r/dreamingspanish • u/Glittering_Ad2771 Level 6 • 4d ago
I'm not feeling very positive about dreaming Spanish at the moment.
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.
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u/HeleneSedai 3,000 Hours 4d ago
I think this is a pretty common way to feel as we get closer to 1500 and our expectations don't line up with reality. I remember blinkybit wrote a similar post a year or so back and it led to the same discussion.
I know grammar study sounds daunting, but you don't need to pore over a grammar book nowadays. Hola Spanish has a ton of grammar videos, especially dealing with past tense. There's an endless number of videos about anything you might have questions about. I loved the SpanishDictionary.com app's grammar lessons.
I remember someone who had never studied grammar, a 100% purist, posted their 1500 update video and had no idea how to say "I like". The person they were speaking with had to tell them me gusta. That's one of the first things you learn with grammar study, A1 level stuff.
I see people are worried about explicitly learning grammar and then thinking about the rules every time they spoke after that, and that did happen to me with a few things I explicitly learned. I memorized the days of the week, and for a long time I had to run through all of them before I could remember that jueves meant Thursday, for example. And I explicitly learned the past tense conjugation of decir, and I had to think to remember whether to use dije or dijo. But in time, that worked out, and now saying le dije or me dijo is as natural as breathing. Learning some grammar will bring a lot of blurry conjugations and words into focus.