Refold

Got into a debate with some folks on Reddit a few days ago about how long it takes to reach B2 comprehension, and there was near universal pushback against my hypothesis.

I'm really curious to hear if the language learning community at large also disagrees with me.

I'm going to formalize and clarify the hypothesis to make it clear exactly what I'm proposing.

Hypothesis:

• If you are a native in a Latin-based language (English, Spanish, Italian, etc)
• And you are attempting to learn French
• If you focus exclusively on comprehension (reading/listening)
• And you invest 250 hours of intensive, focused, self-study (vocab, grammar, translation, test prep)
• And you consume passive media

We recently got a shoutout on r / learnfrench for our French deck, and I want to explain why we built it and why it’s the most efficient way to learn basic vocab.

The problem with most French Anki decks

The most popular French deck on AnkiWeb has 33,474 cards to learn 5,000 words. At 20 cards per day, that's 4.6 YEARS to finish.

Let's be honest: studying Anki sucks. It's boring, and unless you're actually engaging with French content regularly, memorizing flashcards isn't particularly useful anyway.

**Our approach: Get you out o

We recently got a shoutout on r / learnfrench for our French deck, and I want to explain why we built it and why it’s the most efficient way to learn basic vocab.

The problem with most French Anki decks

The most popular French deck on AnkiWeb has 33,474 cards to learn 5,000 words. At 20 cards per day, that's 4.6 YEARS to finish.

Let's be honest: studying Anki sucks. It's boring, and unless you're actually engaging with French content regularly, memorizing flashcards isn't particularly useful anyway.

**Our approach: Get you ou

If you could go back in time and give yourself one piece of language learning advice, what would it be?

Personally, I’d tell myself to start tracking my time. I have no idea how many hours I’ve spent studying Spanish, and I really wish I had that data. I have friends who tracked from day one and can point to specific milestones—like “after X hours, I could understand Y.” I can't say that, but I wish I could.

How about you? What advice would you give your past self? And if you haven’t been learning long, what question would you want to ask your fluent future self?

Hey r/spanishlearning!

I've seen a lot of people talking about what the best app is to learn Spanish, and it's YouTube. Hands down.

That said, finding good Spanish content on YouTube can be tricky.When you try to use your YouTube account to watch content in the new language, you'll still get tempting recommendations in your native language and have a hard time discovering new content.

Your algorithm won’t suddenly shift overnight just because you have decided to learn Spanish.

What you need is a new profile just for Spanish and a strategy to train the algorithm to show you content in Spanish.

Here's what I recommend...

1. Create a new immersion profile or channel on YouTu

Hey r/languagelearning!

I've seen a lot of people talking about how hard it is to find good target language content on YouTube. When you try to use your YouTube account to watch content in the new language, you'll still get tempting recommendations in your native language and have a hard time discovering new content.

Your algorithm won’t suddenly shift overnight just because you have decided to learn a new language.

What you need is a new profile just for the language you're learning and a strategy to train the algorithm to show you content in the language you want to learn.

Here's what I recommend...

1. Create a new immersion profile or channel on YouTube

You can create a new

I remember when I first started learning a language, I spent way too much time hunting for language resources. And looking around at the posts here it looks like I'm in good company.

Our Korean learner community has been compiling their favorite resources into a pretty extensive resource document. I've shared our resource docs for other languages in comments around Reddit and people seem to really find them helpful, so I wanted to share it with you.

Link: https://refold.link/r-korean-resources

It has suggestions for:

• Vocabulary references
• Phonetics and writing
• Grammar
• Study materials (immersion content)

There are no links to pirated content, just resources on the web, or links

Hey r/Spanish, I've already asked this before somewhere else, but I wanted to hear your thoughts. Has learning Spanish positively affected your life in a surprising way?

On the surface, the answer seems obvious.

• You learn a new language (duh!)
• You gain the ability to connect with new cultures
• Traveling is easier and more fun
• You can connect with relatives and your heritage
• There are potential economic benefits
• Etc.

For me, some of the best things I gained from learning Spanish weren’t related to the language at all.

Have you had the same experience? Has language learning unexpectedly changed your life?

I’ll start: I didn’t expect that learning Spanish would teach