Julia has always been a fan of baseball ever since she was a little girl. Her favorite team is the Boston Red Sox and she has attended many games at historic Fenway Park over the years. While Julia loves watching baseball games live, one of her favorite hobbies is collecting baseball cards. She thinks it’s really fun to learn about different players, both past and present, by looking at their baseball cards and reading the stats and biographies on the back of each card.
In recent years, Julia decided she wanted to try learning Spanish. She took Spanish classes in high school but found that she didn’t retain much of the language after graduating. When the popular language learning app Duolingo launched their Spanish course, Julia decided to give it a try. She found that she really enjoyed using the app’s bite-sized lessons and gamification elements to start picking up Spanish little by little. The colorful mascot Duo also kept her motivated to keep practicing each day.
After using Duolingo Spanish for a few months, Julia started noticing that she could understand more when watching her favorite TV shows with Spanish dubs or seeing Spanish signs around town. She was proud of the progress she was making with the app. One day while using Duolingo, she had an idea – why not combine her interests in baseball cards and learning Spanish? She decided to start a collection of baseball cards entirely in Spanish to help improve her vocabulary and language skills.
Julia began frequenting Spanish-language card shops both online and in nearby cities to find Spanish baseball cards to add to her collection. She especially enjoyed looking for cards of players from Latin American countries like the Dominican Republic, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. Some of her favorite finds included cards of Cardinals star Albert Pujols, Blue Jays slugger Vladimir Guerrero, and all-time great Roberto Clemente. As she looked at each new card, she would say the player’s name, position, and stats out loud in Spanish to help reinforce this new information.
In addition to baseball cards, Julia also started following Spanish language baseball accounts on social media. She found Twitter and Instagram to be great resources for seeing Spanish captions and commentary for highlights, games, and news from Major League Baseball and the Latin American winter leagues. Occasionally she would even try commenting or direct messaging accounts in her beginner Spanish. She found the community to be very welcoming of language learners giving it their best effort.
To get the most out of her collection and continue improving her Spanish, Julia decided to start a project logging details of each Spanish baseball card in a Google Doc. For each player, she would write their name, team, position, and top stats in Spanish. She would also try including a few sentences of commentary or background on the player. This gave Julia a lot of writing practice while letting her flex her baseball knowledge. It was challenging at first but became easier with each new entry.
As her Spanish baseball card collection and knowledge grew, Julia decided to take her language practice one step further. She began regularly live streaming unboxings and reviews of her newest baseball card pickups entirely in Spanish on her Twitch and YouTube channels. Having to speak extemporaneously about each card really pushed her out of her comfort zone but also helped her learn so much more quickly than just reading or writing. Viewers in both English and Spanish-speaking countries provided encouragement and corrections in the chat which Julia was grateful for.
Two years after starting her Spanish studies on Duolingo and baseball card collection, Julia’s progress in the language was remarkable. She found herself comfortably understanding Spanish broadcasts of games and having conversations with locals whenever visiting places like Puerto Rico or the Dominican Republic during spring training. The unique combination of her passion for baseball and dedication to learning Spanish through an interesting hands-on project had paid off tremendously. She was proud of how far she had come and couldn’t wait to continue expanding her baseball card collection and Spanish skills even more.
