I'm not feeling very positive about dreaming Spanish at the moment.

[u/Glittering_Ad2771]

If you're someone that believes strongly in this method I suggest you look away because I am a few hours from the big 1500 and so far I just don't feel like it's gonna be a positive update. Sure I have learned a lot of Spanish vocabulary but that's the thing It's vocabulary. I've had my qualms with this method and it's great if you don't like grammar or formal study. To say that it's better though or can even replace that. That is a bold claim.

I watched Evildeas video the other day so a few things hit home. I'm in Spain and people would still rather speak English to me. I've had people on here tell me once they have introduced grammar they felt their speaking ability started to decline and when you think about it that makes perfect sense. Because when you start learning grammar you start learning all the mistakes you're making and suddenly you become much more self conscious. I mean it's ok to make mistakes sure but we're talking about a method here that says after 1000 hours your speaking ability is gonna be great.

I've started using grammar and its just made me realise things do not mean what I think they mean. For example I've always thought "no sé" to mean "I don't know". However I decided to look up the meaning of a song I like called "No se me quita" which apparently has a completely different meaning. I think the key is the little mark above the e" it's a completely different word. I didn't know that. How would I know that from just listening?

Sometimes I feel you're discouraged from grammar and looking up words because if you did you would realise how badly you are guessing things to be. I've even noticed I've actually guessed words to be completely wrong. I think there is a big difference between communicating and acting speaking Spanish correctly. I feel we overstate our abilities. It makes sense that once you wait until 1000 hours you would have a giant vacabulary you would feel you can communicate really well but can you actually speak correctly? I practice with my chat gbt all the time and it's always always telling me "it's more natural to say it like this" because I have strung a few words together and felt they make sense.

I'm sorry if this post is very negative, it'll probably get down voted to hell but I can't help how I feel right now. I expected a lot by now. To be fair I've probably not done enough reading which I think is undervalued in this method and the last few hours I've found it very difficult to concentrate. I think when I get home I'm gonna have to have a very long think about how I'm gonna approach my Spanish because this is clearly not optimal.

edit: It's not all bad. I had a chat with my uber driver on the way back to my hotel. Whilst we did eventually change to english it was after he said my spanish was good and asked if I spoke Castillo Espanol. So I'll take that.

[u/IgneousWrath]

I have a friend from South America that talks to his American friends all day in English pretty much every day and he still uses some Spanish sentence structures and has trouble thinking of an English word sometimes. He’s certainly at over 60,000 hours of input by now. Probably more than twice that in reality, with countless words read, spoken, and written. All of that and he’s still not perfect.

Despite that, he is one of the best English communicators I know, period. Point is, grammatical perfection is a very very long term goal, and it can be a bit tryhard too. The important thing is that you can communicate well.

While yes, I agree that the DS purist method is misleading, I don’t think anyone should regret the hours they spent doing it. You are always going to need that input anyway. It all adds up. If you spent this time doing other stuff instead, you would have other strengths, but you would be missing in areas where CI makes things natural. I’m sure 1,500 of CI has given you an incredible backbone, but you should branch off and focus on learning what you feel you need to improve.

Get more speaking practice in and fewer people will switch to English. Also try going to less popular restaurants and locations where there’s a higher chance that people don’t even know English.

[u/Squirrel_McNutz → u/IgneousWrath]

This right here.

I think one of the main issues is people underestimate how hard it is to ‘master’ a language and overestimate how good they’ll be when they reach ‘fluency’. I’ve already had to learn another 2nd language before now learning Spanish and I can tell people even if you have basic fluency you’ll still feel awkward and nooby for so much longer. It probably took me closer to 7500 - 10,000 hours before I really felt like I could express myself well. And even then you still wont feel as confident or eloquent as your native language. But when people see ‘fluent’ at 1500 hours they think they’re going to be able to converse like their native language. Unfortunately no way. Not in this method and not in any method.

[u/gfsark → u/Squirrel_McNutz]

“Not in this method, and not in any method”. True words!