Case Study: A Premed Student's Journey to Spanish Fluency

Most people would consider med school to be enough on their plate, but Ethan realized something: to be the sort of doctor he wanted to be, he needed to learn Spanish.

On September 2nd, 2024, he joined Migaku's Discord channel and quickly built a name for himself: that guy who's speedrunning Spanish. His goal was to learn 4,000 Spanish words in four months.

Two months in, we decided to reach out to see how things were going.

We talked about:

First, tell us a bit about yourself!

So, of all languages, why learn Spanish?

Spanish is tied very closely to my life and goals.

For starters, my father was born and raised in Argentina—in Buenos Aires. He's a native Spanish speaker. So that's one big reason I wanted to learn Spanish. Culturally, it's important to me.

The second reason is that I plan to go to medical school. I'm currently in the middle of a cycle—I applied to 34 schools—and I'm waiting to get interviews. To be a practicing physician in the United States, it inevitably means you’ll be encountering Spanish-speaking patients—many of whom might not be able to speak a lick of English. This is serious. Any language barrier impedes healthcare.

Just imagine you're off abroad in some country and something happens to you, so you stop by a hospital to see a doctor. You're in this foreign clinic. You don't understand what anyone is saying. This guy in a blue suit comes up to you and starts talking—blah blah blah...—and you're shaking your head, confused. Then he grabs your arm and starts preparing a needle.

That's scary, man.

But couldn't you just use an interpreter?

Well, sure. Nowadays there is a lot of structural support built into hospitals and clinics, yes. But even then, the thing is, this creates a barrier of rapport. When you start talking to the interpreter, it's the interpreter who you're developing a relationship with, not the doctor. That's weird, because the interpreter isn't the one who is going to be giving you treatment. They're just the man in the middle.

So I view learning Spanish as integral to building rapport with patients. That's really important. If rapport isn't established, or if the process is troublesome, there's a chance that the patient might just decide not to come back.

Anyway—these small inconveniences and stressors add up, and ultimately form what I see as being a barrier to healthcare.

(And if I had to give a third reason for learning Spanish, it'd be that it's fun.)

How'd you get started with Spanish?

Did you speak it at home with your dad?

By the time I was born, my father had already been speaking English for a long while. He spoke Spanish with patients, but he never wanted to teach it to me... which is frustrating. I didn't start learning Spanish until high school. The thing is, everybody in my Spanish class was taking it because they had to. Not a single person wanted to be there. I took it seriously, and I do think it gave me a nice foundation, but my Spanish learning didn't really begin until university.

At university, I took intensive Spanish classes over two summers—it was two hours of class per day, plus about three hours of homework.

And how would you describe your level at those periods of time?

When I graduated from high school, all I could tell you in Spanish was what my favorite color was red (rojo) and what time it was. Everything I learned in high school was covered in basically the first two weeks of that college summer course.

That's not a lot for four years of Spanish!

Well, that's what it sounds like, but I'm not going to bash on it. No—it wasn't worthless. Learning the conjugations and building a grammatical foundation has stuck with me, and without it, I wouldn't have been able to learn so fast in university.

So, how much progress did you make in college?

After the first year, which consisted of an accelerated 10 weeks of class over the summer, I felt like I was at about a B1 level. Low intermediate. I felt like I could reasonably converse with people; talk about the basic things. If I got lost, I could find my way. It'd be a pain, but I'd be able to get by.

The second year focused primarily on grammar, "proper" speaking, and on expressing more complex ideas. I feel like it was a really good refinement of what I'd learned previously. I'd call myself upper B1, lower B2. "True" intermediate.

After that second year, I felt confident that I could talk about anything, if I had a bit of time to prepare.

6 years of Spanish is a lot—why even bother with Migaku at that point?

Well, after that second year of Spanish, I tried watching a movie (Coco) in Spanish—with Spanish subtitles.

I missed like half of it.

Like—I'd watched the movie before, so I got the gist of it, but like... I felt pathetic. I'm a B1 or B2 or whatever, but I can't even understand this children's movie? It made me think that this whole intermediate/advanced scaling system is just completely worthless. How can you call me an intermediate speaker when I can barely talk?

Maybe I wasn't actually a B1 level by the end of that 2nd year. Maybe I was A2. All the same, it was frustrating.

That's frustrating. So, what did you do next?

Well, I didn't do anything for a while. It took a couple years. After I graduated from school, I felt this kind of emptiness in my life, since I wasn't studying anymore.

So I thought: why not go back to Spanish?

