Okay so today I tried the Spanish course on Lingodeer! (Latin American, ofc)
I'm starting w "Spanish 1", even though most of it is below my level, bc it's good to go over the basics! Also, unearned success is better for my ego than challenging myself and messing up 😅
I did start testing out of units after trying the first lesson, though, cause it would've been a little too slow, otherwise. But I noticed that in the first lesson, they did what I wish the Russian course would've done, with teaching you which letters correspond to which sounds, mixed in along the basic vocab! It did confuse me at first, I was like, "none of these 2-letter words are real words??" but then I realized they were parts of words 😅 Less helpful for me, personally, but cool that they included it!
I always read all the phrases out loud, bc practice seems like it can only help, and also I love to talk! (This is how i used to do duolingo, too) I noticed that my ability to pronounce a single "r" seems to have deteriorated? Which I guess makes sense, I haven't practiced speaking that much, the last few years. I also wonder if it's a matter of my mouth growing or shifting in the ~10 years since I took Spanish in school?
(It's also possible this has always been a weakness that I just didn't know about before now, but I don't think so? My pronunciation and ear have always been pretty solid, due to growing up around Spanish. And, while the standards for pronunciation in my school classes were NOT high, 😬😬😬 I would practice for my parents, and both of them would correct me if something didn't sound right. They grew up more surrounded by it than I did, though they're both less willing to try and speak it.)
(Aside: Like, neither of my parents are fluent or are willing to speak Spanish publicly, but they both have words they don't/didn't know how to say in English! Our pronunciation of many words can be compared to a native speaker's, and has been mistaken for such before. Practically anyone born and raised in our city can code-switch between the two languages to some extent, even if they have no idea how to string a full sentence together. But also sooo many people here can speak Spanish, like, way more fluently than me, but say they can't and refuse to try, usually for fear of ridicule. Sorry, I'm off topic, I could talk about my community's relationship to Spanish all day!!)
But it DID freak me out enough that I spent, like, 15 minutes saying "¿de quién es ese reloj?" out loud to myself 😅 slight improvement, but still less consistent and requires more concentration than I would like :/
I've never been able to actually roll my "r"s continuously, like, when there's two (or more lol) together, (my parents also can't) but I can fake that in casual conversation with the single "r" sound! But I'd be kinda screwed if I lost that, too, lol. So I'm glad it was brought to my attention!
Also, I don't always know which vowels are spelled w an accent, which is... less surprising, lol 😬
I've already run into some vocab differences than what I'm used to hearing, too, but that isn't surprising. I'm pretty used to that, after being taught from textbooks that were technically in Castellano, and also, just, like, being around people who learned their Spanish from lots of different sources.
