I did Duolingo for 2000 days. Can I speak Spanish?

after 2,000 days on dualingo can I speak Spanish short answer yes with some caveats let me show you this is my current streak on dualingo that's over 3,000 days but the first 1,000 days of that were actually learning German which I've made many videos about on my YouTube channel over the years including one full video in German and hopefully a second one coming next week in German of course with English subtitles but every day for the past 2,000 days I've spent slowly but surely learning Spanish using only dualingo with German I had gotten to the

point where I was using a lot of other resources I was reading German books watching TV shows listening to music but this time around for Spanish I have not done that in fact for the past four to five years I've been learning exclusively on Duolingo mostly to test out naysayer claims that say you can't do that well sorry guys I have will my Spanish be perfect absolutely not but it will be very interesting to see where exactly my shortfalls are to see how far dualingo alone has taken me I want to show you what my

lessons look like at the moment and I'm really excited to tell you about a 20-minute ation I had this past week in Spanish in Berlin of all places all coming up in this video so let's go my name is Evan Ediger and this is part one of a two part series on du lingo the second video coming out in a few weeks goes into detail about my uh current tips and tricks for how to get the most out of the app in 2025 but for now though I just want to show you how far I've

come this right here is where I'm currently at in my du lingo path near the tail end of section six according to do a lingo I should just about be able to start learning at a B2 Level under the common European framework of reference for languages or CFR now if I were fully at a B2 level Spanish I'd be able to communicate in sentences like this in 1755 Lisbon was destroyed by an earthquake and a fire but later it was reconstructed or rebuilt with a modern architectural style in Spanish this reads can I understand this

sentence 100% could I communicate this way well I mean I've got the building blocks it's all about putting them together at this level I can have practical conversations but I'm still far from native level fluency found in the sea levels of the framework it's a point where you can feel confident speaking but there's still a lot to learn as in life for context if I were at an A2 level of Spanish which is a bit more Elementary I'd communicate like this I was born in New Zealand but now I live in Osaka I have lived

in Saka for 5 years so the sentences and the grammar are less complex more basic but still understandable since starting the Spanish module on dualingo I have personally witnessed my Spanish progress from the early statements in the A1 section to the more advanced ones later in B1 through constant repetition and practice within the app I acquired the building blocks for advanced sentences and developed a sense where I can just sort of feel what words I meant to use not always but a lot of the time for example if English was your first language it's probably

the case where no one had to tell you that an apple is correct and a Apple is wrong same with an hour or an excuse to subscribe to my YouTube channel you've just heard it enough times that you can just sort of hear ah apple is wrong now a popular comment made online is that dualingo is too basic it only teaches you vocabulary and one can't really learn a language simply matching words with your finger on your phone and you know what I actually would agree with that final point but that point is assuming that

advanced dual lingo lessons are the same as the basic ones the app starts you off with these very basic challenges to help build confidence and realistically as is their MO build consistency so you keep coming back to the app with these little wins but as you progress so do the complexity of the exercises so if you're someone in the early stages on the app wondering what it's like later how advanced do the exercises get or if you're just interested to see how it all works and or how my Spanish is well let me show you

a lesson or two where I'm at I'm going to try and show you a standard lesson meaning they're going to be teaching me new words and Concepts that haven't yet been taught in the app as well as one of the listening only sections that focuses more on listening comprehension also a story for good measure just to see how those stories have been developing all right so we have talk about jobs lesson two of six for the record usually I just skip the section where I can hear him talking CU I don't feel like I need

that a lot of times as well it will actually trigger as if I've gotten it right just before I finished I'm like excuse me me don't cut me off thank you these exercises right here I can't see anything I have to listen and repeat these are actually quite new as of this year and are really exciting I like new ways of learning I do repeat all the exercises out loud just because that's extra practice why not unless I'm on the tube because I don't want to be a pariah hante the interesting thing the interesting thing

is that uh everyone wants to collaborate with my YouTube channel send me an email guys everyone wants to collaborate dingdong so it's obviously M I'm speeding through oh see here we go it's DET DET supposedly he works as a detective sorry guys the most important thing is to ask if you know something if you don't know something detectives can earn a good salary so many fun words like this detectiv detectiv close so this is saying Fernanda read that in order to be an astronaut you should study math or engineering she is looking for universities in

order to study those careers the question is what does Fernando want to do she wants to be an astronaut there's a lot of these variations these ones are like the most basic but there's a good balance you don't want it to be all difficult and all easy you kind of want some wins some losses you know you learn from mistakes EST andar don't make sense EST not bad not bad it's so exciting G traveling for free uh the work pays for it okay for example I'm traveling to Russia and I don't have to spend anything

