Why Your Spanish Gets Worse Before It Gets Better

By Daniel Herrera, Spanish teacher and curriculum designer

Updated July 30, 2026 · Reviewed by our team

Last year you said tuve que irme without blinking. This week you paused, said tení que irme, heard yourself do it, and felt something sink.

That is the moment most Spanish learners decide they are broken. They were doing fine. Now they are hesitating, mangling verbs they used to get right, and speaking slower than they did in January. It is the single most common reason people quit at intermediate level, and it is the point where they start shopping for a new app.

Here is the part almost nobody tells you. Spanish does get worse before it gets better, that drop is well documented, it has a name, and it usually means the opposite of what it feels like.

Why is my Spanish getting worse instead of better?

Because you learned something, and the new thing has not finished moving in yet. Your Spanish gets worse when a newly learned rule starts competing with forms you had already memorised. Accuracy drops while your internal grammar reorganises to hold both. Researchers call the pattern U-shaped behaviour, and it resolves on its own.

Language learning is not a staircase. Michael Long put it plainly in 1990: progress is not linear, and backsliding is common, giving rise to what the field calls U-shaped behaviour. Rod Ellis defines it as the situation where a learner’s proficiency “suddenly but temporarily drops off only to return once again to their usual level”.

Read that definition again, because two words in it matter. Suddenly, which is why it feels like something broke. And temporarily, which is the whole point.

The dip has a name, and it is not “plateau”. A plateau is progress flattening out. U-shaped behaviour is accuracy actually falling, on forms you previously produced correctly, because a newer rule is now competing with them. They feel similar from the inside. They are different events, and only one of them is caused by learning something.

What is actually happening when your Spanish gets worse?

Your internal grammar is being rebuilt. The field calls this restructuring. In Ellis’s words, the dip “occurs because learners reorganize their existing knowledge to accommodate new knowledge”.

There is a second mechanism underneath it, called destabilisation. You start with one rule that you apply to everything. Then a second rule arrives. For a while you alternate between the two, or bend them, until the correct pattern settles. That alternating stage is the ugly bit. From the outside it looks like decline. From the inside it feels like decline. Structurally it is a system with more moving parts than it had last year.

Think about what that means for the error itself. Before you learned the regular preterite endings, you could not possibly have said tenió. You did not have the machinery to build it. The mistake requires the knowledge.

Is there real research on this, or does it just feel that way?

There is research, and it is old. The curve was first reported by Ervin and Miller in 1963, then followed up by Cazden in 1968. Marcus and colleagues documented it at scale in 1992 with the errors every parent has heard: comed for came, breaked for broke.

The child-language version is startling when you see the sequence. English-speaking children produce correct irregular past forms up to around their third year. Then, around age three, they begin overregularising the very verbs they had been marking correctly. At roughly the same time, they start acquiring the regular past-tense rule. The rule arrives, and the correct forms wobble.

The second-language evidence is thinner, and it is worth being honest about that. A 2022 study, U-shaped Trajectories in an L2 context: Evidence from the acquisition of verb morphology by Stefan Williams and Mila Vulchanova of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, with Pedro Guijarro-Fuentes of the University of the Balearic Islands, tested Norwegian learners of English across three school grades. The final analysis covered 17 learners in eighth grade, 19 in ninth, and 15 in tenth, on a 40-item elicitation task modelled on Berko’s 1958 Wug test.

Their finding: results “consistent with the later stages of U-shaped learning”, with overall accuracy rising as overregularisation errors fell. The authors argue the pattern reflects a general, input-driven learning process, and that it is an integral part of acquiring irregular forms rather than a fault in the learner.

There is a stranger result underneath all of this. In 2013, Lorenzo Carlucci and John Case published On the necessity of U-shaped learning in Topics in Cognitive Science, volume 5, pages 56 to 88. They asked a mathematical question rather than a psychological one: are there learning tasks that require the dip? Their answer was yes. For the learning criteria they tested, they concluded that “U-shapes are necessary for full learning power”.

Read that in plain terms. For some kinds of learning, there is no route to the top that skips the dip. A learner who never got worse could not have got that good.

The caveats are real. That study looked at English as a second language, not Spanish, and its participants were school-age. The authors themselves note that few studies have addressed the phenomenon experimentally in a second-language grammar context. So the honest summary is this: the shape is well evidenced across first and second language work, and the timings are not.

What does the ugly phase look like in Spanish specifically?

Four ways, and three of them are the same mechanism wearing different clothes.

1. Your irregular preterites go regular

You had tuve, hice, dije and fui as memorised units. Then you learned -é, -aste, -ó and the whole regular set. Out come tenió, hació, deció. This is overregularisation, the textbook marker of the dip, and it is the clearest signal in Spanish that the rule has landed.

