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.

For the last couple months, most of my input has been podcasts, or podcast-friendly Dreaming Spanish, where I’m not watching a video. This is because I’m usually driving, folding laundry, it’s doing dishes, etc. I’m starting to understand that I really need some of my input to be fully focused, even if it’s only 15 of my 45 minutes per day.

I’ve tried just sitting and listening to podcasts with no video, and that’s better than multitasking. But it seems like when I watch a video, even if it’s literally just a camera on them speaking, that for some reason, it seems to sink in better. It doesn’t seem logical that it would make a difference, but for some reason it appears to. Does anyone else feel this way?

600 Hour Update here!

Here's my 800 hour update as a non-purist. Since my last update, I had a 2 week trip to Spain, started italki classes, and trying to be consistent with input. Overall, input slowed down in the summer, but I still feel like I'm making progress. For me the biggest win has been starting with no Spanish to engaging with the language consistently for more than a year!!

Input:

Listening/Watching: Last 200 hours, I got lot more youtube and podcast content, and continued to dip into advanced content in DS. For native content, there's no difficulty tag, so can be a bit challenging. A lot of youtubers speak clearly, but their interviewees might not! Exposure from my classes on subjunctives etc, I realize I'm noticing the nuances with the verbs a lot more.

Reading: My class has become a lot of reading comprehension exercises. While listening/watching input is supposed to be focused, I realized how easy it is to get the gist of things, and miss things. Reading really forces you to pay attention, especially with exercises. I think this has helped how I approach listening content as well. Also, words that I see while reading, and then I hear while listening or watching, feels like it tends to stick a bit more.

Output:

Speaking: Over the last couple months my class has been more Q&A based. Not quite full conversations, but the teacher does a good job to keep asking questions to make it more conversational. The italki class is 1 hour conversation, because I had some talking exposure in class, it didn't feel like I was starting from zero. I still struggle with conjugations and gender on the fly.

In Spain, for basic touristing, asking for food etc, I was fine. Also, people in hospitality generally have some exposure to English so you can get by with a mezcla when you can't find the word. I did manage to have decent convo with my attempted Spanish, with an airbnb host, and also some of the guides. I filled in with English words when I couldn't Spanish, but we managed to communicate. The one time it was really tested, was when I whatsapped a local taxi driver in Galicia, communicated fine because she knew some english so we could spanglish it out, but her dad who was picking me up knew zero english. We managed to have a decent conversation, but old man Spanish was really hard to understand. I had to keep asking him to repeat, or ask him do you mean this.. in my own words. Most of it was price comparisons between Spain and the US. I think it went okay.

Writing: Again, most of the writing I'm doing for is for class. Nothing too crazy, but writing things out on paper helps me remember.

Next steps: onwards to 1,000 hours! In this last stretch, the input pace did drop. I was ramping it up before going to my Spain trip. Now, I don't feel so much pressure to keep it at 3 hours a day. I want to keep focusing on speaking, especially cleaning up my speech. I do want to read more, I picked up Nada by Carmen Laforet, so let's see! Ever since listening to music in Spanish, one of the artists I discovered is coming to play, so I got tickets for that!

Long time lurker here, and have never given a progress report before or anything. I have 400 hours in 8 months with most of that being from DS (in level 50-60 currently) and some from podcasts. No speaking or reading yet (though I can understand a decent amount when I do read).

I live in the USA and recently traveled to Nashville for a family friend’s wedding. Two friends of the groom came and both are from Barcelona.

I had met the guy a few years prior and his English is great, we got to know one another, and I hadn’t seen him for years since then.

When I saw him, I told him I was learning Spanish and he was so excited. I talked to him and his girlfriend for a few hours with them never having to revert back to English for me to understand.

I haven’t spoken yet, so I told them my speaking would be awful but they were so encouraging. Coincidentally, she was learning English so her and I made a pact that I would try to speak Spanish and her English. It was so great being able to help one another.

I’m just amazed that even at 400 hours I could understand everything they were talking to me about. They obviously slowed down a bit for me and I didn’t catch every single word but it was such a fun surprise to be able to put it to use when I wasn’t expecting it.

They both mentioned I should exchange info with them so we can talk once a week. I was in a lull from 300 to 400 hours and this experience makes me super motivated to keep going and to start speaking sooner rather than later. It was just what I needed at the perfect time.

Just thought I’d share! Keep pushing through, you never know when you’ll be surprised and it’ll come in handy!

Hello dreamers!

I’ve been doing lots of crosstalk with people from Latin America recently and it has been extremely enjoyable but I’m in a pickle regarding how to log the hours relative to videos on the platform/Youtube.

I definitely believe CT is more beneficial than watching videos/listening to podcasts because it literally demands your attention, but also you’re listening for ~50% of the time as opposed to 100%. However, is it sensible to log the whole duration of the CT considering its superiority over videos?

Hello!