I think that's roughly correct yeah when the job pays for it sometimes I'm like oh I got the vibe astrona this is a word that I've just learned from this lesson I really have to focus on how it's pronounced so I can figure out how it's spelled correctly cuz it might be Aon ason ason thank God in order to be an astronaut you got to have or you should have a lot of experience so to be an astronaut you have or must here we go you must have a lot of experience at the end of

each lesson you usually get two or three hard exercises rather than matching rather than just choosing a word you kind of got to write the whole sentence the most important thing is to be honest and efficient now this is difficult they've just taught me this the sentence structure and then it says to be honest no it's the most important thing I missed the one word there oh and there's also no K it's one of those mistakes where it's like take your time supposedly supposedly supposedly so I don't know this however because I'm in one of

the first ones where they're just teaching this I can just tap on sayone I did not remember thatone is it say see I got both of heart was wrong you got to learn these things oh it was k sayon k all right Ken there we go little pling pling PLS so I now want to show you what a story looks like and I want to show you what an audio lesson looks like but that's going to take me about um about 15 more minutes of learning so let me grind through those and then uh come

back to you when it's time for story [Music] time all right finally done that exercise now on to the next story this one's called the flu shot you have options to read it or it hides some of the words and you have to just listen I usually do that because why not just makes it a little bit more difficulty a lot of stories introduce words you don't know and you have to kind of pick it up through context uh the vaccine that is against the flu to to stop the you know what I mean this

is my knowledge I'm like okay clearly it's a flu vacine also so Eddie and his son Junior are uh waiting for the doctor outside of his office why do I have to get a vaccine a flu vaccine I don't want to but this this vaccin is pretty necessary all right now I actually have an option here so but I yeah but I don't know how to be brave [Music] for what up Junior yeah opens a box and takes out AUA now AUA is a word I've never heard before so I have to assume it might

be needle I could tap the word but sometimes I like to wait a bit to see if I can pick it up through context oh and there we go which word means needle h a he's like dang you right that needle is big so uh junior I have an idea I'll give it to your dad first and then it'll show you that it's not dangerous no it's pigo I don't know what that means I Joe in order to get Eddie to uh take the vaccine first then you have some matching here vaccine is a word

we've learned todaya Brave is Valente next it basically asks you what happens in the story and then you're supposed to explain it however true uh dualingo OG's we just type no a lot and then when you type no 10 times it says you're you're expressing your thoughts in Spanish you can take your time to write this but when you realize that it doesn't actually matter you still get points I I lose incentives no no no no no no and that was dingo stories and it gives you some gems now what do you use gems for

JA they're actually completely useless your boy has 100,000 gems there's no reason I would need these now I I really want to show you this audio section called carteros dados but I can't do that until I go to three more so give me a sec [Music] all right finally finished all the other lessons in between we now have the new audio lessons it's kind of like you're listening to a podcast there's not many questions to answer but they're good for listening comprehension hola all right one of the big projects people are going to be sharing

with her today all right Pro projects is fun PES Petes packages and this one's going to bees or something yeah or something that's a weird idea so she wants to give postmen disguises costumes yeah why it'll make people smile yeah how do you plan work didn't work it was a bit of a idea that last bit m i could I could use to go over it again it was bit fast my my brain like stopped listening for a second and then oop I lost it it's pretty simple and there you go a very quick uh

listening exercise look at that three times multiplier bing bang bomb no I am not doing any more dualingo today that's enough and that's roughly what the tail end of the B1 section of the dualingo path for Spanish looks like not bad right well I hope so I'll be going over this section in more detail in the next video in this series with more actionable tips for those using the app but I'd say from my experience progression in the language and overall comprehension has a sort of multiplier effect based on the amount of time you spend

learning in my case within dualingo what I mean is some days you just don't have a lot of energy that's normal you might find it's 11:30 p.m. and you begrudgingly open the app just to maintain your streak and you do one 2 to 5 minute lesson or maybe you just do a speaking exercise that requires the least amount of brain power and can be done in under minute obviously that's not going to help you progress that much I've had many of those days sometimes a week sometimes it's two weeks long where I'm just like ah

