From Zero To Fluent: Three Years of Spanish Growth

Reflecting on the Journey and Process

For the last three years, learning Spanish has been my primary long-term goal. It began with religious Duolingo use during the pandemic, and led to fifteen months of solo travel through Latin America and Europe, followed by a relocation to Colombia. I’ve mixed bursts of intensive structured study (IRL in Guatemalan Spanish schools and online with BaseLang) with long stretches of learning through daily life and conversation.

Learning Spanish has been scary and intimidating, frustrating and exhausting. But it’s also been euphoric and earth-shaking, exciting and surreal. It’s taken a lot of hard work, but I’m so proud of how far I’ve come.

Conscious Competence and Growing Ease

As of March 2025, I’ve been living in Colombia for a year and a half. I’m still far from perfect. And I can be a bit of a perfectionist. So I’ve been hesitant to claim that I’m fluent in Spanish. It feels like a moving target. No matter how much I advance, I can still see how far I have to go.

“Fluency” as a concept is pretty broadly defined, but I can see that I’m finally in its early stages. Back in 2022, my fluency goal was to be able to eavesdrop. Now, I can easily pick up the thread of other people’s conversations, and I can express myself with relative ease. I dream in Spanish sometimes, and I conduct all my day-to-day life admin in Spanish. I’m at a point where I sometimes even take my second language for granted.

Big Breakthroughs

Listening Comprehension

The most dramatic difference I’ve noticed since moving to Colombia has been an improvement in my listening comprehension. It took a while–I had assumed that with full immersion, it would happen more quickly, but it was at least eight months before it really clicked.

But suddenly, I realized that I could understand just about everything that most people were saying. I can watch the news and listen to Spanish audiobooks. A year and a half ago, I was missing about 25% of conversations, and it provoked consistent anxiety. It was something I got used to, but now that I can relax more, I’m aware of how much that weighed on me.

In the Flow of Native Speech

One of the best things about my current level is that I can finally understand a fast-paced conversation in a big group of native speakers. I’m still a bit hesitant to speak up in that setting, but that’s often true in English, too. But being able to follow the thread and participate makes me feel much more integrated into my Colombian social life.

Earlier this year, I went on a multi-day backpacking trip with a group of six friends–all young Colombians. To my delight, I could now understand their slang-laden jokes and anecdotes. We played verbal memory games, made up songs, and I taught them to play 20 Questions. It was a setting where I would’ve felt lost and isolated a year earlier, but now it’s a source of connection.

Though listening comprehension is one of my strongest skills right now, noisy environments like bars and sound distortion over loud speakers are still a major challenge, reminding me that the journey is ongoing.

Advanced Grammar: The Subjunctive Mood

I also finally have a handle on the infamous Subjunctive Mood, which is a notoriously difficult concept for English speakers to learn. I use it correctly most of the time, and though I still make mistakes, I understand them and can correct them myself.

Ongoing Struggles

Simple Grammar – Gender and Conjugation

Even though I understand complex grammatical structures, I still often make mistakes with the simplest ones. Misgendering words is a common one for me because in English our words don’t have genders. So even though I understand the concept and know the correct form for almost all of the words I use, I often slip up or forget to match the gender of my adjectives to the gender of my nouns. Or sometimes I mis-conjugate, using a first-person verb form when talking about someone else. I’ve noticed that many other advanced Spanish learners continue to make these two common mistakes in conversation. Though we can easily identify the errors, they still slip out when we’re speaking quickly.

The Double-R

Rolling my Rs, the notoriously difficult “rr” sound, has been one of my slowest challenges to overcome. Back in 2022, I couldn’t pronounce it at all. Unlike my other challenges, this one is more about muscle training.

I’ve noticed that it’s been easier to learn to pronounce the “rr” after certain vowels–I learned to say “carro” pretty quickly, but “irracional” requires more effort and still comes out sounding pretty weird. Sometimes I walk down the street muttering, “Arrrr, errrr, irrrr, orrrr, urrrr,” to myself to practice.

Next Steps: Beyond Competence

Reading and Vocabulary

At my current level, one of my biggest areas for further study and growth is vocabulary. This one stands out to me because my English vocabulary is robust, and it’s always been something I’ve enjoyed. So when I don’t know a specific word in Spanish, it’s a frustrating deficit. Unfortunately, I’ve also noticed that learning Spanish has made it more difficult to access my English vocabulary. Sometimes even simple English words are harder to find when I’m searching for them through the translation machine in my head.

Nevertheless, I’m determined to improve my Spanish vocabulary. I’m doing some reading in Spanish, underlining unknown words and looking them up. Then I add them to my flashcard app, and practice the flashcards a few times a week. I also try to add new flashcards when novel words come up in conversations. It’s a cumbersome and time-consuming process, but it’s the most efficient way I know of to expand my vocabulary rapidly.

Natural Phrasing

Alongside vocabulary, refining how I phrase things is an ongoing challenge. It’s easy for me to communicate ideas and get my point across, but I know that I often do it in a way that sounds odd to a native speaker. It frequently happens when I try to describe something that I’ve never talked about in Spanish before. It’s especially difficult in cases where we’d usually use an idiom in English. Sometimes these idioms translate directly into Spanish, but I often realize that a direct translation doesn’t exist.

Refining my speech in this way is an ongoing process, which will also take a lot of time and exposure. I try to pay close attention to the way that Colombians phrase things, and I try to incorporate those phrasings into my own speech.

The Power of Partnership: Our Couple’s Language Exchange

I’ve mentioned previously that my boyfriend LuisMi and I are both bilingual. When we first met, we spoke only Spanish together. A few months in, we switched to alternating days, speaking one day in English and the next in Spanish. About a year ago, we switched to speaking for a whole week in English followed by a whole week in Spanish.

We made the switch because we thought it would be a more immersive learning experience. When you speak your native language every other day, you’re not giving your brain as much time to really adjust to practicing your second language. We’ve found that getting over that hump is really beneficial.

This technique of weekly switching is fun for us, and it’s become a natural part of our dynamic. We both get the opportunity to learn and grow, playing the roles of teacher and student. We teach each other new words and give gentle corrections, both of which don’t happen as much in conversation with other people. During the long periods of time off from formal Spanish lessons, talking with LuisMi gives me another avenue for improvement.

Looking Ahead

Though I hope I never cease to appreciate my learning, complete “unconscious competence” is my next target. I want a versatile vocabulary, polished, natural speech, and effortless conversation. I’m at a point in my learning where an improvement by an order of magnitude is more difficult to achieve, but I’m going to keep building on it. Looking back at the last three years of my journey, I know that Sachi from 2022 would be very proud.