One Year of Spanish Immersion Using Refold (2024)

One year ago today, on a whim, I opened Netflix and searched for a new show to watch. While scrolling through the endless options, I found a show that sounded interesting: Money Heist. I remembered seeing the name in advertisem*nts and internet discussions, and I hadn’t watched a heist show in quite a while, so I figured I’d give it a shot.

About five minutes into the first episode, I noticed that the audio seemed to be out of sync with the actors’ lips. I opened the audio settings for the show to investigate and discovered, to my surprise, that I was actually watching the show dubbed in English! The original audio for the show was in Spanish.

I had studied Spanish pretty seriously for several years in the past, but at the time I found Money Heist, I was on a five-year hiatus from engaging with the language. I decided it would be a fun challenge to try watching the show in its original Spanish in order to see how much I could remember from my earlier studies, so I switched on the Spanish audio and Spanish subtitles and settled in to finish the first episode.

On that day, my love for Spanish was rekindled, and I’ve been immersing ever since. After now having passed the one-year milestone, I decided to write this post to detail what I did, what worked (and didn’t work) for me, and where I plan on going next in my journey.

Note: if you’re already familiar with immersion learning and Refold, feel free to skip this section.

After getting hooked by Money Heist, I began scouring the internet for resources on how to improve my Spanish and what I could do to speed up the language learning process. I had read some of Stephen Krashen’s work in the past, so most of my search revolved around input-based methods — which is how I eventually stumbled on Matt vs. Japan and Refold.

These resources have been absolutely indispensable for my language learning journey, so I definitely recommend checking them out in full if you’re interested in learning a foreign language, but I’ll provide a brief summary of the methods here so we’re on the same page.

The key premise behind Refold’s ideology is the idea of language immersion. Refold asserts that no amount of explicit grammar study, textbook exercises, or speaking drills will get you fluent in a language. The only way to reach true fluency is to consume content — and to consume a lot of it.

They then split language immersion into three different types: intensive active immersion, free-flow active immersion, and passive immersion. Intensive active immersion entails focusing all of your attention on the content you’re immersing in (whether it be a show, podcast, book, etc.) and actively looking up words or grammar structures that you don’t know. On the other hand, free-flow active immersion gets rid of the dictionary and only requires you to focus all of your attention on your immersion. You allow yourself to follow the story without getting bogged down by the details. Lastly, there’s passive immersion, which is immersion that is done while performing another task that doesn’t require much attention. Examples include listening to an audiobook while you fold clothes or listening to a podcast while you drive.

In order to reach fluency, ideally, you will want to employ a mix of all three types of immersion. Intensive active immersion will be most productive on a per-hour basis, but it is also by far the most mentally taxing and most difficult to fit into a daily schedule. As a result, the majority of my immersion has fallen into the free-flow active and passive categories.

Refold also recommends the usage of a flashcard app called Anki, which is a form of spaced repetition software (SRS). An SRS basically optimizes the time between reviews of your flashcards so that you review a card just before forgetting it. Saving a review for just before (or just after) you’ve forgotten the content of the card has a couple of important effects. Firstly, it prevents you from wasting time by reviewing a card that you already know very well. Secondly, by waiting until you are on the verge of forgetting, reviewing the card becomes much more difficult. The difficulty of recalling the contents of your card actually causes your brain to reinforce the neural circuitry which contains that memory to a much greater degree than if your review had been easy (see Make It Stick: The Science of Successful Learning for more info on this phenomenon).

The role of the SRS is to help memorize important vocabulary and grammar structures. Cards typically consist of Spanish vocabulary on the front and English on the back at first. However, you very quickly move on to creating sentence cards, which are created from sentences that you find during your immersion in which there is one unknown element (either a word or grammar structure). Sentence cards consist of a full Spanish sentence on the front, and then one of a few options on the back:

• A translation of the sentence into English
• An English definition for a word you don’t know in the sentence
• A Spanish definition for a word you don’t know in the sentence

The best option of these three will depend on your level of ability in the language and the specific word or grammar structure you’re trying to learn. Combining the SRS with immersion is an extremely powerful tool and allows you to rapidly expand your vocabulary, helping you quickly move onto more challenging immersion material.

Now that we have the basics of immersion-based learning and SRS usage ironed out, I’ll talk about what I did on my journey and how I found it worked out.