And that's that?

Well, no. I decided, you know what, I want to try something new and fun and interesting. So I thought: What if I try to learn as much Japanese as I can in a week? I started learning the kana and it was awesome. I jumped on the Japanese bandwagon.

And somewhere along those lines, I got into this stream of videos about comprehensible input and the value of learning a language by listening.

And it blew my mind.

In my opinion, this video is a must-watch for any language learner. Most of the dude's videos are about Japanese, but they're really applicable to any language.

I mean—despite two years of language study at a top university in the USA, I'd never heard of anything like that. Our college emphasized speaking and reading. It emphasized everything but listening. I was so fixated on grammar and syntax... it was just a total miss.

Then there was this other video, and it talked about being comfortable with not understanding everything. He said something like:

And that struck a chord with me.

And that's about the time I stumbled into Migaku. I was watching a video from a YouTuber who was talking about the input-learning method, and how he used Anki to learn vocabulary. "You watch shows and make flashcards," was the gist of it. And I liked that. Trust me—every single premed student in the United States knows what Anki is. You have to use it. Being premed, I'd already been using Anki extensively. So when I heard that, it just seemed like Migaku was perfectly tailored to me.

The YouTuber was talking about using Migaku to learn Japanese, but I wondered if it supported Spanish, too... and, lo and behold, it did. So I started using Migaku to learn Spanish.

How do you use Migaku?

Well, I use it to make my own flashcard decks. I tried to use pre-made decks (decks made by other people; usually uploaded to Ankiweb) initially, but didn't like them. They just gave you random sentences that had no relation to what you wanted to learn.

So, initially, I used Migaku exactly as it was intended to be used... but I quickly ran into a problem. Whenever you watch an episode of something on Netflix, you really only run into like twelve to twenty sentences that are worth making flashcards out of. So if I wanted to make enough cards to last me a week, I'd have to watch several episodes in one sitting. Making flashcards was just taking too long.

So, what I do now is:

Currently (as of November 7th), I've made flashcards for 1,800 words. I don't make flashcards for cognates (words that are the same in Spanish and English, like "education" and "educación"), but when you add those into the mix, Migaku says I understand 2,600 words. My goal is to hit 3,000 known words by the end of November, and 4,000 by the end of the year.

Do you have any advice for people who are new to Migaku?

Well, I think that a lot of the people using Migaku don't use the clipboard as much as they could. Like—there are some days where I don't feel like listening... but I still want to make Anki cards. So what I do is I paste a list of words from a Spanish frequency dictionary (a list of the words most commonly used in a language, in order from most to least frequent) into Migaku's Clipboard, look for words that are new or that I want to learn, then generate sentences and audio for those words with Migaku.

So you know—by definition, the words I'm learning are the most common words to learn. These are the words that will help you the most, because they're the things that you'll be hearing the most.

So I just make a bunch of cards in advance—enough to last me for a week or two. This lets me prioritize listening when I'm watching a show, and worry about vocabulary as a separate, after-the-fact thing.

(Editor's note: this flashcard style is from one of Migaku's old Anki flashcard formats. We have since updated the flashcard style and have our own spaced-repetition flashcard program, which we recommend most users use.)

Do you just kinda listen, or do you follow a routine?

My ideal schedule looks like this:

I don't really do anything special. It's just about trying to maximize your time spent listening.

This is difficult for me because I'm not a movie guy and I didn't find the typical recommendations, like Casa de Papel, engaging. I do watch Spanish dubs of anime for fun, and I listen to podcasts to get in my listening hours. I feel like everyone else has an advantage over me.

Like if you asked me how I'd pitch Migaku, I'd say:

What made you realize that Migaku was working for you?

Well, before I found Migaku, I felt frustrated. I felt like I had done what I was supposed to, but I still couldn't do the things I wanted to do. There was one crucial thing that I was missing—listening.

Recently, somebody told me that learning is about smaller victories adding up. I like that. Like today, I understood a word that I didn't understand a week ago. Awesome! Learning Spanish is all about the culmination of small incremental gains that let me know that I'm learning.

And I'm starting to understand.

I still wouldn't consider myself anywhere close to being fluent, but being able to understand the gist of Spanish shows is much more than I was able to do previously. If I watch a movie now, I won't be able to catch every little detail... but I can tell you about what the characters are saying and what they're feeling. That's just a huge victory for me. It's ultimately what I want to be able to do.

More recently, I've started having dreams in Spanish.