can't be arsed can never pronounce that right way my British brain's like ared arst I can't be arst she moved to England and she picked up this fake British accent AR IR I can't be arst I feel like a perfect AR and those are the times where demotivation really kicks in the most because I'm not progressing that much I can tell and it's a vicious cycle where I know I'm not learning much I can feel that it means it everything is just more difficult my brain's not thinking in Spanish as often and I just get

way more frustrated when I'm wrong however days where I prioritize ensuring I do 15 to 30 minutes of learning a day really multiplies the effect of that time I find my mind way more in a Spanish space where I'm more able to quickly understand new concepts of grammar and vocabulary excitedly I go from saying why did I get that wrong to why did I get that wrong it's a very tiny tonal shift but for me a lot of the times it comes down to just making time for learning using dualingo in the morning as opposed

to finding time for using in the evening it brings me back to why I started using dualingo over 8 years ago at my full-time job I had an hourlong lunch break and I wanted to use some of that time productively to work on myself as at the time I was just using my lunch breaks to play Smash Bros with my co-workers which to be fair is the only reason I've actually won so many tournaments but that's only impressive within a very small niche of of people the idea of putting in 15 minutes a day into

learning a language and having that actually work over a long period of time wasn't a very exciting concept to me especially because it wasn't just that lunch break I had I also commuted an hour to and from work and so what else was I going to do with that time wasted on social media might as well do something productive and I found good success with that it kind of works similarly to the one minute rule for habit forming like in the book Atomic habits where James Clear explains the hardest part of any habit is simply

showing up He suggests committing just one minute of effort because once you start it's just so much easier to keep going it's like kinetic versus static friction the trick is convincing your brain that all you need to do is just do one minute right just open the app just start one exercise or spend a single minute doing whatever thing you're trying to get into a habit of doing however the thing is after you do spend that minute you might as well just keep going right you already got momentum going you might as well just do

another lesson it's that hard part of starting so if you can trick your brain into doing that get your brain out of the way just just start a little bit you'll find yourself learning a bit more and that's kind of been my experience with dualingo in general obviously not every single time I log into the app and learn something is going to be groundbreaking but it's showing up every single day and getting those consistent tiny wins that add up to getting those bigger breakthroughs not just like I said in Spanish but in a lot of

the other things that I try and keep up [Music] with all right sure I have learned a lot within the app and I've shown you where I've been but what about a real conversation in Spanish outside of dualingo well somehow I'm in a lucky position where the large majority of people that I collect my packages and mail from speak Spanish so whenever I go to collect a package I get to practice a little bit it's not like I'm out here talking to my Postman about like our hopes and dreams and using complex sentences some saying

things like I call this my Postman Spanish because it's it's all you really need to use to pick up a package just basic little sentences in German I have a very similar thing which I've dubbed my Baker's German because I can go into a German Baker have a full conversation with them about what it is I want I'm not even using like full sentences all the time but to me it's just so exciting to be able to use a language that is not my native tongue and the other person doesn't switch to English and that

happens pretty much every time I go into a German Baker except of course that one time which I did make a video about but speaking of being in Germany I was recently in Berlin with my friend Dodie shooting a big future video on public transit very excited for that but at one point Dodie injured her foot so we couldn't really spend the day walking around Berlin we spent it at the spa a German Spa texti fry texti fry by the way means uh it's a it's a nude sauna all right it's a nude Spa it's

Germany I'll tell some embarrassing stories in German for my video uh next week or so so stay tuned for that but I say to my masseuse in German what I'd like out of my massage and he says to me in English usually this is an upsetting thing doesn't want to use German with me but instead he says oh I'm sorry I I I Don't Know Much German like my German isn't great so I just replied with oh well AAS esbol to my utter Glee he responded see along with my excitement came you know the fear

