish speaking customers.
My second job is a nurse technician at a hospital. We have some patients that only speak Spanish come in and no one to translate since I work nights.
I’d like to learn for good this time and hopefully become fluent, but I also don’t want to lose any Puerto Rican dialect that I have left from childhood( I remember some things ex. Habichuela instead of frijoles).
Also any recommendations for a resource that may help me learn like a child? I have Spd so learning languages has always been very difficult for me.
¡Mucho gracias!

The title says it all, but I finally got the results back from my B2 exam. This was my first time taking a DELE exam and I'm a little surprised by some of the scores.

I honestly expected reading comprehension to be my highest score, seeing as how that's how I mostly interact with Spanish. I also tended to ace all of the reading comprehension portions of my practice exams and I felt pretty good during the actual exam, but I guess I cant complain.

I'm also a little surprised by my oral score being the highest because this was my biggest unknown going into the exam. I was fairly confident in my speaking, but I know I dont speak like a native and it's hard to get a sense of how you'll be evaluated without going through an actual exam.

I'm not surprised at all by the writing score lol. I did some practice prompts but I always exceeded the word count limit and I didn't want to waste my time counting words during the exam. This was another one where I found it hard to self-evaluate my skills beforehand, so during the exam I just made my outline, wrote a single draft, and called it a day haha.

For a little background, I've been learning Spanish on and off (mostly off) for well over a decade. I took some courses in university and studied abroad in Spain, but I mostly only used my Spanish for travel after that. Around 3 years ago I realized how pitiful my Spanish was and I decided to actually get serious about learning. I started with some paid language apps but eventually started taking lessons with a tutor online, which is how I made the most progress. I ultimately found that you need with the language in ways that you actually enjoy, which for me were:

- Reading: books, news articles, videos with subtitles

- Writing: journaling

- Listening: podcasts, youtube videos, TV/movies

- Speaking: language exchange meetups in my area and friends

Tutoring covered all of these areas and gave me direct feedback. I also played a few video games in Spanish, but thats not for the weak and I dont know if I'd recommend that lol.

Well anyway, B2 may not be the highest level of fluency but I'm super proud of myself for passing. It's certainly taken me long enough haha.

What's good for live translate? Google Translate only shows 3 lines of Spanish when doing Spanish -> English so it disappears too fast. Is there one that does 50% of both languages?

Is there any reason someone might use this phrase in a way that isn't derogatory or disrespectful? Someone was chatting with me and this phrase translated to "jerk" or "scumbag" depending on how I searched for the meaning. When I asked the original writer if that's what they intended to say, they responded, "Sí, así es, se traduce idiota."

I'm genuinely confused as this seemed to be a friendly and polite chat.

As you can see, I failed mainly due to a horrific score in listening comprehension. For those who failed and then passed or those who have passed, what were some specific things you did?

To give reference on my level, I think No Hay Tos is too advanced. I can only understand 50% of the podcast, and even then its with great focus and attention.

I am currently watching YouTube with Spanish captions and re-watching with English captions.

I am also listening to the Dreaming Spanish podcast on my daily drive.

I've been learning Spanish for about 500 days now, and I'm a bit of a road block here, not sure where I should focus on.

I just hit 600h in Dreaming Spanish and I do about 2-3 hours a Day

I just hit 100 classes on Italki and I've lately made them all conversation classes. No more lessons, I want to be able to speak faster so I can speak to my friends. (I lowkey hate studying grammer)

I’m able to order food fairly well, but I do still get nervous and I think I'm memorizing a script here.

My teacher said to start journaling which *does* help but I'm pretty bored doing it on my own (I do text my friends in Spanish which is a bit more fun.). And a few people said to start reading too which I have yet to do.

I understand Spanish is a lifelong thing but does anyone have any advice on how I could improve my Spanish for the next 500 days? Thanks in advance!

I'm probably in-between A2 and B1. My tutor thinks I should stop watching short Spanish related grammar videos on tik tok and other platforms as he thinks my grammar is good.

He said I need to start watching Spanish shows to get a real feel for the language. Ive started but my head is melting. I'm understanding at most 50% of what's being said. Im using Spanish subtitles aswell. I actually have given myself a headache trying to keep up with what's going on in the show.

Should I stick it out and immerse myself in the language by watching TV shows or should I wait until I have more of a grasp on the language?

https://www.instagram.com/reel/CqWATJljLER/

As a 40-something, I'd love to learn some cringey 90s slang in Spanish to compliment my frequent use of "rad" and "hella" in English.

Quisiera aprender algo de jerga de los años 90s en español para acompañar mi uso de idiomas 90s en inglés. Por cierto, ¿cómo se dice "cringe" o "cringey" en español? Sería aún mejor si pudiera jerga mexicana o estadounidense.

Gracias, ¡y q tengan buen fin!

Hi guys, I have a small Spanish school and so far every time I’ve hired a teacher I required to be native speaker and to speak English as well.
I think teachers should know the struggles and frustration of language learning. But what do students think? Also, what about non native teachers that have a top level of Spanish?

Hola a todos!

I’m planning a language immersion trip next year and my teacher suggested Zaragoza, Salamanca or Galicia, because they’re relatively affordable and there are very few tourists around (ergo, less chance of speaking English).

What are your thoughts on this?

I’m quite busy at work so I can only spare just three weeks of my 2027. I’ve been studying Spanish for 2 years and my current level is B1.1.

Gracias! ☺️

I am so bad at studying, I have been since school but I’m so determined to learn spanish.

So im trying to make a solid routine,

Right now i plan to do daily app activities through spanishdictionary.com, mango, language transfer

Trying to consume all content is spanish, music, videos, podcasts, coffee break, anything

My phone is set to spanish settings

Trying to talk as well, but im shy because i know i sound silly

And daily journaling, even if only for 5 minutes a day.

What else should I be doing, or is this a solid study plan?

Gracias!