Stats:
Books: 20
Pages: 5132
Words (estimate): 1,539,600

Reading has been by far my most successful domain throughout my Spanish journey. I bought a couple of graded readers right after starting Money Heist (Classic Spanish Stories and Plays and Read & Think Spanish) and started working through them. Immediately, I found that I loved picking up vocabulary and grammar through extensive reading but struggled to do the same through listening. As a result, I shifted the majority of my immersion time to reading. Most of my reading immersion for the first few months consisted of free-flow active immersion because of the difficulty of looking up words — I felt that it broke the flow of my reading if I looked up too many words and made significantly affected my enjoyment of the story.

After the first few months, I decided to set up an old Kindle I had lying around and start using it to read Spanish ebooks. This was a massive game-changer for me because of the ease with which I could look up unknown words. I no longer needed to interrupt my reading to go to SpanishDict or WordReference in order to find a definition. Instead, all I needed to do was highlight the word and get the definition without breaking the flow of the book. As a result, I was able to do intensive reading at essentially the same speed that I did free-flow reading previously, which helped my vocabulary and grammar knowledge to explode.

Even after getting the Kindle, I was still very bad about sentence mining from my reading immersion. I found the process to be extremely tedious, and so I would have a week where I’d stay on task followed by months where I would create 0 new sentence cards. I eventually stumbled upon Migaku Kindle, which marked another turning point in my reading journey. This Anki extension allows me to automatically import Anki cards for all of the word lookups I perform on my Kindle, reducing the time for sentence card creation to essentially nothing. As a result, since incorporating this add-on, I’ve created thousands of sentence cards and significantly expanded my vocabulary.

Using this approach, I now feel fairly comfortable reading the vast majority of material that I find. For example, I recently read Crónica de una Muerta Anunciada by Gabriel García Márquez while making few, if any, lookups. While there were definitely words I didn’t know, they didn’t impact my enjoyment or understanding of the story.

Takeaways:
- Read a lot to acquire more vocabulary and grammar
- Buy a Kindle or some other e-reader for fast word lookups
- If using a Kindle, make frequent use of the Migaku Kindle add-on for Anki

Stats:
Active Listening
- Netflix: 180 hours
- YouTube (estimate): 300 hours
- Podcasts (estimate): 50 hours
Passive Listening
- Podcasts (estimate): 20 hours
Total hours (estimate): 550 hours

I began my listening journey focusing mostly on watching with Spanish subtitles. As a result, at the start of my journey, listening was more of a hybrid listening/reading activity for me. Later on, as my vocabulary expanded, I began to slowly wean myself off of subtitles. I began by removing them entirely from YouTube immersion while keeping them on for Netflix immersion. I then started to remove subtitles on easier Netflix shows, while leaving them on some of the slang-heavy shows I was watching such as Élite or Pablo Escobar: El Patron del Mal. Starting around April 2021, I removed subtitles on all content and now focus purely on listening without any reading support.

Due to my heavy emphasis on reading, my listening has suffered a bit comparatively. I’m now at the point where I understand essentially 100% of vocabulary and grammar structures that are used in TV shows, podcasts, or everyday conversation, but there are many times where I simply cannot parse the sounds and understand the words that are being said. It has been improving steadily since removing all subtitle supports in April, but it’s still far below my reading ability.

I also started doing much more passive listening in the past month (I’m actually passive listening while writing this article), and I’ve noticed that this has had a huge effect on my listening ability. While I’m usually distracted by other things while doing passive listening, the little bits of language that do seep in start to add up over time. I’ve been focused mainly on understanding the Dominican dialect lately by passive listening to a wide range of Dominican podcasts, and so far I have noticed a very rapid increase in my comprehension of that accent.

In summary, if I could do things over, I would have removed all subtitles from my listening practice significantly earlier — probably sometime around January 2021. In addition, I would have attempted to passive immerse as much as physically possible since Day 1. It’s quite easy to fit in at least a couple of hours of passive listening every day, and these hours begin to add up rapidly. Lastly, and perhaps most importantly, I would make sure to prioritize compelling content over comprehensible content as much as possible. I find that when a show is way above my level but extremely good, I learn significantly more than from a show that’s comprehensible but not compelling. Don’t let difficult content scare you away — if it looks enjoyable, dive in as soon as you can.

