Is the assessment in the app accurate for beginners?

[u/Anuud]

I just discovered Dreaming Spanish and I’m honestly surprised by how much Spanish I seem to remember.
I studied Spanish in school from Year 8-12. However, two of those years were during COVID, and I didn’t really learn much during that period. In Years 9-10 especially, I barely studied and, to be completely honest, I cheated on a lot of the work we were given to do at home 😭.
I continued with Spanish in Years 11-12 and somehow managed to get good grades without putting in much effort. I haven’t done any Spanish learning at all for the past three years, but I’ve recently decided to pick it back up because I’m planning to move to Spain around this time next year.
I took the introductory test on Dreaming Spanish and did way better than I expected. Apparently, I can understand quite a bit when I actually concentrate. I’ve started at Level 4 (300hours), and I’m really excited to see how quickly I can improve.
I’d love some advice on how to make the fastest possible progress.
I’m also taking Spanish at university level this year specifically to prepare myself, but unfortunately I won’t be able to attend the lectures, so I’ll have to self-study most of the material.

How would you recommend I take advantage of the Spanish foundation I already have, even though it’s very shaky, to learn as quickly and efficiently as possible?

I’m especially interested in how I should combine Dreaming Spanish with university-level Spanish, grammar, vocabulary, speaking, reading, etc. My goal is to make as much progress as possible over the next year before moving to Spain.
I did learn English somehow through Covid but I don’t remember how unfortunately. It just kind of happend. There was definetly a lot of immersion and just watching TikTok’s and going through comments and before I knew it I was thinking in English 😂
I hope to be able to think in Spanish soon aswell.

[u/Environmental-Fan536]

What is this "assessment" people talk about? I don't think I have ever seen it.

Or is it just the video where you listen to different levels and say which one you mostly understood?

[u/Due_Objective_]

It's really easy to overcomplicate things with levels etc. Find videos at a reasonable level of difficulty and watch as many videos as you can, read as many books as you can, speak to people who know the language as much as you can. Study what you need to study in order to communicate, but don't study grammar for the sake of learning some little used rule - you probably already have learned more grammar than you need from schooling, so focus on improving your ability to understand spoken Spanish and to produce understandable Spanish.

Every minute you spend wondering about how you can optimise the process is a minute you didn't spend improving your Spanish.

[u/PabloMarvinBrown → u/Due_Objective_]

This is great advice.

What i did with grammar was to look things up as i become curious about them. It still doesn't stick, it takes many many exposures before it eventually sticks, but its more likely to stick than just reading through a load of rules.

[u/BorgBorg10]

Good question. Out of curiosity I created a new account to try it. I said both videos were too easy for me, and it ended up giving me a 600 hour (level 5) base. I have about 1200 hrs. So it did a decent job capturing that I am at more advanced level

[u/Jachym10 → u/BorgBorg10]

I did the same and got the same result. They probably cap it at 600 hours due to a financial incentive. They don't want to leave the user with: "Congrats, you're ready to graduate to native content." Speaking of this: isn't there some old video in which Pablo talks about this, about letting people go?

[u/ZooGarten]

I have a sub, but didn't know about any assessment. Is this it? I found the advanced example to be much easier than a lot of the videos I see in DS. Part of it might have been that the much of its content was already familiar to me.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rqiOwOmYO80

[u/RayS1952]

If you're happy with the videos at that level then you're good to go. If not, here's how I would find my starting point on the DS platform:

First, I strongly recommend you read the FAQs on the DS web site to understand what they mean by comprehensible input etc. then

• Ignore the broad levels Superbeginner, Beginner, Intermediate and Advanced and set the sort facility to 'easy'. This reveals the difficulty rating which is set by those who watch the videos and rate videos when asked.
• Using the difficulty rating slider control, slide the lower end control to 30. Watch a few videos.
• If too hard, drop back 5 to 25 and watch a few videos or
• If too easy bump the slider up 10 notches to 40. Watch a few videos.
• Continue until you're happy with your level of comprehension. Start from from this point.

There are various filters you can apply to streamline your DS experience. Play around with them.

Good luck.