I've never actually used my Spanish before outside of small conversations with my Postman like was my Spanish going to be good enough to really hold a full conversation for 25 minutes of a massage now those of you that are uh more sane than I are probably thinking Evan why would you need to have a full conversation aren't you like uh getting a massage where you know you sit in silence for 25 minutes maybe you make some grunts you just relax no not me honestly I could barely focus on how amazing this massage was because of

how lit up my brain felt being able to communicate in Spanish effectively also I might have been off my tits that day but you know what it's went in Berlin all right anyway he's asking me questions about myself I ask questions about him his name is Paul he's born and raised in Mexico City he can speak not only Spanish but also noat which is the language of the Aztec empire his daughter got a really good job in Berlin 8 years ago and he came with her and has been working here ever since in Berlin listen

it was probably the most grossed in a conversation I'd been in for so long and this is not an experience that I ever would have had had I not learned Spanish or tried using my Spanish to speak with him there were times in which obviously my Spanish would falter I just wouldn't know the right word I would slow down but I would know the right word in German so I just kept going back and forth between Spanish and bits of German and every time you would laugh because the Whiplash between switching from Spanish fully to

random German words was just too funny but this also just made me feel even more great about this whole experience I'm switching between Spanish and German neither of which are my native language and it just felt like a huge pivotal like moment in my language learning Journey the same as when I was in Munich and I managed to get a haircut using only German I was terrified like oh God what if I say accidentally cut it all off or I only you know but I did it and it was that confidence boost I needed to

make me feel like oh my God I I can do this I'd be formulating sentences and for the first time in my life I felt like I could actually make use of the more advanced grammar and sentence structure that I've been learning in the B1 section rather than sentences like I'm from America but I live in London now and I've lived in London for 12 years I was successfully throwing in things like YouTuber and then I'd say something like eay videos off YouTube well I know in German whoosh and I knew the he knew enough

German to get that and it it was a very transformative massage towards the end when he had moved to my neck area where I really can't be talking he had to be like I was just really excited my Spanish had passed a really tough test and honestly the massage was pretty good my back felt pretty great later on in the day I also had lost uh my little wristband which allowed me to get my clothes back so I just have a robe on pretty much nude I run into this guy and I'm like my guy

M Amigo and I managed to ask him for help in Spanish and didn't use English the whole time and it was just a really satisfying feeling all right so where are we at then well for my definition of fluency conversational fluency of being able to communicate in Spanish using little to no English I'd say I'm there now yes I'm making mistakes and no I'm absolutely nowhere near the C1 or C2 level of advanced native fluency but for me to be able to understand and be understood in a foreign language of my choice is my threshold

uh for fluency and I'm just really excited not only about the fact that I'm here now but that I have so much more to learn there's no reason for me to feel like oh that's it fluency is a spectrum so many things these days are spectrum and that's why the whole CFR framework is cool you can have conversations with people at A1 A2 B1 B2 obviously it gets more and more advanced but it's so exciting to be able to to see the progression and find yourself being successful in this thing that you've been putting in

little bits of time for over so many years at some point I think it'd be a really fun idea to take an official test to like rank where my Spanish is seeing where the weak spots are and I'm almost tempted to wait until I finish the entire dualingo path at the end of the B2 section before doing that especially as I said outside of the basic Spanish I learned in the American public school system I've made an entire video about that there as an adult I've been 100% just using dualingo so it'll be really fascinating

to see how I do on that test given my circumstances so to succinctly answer the title can I speak Spanish with 2,000 days of dualingo I would say yes but also important to note I probably would have said the same thing at a thousand days I'll be it at a much lower level I'm not really a gatekeeper I'm a gate opener okay so no matter where you are in your language learning Journey the one thing I hope you can take away from this video is this learning language is not a race don't let someone bully

you cuz you're slow and steady you're learning if you're just using some spare time you've got in your day to figure out a language hell yeah I know dualingo is not the fastest way of learning a language I know there are more efficient ways but it's just an easy thing I can just kind of throw in during my day and it for me has had huge benefits learning a language is not a race don't worry about it taking a long time if you're only putting small amounts of time in some days you're going to have

a lot of time some days you're not as long as you show up you take your time you'll get there if anything it's more like planting and tending to a garden as long as you show up consistently you know not only are you going to be able to harvest the fruits of your labor in the future but you'll find joy in the process of growing and nurturing everything along the way even if that does sound a bit wanky this is also just so similar to my story on YouTube and how I've uploaded a video every

single Sunday and I started doing that over 10 years ago but the consistency is really where most of my growth has come from I've never really had a viral video that blew up and I got lots of subscribers from it's just every week I've always shown up I've always uploaded something different and slowly grew from there and one day I will hopefully hit that 1 million subscriber threshold just by being consistent I suppose so thank you for being consistent with me and joining me on this journey hopefully I will see you here next Sunday or

uh here if the video is already up so I'll see you there thanks for watching goodbye [Music]