In my experience with Refold, listening is a skill that requires a ton of hours to develop and it cannot be improved much through other means. Yes, reading helps with actually knowing the words and grammar that are being said, but it can’t help you with hearing those words in rapid speech. So make sure to invest a lot of time and energy here.

Takeaways:
- Remove subtitle supports as early as possible
- Start passive listening from Day 1 and do it every day
- It is more important for your content to be compelling than for it to be comprehensible

Stats:
iTalki: 43 lessons
In-person conversation (estimate): 6 hours

I deviated a bit from Refold methodology here, but I ended up starting iTalki almost immediately after beginning Spanish immersion in August 2020. I decided to take the plunge in order to overcome some output-related fears I knew I had from my previous experience with Spanish. The iTalki lessons definitely helped a lot with getting over this fear, which facilitated in-person conversations once I felt ready for those.

In addition, the lessons helped expose me to gaps in my vocabulary and grammar knowledge, which I then targeted through immersion and Anki. This allowed me to systematically learn phrases which made my output more fluid and natural over time. I think this exposure of what you don’t know is probably the biggest advantage of speaking practice, so make sure to note down words or phrases that you wanted to say but couldn’t think of during your iTalki lessons.

When you do decide to start your iTalki lessons, make sure to find a friendly tutor who you feel comfortable speaking with. You will likely be spending dozens of hours conversing with this person, so it will serve you well to prioritize the quality and enjoyment of the conversation over any particular accent.

Takeaways:
- Start iTalki early if you have output-related anxiety
- Use immersion and Anki to address gaps in your knowledge that iTalki exposes
- Find a friendly tutor that you feel comfortable speaking with for hours

Stats:
Learned Cards: 671
Unseen Cards: 2760

Anki has been the biggest struggle on my Refold journey. I don’t particularly enjoy making or reviewing flashcards, so I’ve been incredibly inconsistent with using the app. I have two big recommendations here for making your life with Anki easier. Firstly, as I mentioned in the reading section, find extensions and add-ons that make your life easier. Migaku Kindle is huge for speeding up the card creation process for reading immersion. There’s also Migaku Browser Extension, which will help you make audio cards extremely quickly as well. Find as many extensions of this nature as you can so that you can reduce your card creation time as close to 0 as possible. The more effortless you make this process, the more likely you will be to complete it.

Secondly, for actually reviewing cards, try to schedule specific times within the day where you’ll use Anki. I find that if I leave it up to me to decide when I study my flashcards, I continually put it off until I’m eventually too tired to do my reviews. With a specific time, it removes the guesswork of when I should do my reviews. In that same vein, experiment with scheduling multiple review sessions per day. It can be intimidating to need to do 150 Anki reviews in a single session. However, if you split those reviews between three or four sessions throughout the day, it suddenly becomes a very manageable amount.

I highly recommend implementing these strategies to make Anki usage easier and more consistent. Whenever I’m using Anki on daily basis, I notice massive changes in my vocabulary and grammar knowledge. I can’t quite quantify how large the speed up is from using Anki, but it feels as if I’m progressing at least twice as fast, if not more, when I’m frequently making and reviewing flashcards.

Takeaways:
- Use extensions to make Anki card creation as easy as possible
- Schedule specific times through the day for Anki
- Experiment with splitting Anki sessions up throughout the day
- Make sure to actually do Anki on a daily basis. It makes a huge difference

My Spanish journey so far has been one of the most challenging and fulfilling projects I’ve ever undertaken. I’m unbelievably surprised with the progress I’ve been able to make, but, at the same time, I know I have much farther to go before I reach my goals with this language. I’d like to pass the DELE C2 exam, read the great works of Spanish language literature, live in a Spanish speaking country, and so much more over the coming years. I anticipate it will probably take me another 1000 hours of active listening and 30–40 additional books in order to reach that point, so I’ll have my work cut out for me. However, if the last year, has been any indication, it’ll be the most enjoyable work imaginable.

I hope my experiences on this journey have been helpful to any readers out there who are currently learning a language or thinking about starting. Feel free to leave a comment if you have any additional questions or want to know more about my experience learning Spanish. Thanks for reading and happy learning!