u/One_Nectarine1328

I hit 520 hours of Dreaming Spanish (mostly CI) and decided to book a 2 week intensive course in Barcelona. I was pretty skeptical. I was worried it would turn into grammar drills and conjugation tables and mess up my input-based progress.

I went with Linguaschools Barcelona after a friend recommended it for being mostly conversation-focused. I stayed in one of their shared student apartments.

Classes ran from 9:30 to 13:00 (with a break). Usually 7 students per group. We had four different teachers over the two weeks. The first two days felt a bit off because the teacher was correcting a lot on the board. But by day 3 I realized something important: she wasn’t teaching new grammar rules. She was only correcting errors on language I was already producing naturally. That distinction made a big difference.

Homework was simple: just write about your day. No conjugation tables or textbook exercises. Teachers spoke only Spanish the whole time. One even took us on a 3-hour walking tour of the Gothic Quarter and I understood almost everything which at 520 hours felt amazing.

The free (and cheap) activities ended up being the best part: tapas night, beach volleyball, and I paid a small fee for a day trip to Sitges. I was easily getting 3–4 extra hours of natural input every day. We also made a WhatsApp group and kept speaking Spanish together after class.

I’m at 670 hours now (one month after returning home). My conditionals and past tenses still need work, but I can now hold a 10-minute conversation without freezing up. Before the course, I understood well but speaking felt like a brick wall. The intensive cracked that wall.

My honest take:
Don’t book a 2 week intensive until you have at least 400 hours of solid CI. You need that foundation first. Once you have it, a good conversation-focused school isn’t interference it’s just more input and forced output practice.

Has anyone else tried something similar? Did an intensive course actually improve your speaking, or did you mostly just get better at “classroom Spanish”?

I installed the latest windows update last week and now my PC takes forever to open any application. My company uses various security tools including Docontrol for SaaS monitoring but that was installed for months without issues.The slowdown started immediately after the update, task manager shows my disc usage at 100% constantly even when nothing is running.

Has anyone experienced this after the recent windows patch?

I have been a digital nomad for two years and I am still confused on how to handle taxes properly. I earn income from a company in one country while living in several others throughout the year. Every accountant I have spoken to gives me conflicting advice. I want to stay compliant and avoid double taxation, but it is overwhelming. How do other nomads handle tax residency when you do not stay in one place.

edit: Thanks for the suggestions everyone! I’ll check out r/expattaxes and add more details. Really appreciate the advice. Sorting out my paperwork and handling accountant calls has been quite hard but a reliable connectivity at least on ArriveSIM is making it easier. Thanks again I will eventually sort this out.

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I know this should feel exciting but it is not , the past few months hav taken a lot out of him and he does not have the mental bandwidth to decode government paperwork from scratch right now. I have used document prep services before for other things and they actually helped. Are services like passport visa rush or Its easy worth using for a standard passport renewal or should he just go to USPS and work through himself?

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edit: I am extremely grateful for the suggestions. We are going to clean the UTM structure. Also in our books is Admaxxer, we shall look at its attribution. Thanks for the heads up tip about properUTM and all the generous advice.

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