Basically, I guess, I've been seeing all these small victories add up. It stands to reason that they'll just keep coming. Eventually things are going to click.

How did you get your foot in the door with Spanish content?

It was hard at first. As I mentioned above, I don't really like movies, and I had trouble finding Spanish media I enjoyed. I listened to podcasts just to get listening hours in, but I was doing it just for the sake of listening practice. Netflix was great because it had Spanish dubs of some of my favorite anime, like Hunter x Hunter and Death Note.

And then like two weeks ago I got the game Dragon Ball Z: Sparking! ZERO and it hit me: there's probably some Spanish YouTuber playing this. And there was! So from there I started listening to anime reviews in Spanish, and I was like—oh my gosh, this is actually really cool.

The most impactful thing for me so far has been listening to fan dubs of my favorite anime songs in Spanish. It kind of introduced me to a new world of media. When you compare the translation to the original, and see how they navigated the lyrics and the words and the ideas and the rhymes, it gives you insight into how the translator interpreted the song. They come up with something really unique, and it adds depth to the song for me. It's a different perspective on the same medium. There's something beautiful in that.

What insights would you share with new learners?

The importance of listening

I was watching this YouTuber, and they said something that made listening click for me. That was: "If you can understand me right now, it's because you are not trying to view what I'm saying as a math problem." That hit me hard.

In traditional environments, what they teach you is grammar: they give you a sentence and say what’s wrong with it. When I'm learning about the subjunctive or going over new conjugations, everything becomes a math problem. I have to think things through before I write down my answer. If it was English, I'd just answer without speaking. That's what hit me. In Spanish, I have a processing delay.

A 7 year old has the capacity to solve 32+48. An adult can do it instantly. I think language learning is no different than this. I already have the knowledge, but I lack the ability to process that knowledge on a dime.

Before I started Migaku, speaking Spanish felt like solving a calculus problem. Now, it feels like an algebra 2 problem. Simpler, but I still have to do some thinking.

Be comfortable with not understanding everything

I'd tell my younger self: Be comfortable with not understanding everything. I know you're gonna freaking hate it. You're not going to believe me. But I'm your older self, and I'm telling you to be comfortable with it.

Like, say you see the word tener, which means to have. It doesn't matter if you don't know the exact specifics of who has what. All you need to know is that someone has something. Maybe context will fill in the gaps for you. Maybe it won't. Someone has something. Just get used to that feeling of "almost" understanding.

Because I used to be really frustrated when I didn't understand something, so I'd give up and not listen at all... and that's what prevented me from progressing at the rate that I'm progressing at now.

I hate when people say that you should wait to do something until you can do it perfectly. Errors are a part of learning. As you keep listening, and the little victories add up, you'll see progress.

Don't let perfect be the enemy of good

It's cliche, but you miss every shot that you don't take. Everyone who is successful at something has inevitably spent a lot of time doing it.

So, you know, don't be a YouTuber who says I learned Spanish in 3 months. I mean, if you want to do that, go ahead! But you don't need to do that. The average lifespan for males in the US is almost 80 years. Even if you make a lot of the wrong choices and it takes you ten years to learn Spanish, like, you have time for that.

So just make progress in a general direction. You'll get there eventually. You don't need to optimize things. Even if you can only commit ten minutes a day—like, sure, it'll take a long time, but you'll get there. The more you put into Spanish, the more you'll get out of it. It's OK to be bad at this. You're going to make improvements along the way.

I guess, don't worry so much about doing things the right way or the most optimal way that you never end up getting started at all.

Looking forward, what are your Spanish goals?

To be honest, I'm just doing what I'm doing and seeing what I get out of it. I do have a few goals, though.

For me, I care more about simply having goals than I do about achieving them by specific deadlines. Having a goal gives me something to focus on.

Lastly—what sort of learner would you recommend Migaku to?

The type of learner who will see the most success out of Migaku is driven—someone who can accept consuming content even if they don't quite understand everything, knowing that they'll gradually improve over time.

The biggest hurdle towards language learning is consistency, and it’s caused by this fallacy that learning a language should feel fast. There are days where I understand everything without subtitles, and days where it feels like I can’t understand anything. This is important: understanding that progress isn’t a linear thing is what will help you thrive.

So, take the leap of faith.

There’s no reason not to use Migaku, it makes learning so much easier than I thought it could ever be and I’m so happy I found it.

Anyway...

Ethan has made some killer progress during his first few months on Migaku.

You can make that sort of progress, too: Migaku is totally free for ten days, and you don't need to give us your credit card information or anything like that, either.