2. Ser and estar start wobbling

Early on you lean on one of them for nearly everything and get it right often enough by luck of frequency. Then you learn the permanent-versus-temporary story. Then you meet the exceptions that break it: está muerto for a state that is about as permanent as they come, es joven for one that is not. Now you pause before every sentence, and your accuracy on the easy cases drops while you sort out the hard ones.

3. The subjunctive turns up where it was not invited

A brand-new rule gets over-applied. You learn that doubt takes the subjunctive, and suddenly creo que sea comes out of your mouth. It should be creo que es, because the affirmative creo que takes the indicative. Six months earlier you would have said it correctly, by never having heard of the subjunctive at all.

4. Your accent gets self-conscious

This one is not overregularisation. It is monitoring. Your ear improved before your mouth did, so you can now hear the gap between your Spanish and a native speaker’s, in real time, mid-sentence. Monitoring costs attention, and attention is exactly what fluent speech needs. You did not get worse at pronouncing. You got better at noticing, and the noticing is expensive.

How do I tell a restructuring dip from actually going backwards?

Both exist. Skills do decay when you stop using them. The two look identical for about a week and then diverge, and the tell is in the shape of your errors rather than the number of them. Here is the read we use, drawn from the mechanism above rather than from any single study.

If you are in the left column, your job is to keep going. If you are in the right column, your job is to get Spanish back in front of your eyes and ears, and the dip question can wait.

Why does speaking feel so much worse than reading?

Because practice does not spread out the way you would hope. Robert DeKeyser’s work on automatisation and skill acquisition makes the point sharply: practice in comprehension does not automatically transfer fully to production, and the reverse holds too. Automatisation is skill-specific.

So a year of reading and listening builds a Spanish you can understand. It does not, on its own, build a Spanish you can produce under time pressure. When you open your mouth you are drawing on a much less rehearsed skill, and the gap between the two widens as your input grows. Your reading improving is part of why your speaking feels worse.

There is a second reason the middle years feel flat. Skill acquisition research describes a power law of practice: accuracy and speed improve steeply at the start, then gradually curve off. The beginner months genuinely delivered more visible gain per hour than the intermediate years do. Nothing has gone wrong. The curve flattened, on schedule.

How long does the ugly Spanish phase last?

Nobody can tell you, and you should be suspicious of anyone who does.

The literature describes the shape of the curve, not its width. Ellis’s own definition gets as specific as “temporarily”, and that is the state of the evidence. The 2022 study was cross-sectional, comparing different school years rather than following the same learners down and back up, so it cannot give a duration either.

What the research does hand you is the exit condition. The dip ends when the new rule stops competing and becomes automatic. Automatic comes from meeting the form again and again in real language, plus deliberate production practice on the specific thing you keep getting wrong. It does not come from a better explanation of the rule you already understand.

What should you do while you are in it?

Five things, and the first one is a subtraction.

What makes the ugly phase worse than it needs to be?

Comparing today’s worst sentence to last year’s best one. Everyone does it, and the comparison is rigged. You remember the day tuve que irme came out clean. You do not remember the twenty times that month you avoided the past tense entirely by rephrasing.

Two other things make it heavier than it needs to be. The first is grinding through it with no rest, which turns a normal developmental stage into burnout and gets you to quit for reasons that have nothing to do with Spanish. Take days off on purpose. The second is having no goal past “get better”. At the start, every week brought an obvious new ability. In the dip, nothing feels like an achievement unless you named one in advance. Pick something finishable, like one short novel by the end of the month.

Avoidance is the thing to actually worry about, because it hides. A learner in the dip makes visible mistakes. A learner dodging the dip makes none, says less, and stops moving. If you have caught yourself steering around a tense to keep a sentence safe, that is worth more attention than the errors are.

The way through is more Spanish, met in real sentences, over more months than you would like. If you have been stuck at intermediate for a while, our guide to levelling up from intermediate Spanish covers the practical side, and our everyday Spanish slang guide is a low-effort way to keep meeting real language on a bad week. If your listening is the part that feels broken, start with why you cannot understand spoken Spanish yet. And if you want the highest-volume source of correctly formed Spanish there is, pick a book you can nearly manage from our Spanish novels for beginners list, or a shorter one from the books you can finish in a weekend. Our reading verdicts and level ratings come from actually sampling the books first, and you can read how we do that on the about page.

So when your Spanish gets worse, read that as movement. It gets worse because the system is being rebuilt, and it gets better on the far side of the rebuild. Keep reading through it.

Frequently asked questions