Could you understand it if you turned on closed captioning and paused the TV to read them? I primarily used Duolingo to learn Spanish. I think it's a great too

Could you understand it if you turned on closed captioning and paused the TV to read them? I primarily used Duolingo to learn Spanish. I think it's a great tool and starting point, but if that's all you use to learn you will have holes in your practical knowledge of the language. I think there are three factors that make the jump from Duolingo to real life hard: 1. Accent - In duolingo the speaker uses a relatively neutral accent. In real life speakers usually have a bit of an accent and do not speak perfectly. 2. Speed - In duolingo the speaker uses moderately paced speech, you have plenty of time to process what they are saying. In real life speech is faster and words blend together. 3. Vocabulary - In real life you may hear a word or a conjugation of a word that you've never heard before. You won't have time to process it and figure out what it means before they start on the next sentence. You may be stuck on the first sentence trying to guess the context of the unknown word while they say the second sentence, and by then you've missed both. All three of these factors come together when listening to language outside of Duolingo and can make it frustrating. I'm still not great at Spanish but I did a few things to get past being a Duolingo Spanish speaker to become an actual Spanish speaker: 1. Immersed myself for a few weeks in a country that speaks only the language I was learning (I know you said this wasn't an option for you, but leaving it here for others.) 2. Read books and newspaper articles in the target language to get an idea of how actual sentence structures work. This can be tedious because there is a lot of unknown vocab but I think it's important. 3. Watched TV shows in the target language. This can be tedious as well. I generally put the closed captions in Spanish and read them along with listening to the words. If I'm feeling confident I take away the closed captioning. This can be tedious as well because you may not understand everything and end up going back to re-watch a scene. 4. Listened to music/radios/podcasts in my target language. 5. Used iTalki/WhatsApp/dating apps to practice conversation with native Spanish speakers At the end of the day I would say the major key is to listen as much as possible to the real language spoken by native speakers, ideally in an informal manner so that it is closer to what you would hear on the street.