Just finding dreaming Spanish and wondering if I screwed myself
So I’ve been trying to learn Spanish for about 18 months now. It was duo lingo, then it was babbel, then it was language transfer, and then it was pimsleur. All the while, I had been going to Spanish language meet ups every 2 weeks, maybe with a few breaks here and there.
I would say my confidence and comfortability speaking Spanish skyrocketed since Pimsleur, and its improved so much. I am on level 5 and have like 23 lessons left until I’ve finished all of pimsleur Spanish.
I was feeling so confident that I realized that I needed to start immersing myself so I can hear and understand things better, all with the confidence of pimsleur to be able to be comfortable with sentence structure etc. recently i hired a tutor where we will Be conversing in Spanish for the hour lesson, and she has provided me “homework” in that of readings, podcasts, and videos, and we will go to the lesson to talk about it.
But reading all the stories on here about not starting with speaking but instead starting with listening has me spooked - did I do this wrong? Am I totally f*cked from an accent perspective because I’ve gone to language meetups for the last 18 months and have tried to learn Spanish that way?
I put my non DS hours at 150 (language meet ups, babel, language transfer, 4 years of high school, and other miscellaneous stuff) and then separately added 37.5 hours to represent my pimsleur progress (gave myself credit for 15 minutes of each lesson).
I am starting to get nervous that maybe I have set myself up in a position to sound totally gringo forever lol. Let me be clear; I don’t need to sound like a native. But I would say that I would like to have a “good” accent.
I’m hoping just more and more and more listening and immersion can help me get there, but am wondering if I need to pump the breaks on anything I’m doing. Maybe even wipe clean my 150 hours from the tracker (even tho I would say I comfortably know 800+ words if you include conjugations)
Idk. This community seems nice so figured I’d kind of vent and see if anyone else has/is experiencing what I’ve experienced. At any rate I’m excited to start this journey and am hoping to get to 1000 hours by next Christmas!