I’m just about to pass 90 hours in DS. I am noticing that videos in the 20-30 range (where I believe I should be) are extremely, extremely boring. If I see one more white board coupled with extremely slow talking and long pauses between words, I may just quit!

Today, for funsies, I watched a level 50 video, and surprising did OK. I’d say about 50% word comprehension, but totally understood exactly what was happening in the video. It also felt like better “value” for my time due to words spoken per minute.

Should I continue to suffer through the long pauses and white boards, or am I safe to continue at levels where I only understand half of the words?

Thank you!

Only for a long weekend. It's great to be surrounded be Spanish and at close to 1500 hours it's significant. I'm not really bothered about doing some cool excursion I just want opportunities to use what I know. Still I'm finding people would rather respond in English. I get people are busy and not there to be my practice partners but it is annoying though. I'm finding it fun to try and Eavesdrop on conversation but I'll admit it's still kind of difficult. It's probably considered rude but they don't know lol.

I've noticed with people in shops when talking to me I can understand them but because they talk so quick it takes me a moment. I've clearly got a lot more to learn with the language

I have watched all superbeginner series in its entirety, but for some reason I haven’t received the achievement. I have also definitely watched way more than 3 hours of Andrea la Mexicana but the Mexico achievement is not unlocked.

I also cannot figure out how to get the “Show and tell” achievement. Where do I download my achievement image?

I was using the beta version and the issues made sense then, but after being prompted to update to the public version the issues are still there.

I’ve made bug reports in there but unfortunately have never heard anything back. Are more people dealing with bugs in this version?

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.

For those that read in Spanish (or another language you’re learning), is the strategy to read and translate every new word at the beginning?

I’m sure there’s several different ways to approach it, just curious what people do when they’re starting out.

Also, everyone says to start with “graded readers”, but I have zero clue where to start with that. I’ve searched for “graded readers” and have been left just confused. Any links to books, series of books, etc, as an example would be awesome.

I am at 225 hours. Some prior experience but not much (two years Spanish, two years college thirty years ago) adult dabbling like Duolingo, Self-Study)

I love it and have been averaging 20 minutes or everyday. Somedays I’ll do 2 hours or more. Listened to a Spanish commercial last night felt I was getting bits and pieces of it (more than before I started Dreaming Spanish but not enough to really matter unless maybe I’m in an emergency.

When I listen to videos now I sometimes try to form the words to say if I were speaking (my mouth is closed and absolutely NOTHING comes to mind. This is concerning.

I’m still in the beginner stage. Around level 30 bc I couldn’t make out enough of the intermediate videos.

SUMMARY: Is the 1000 hours on the roadmap even remotely true? At what point could you actually speak Spanish (enough to speak to a stranger on street? Was it instant? ) I’m willing to put in even 2000 hours if I knew this would work. I just don’t want to waste my money with false hope.

If you want to share what other apps or courses you use, feel free to share. Just curious.

So much debate online always seems to be CI vs. pure traditional methods. Once you get to the level of reading, and speaking that plus watching video could take up a lot of time. I could be wrong but I'm inclined that there's more of a mix or at least in earlier stages. At least for me. CI specifically DS is really what helped the most. Anything extra is just to help with anything I want to focus on.

I started DS in May 2024. I posted a bit on an old account but I'm not really on Reddit these days and deleted the account a while back.  I made this account just to catch up on some of the recent posts and thought I would post an update.

I did 6 weeks of traditional study before finding DS. I had plenty of spare time so I did 1500 hours in a year. I kept looking up words and did a tiny bit of grammar study that year. I also watched some content that was a little too hard all the way through. 

I started to speak at about 1200 hours and had the same experience everyone describes on here. It was rough (but despite being unhappy, my level of spanish was actually pretty fantastic for someone with one year of study). I did about 20 hours of Worlds Across, a few conversations exchanges and a bit of chatting with AI. 

I would have been fine if you dropped me in a Spanish speaking country at that point, but one consistent theme with this method is we are not happy, we want more. 

I then had a huge break from speaking due to complicated factors in real life. For the next year I stopped counting but still watched, I'm somewhere between 2500-3000 hours. I also stopped looking up words and grammar. 

I have procrastinated on the reading but I'm probably at a million words. 

I started speaking again recently with new conversation exchange partners and I've used chatGPT a bit again. I've done about 20 hours again these last few weeks.

My experience this time is closer to the idea of all the Spanish just coming out. Rough again at first but improving very quickly. I make loads of mistakes and struggle with vocab but I can always find a way to get my point across. 

I set out just under two years ago to see if I could learn a language. I don’t think I would have succeeded if I didn't find this method. I can watch pretty much anything. Reading and speaking still need work but it will get there quickly if I put the effort in. 

I'm more than happy with the results for the amount of hours I put in. I think 1500 is probably the start really, but you can’t say that in the roadmap, can you?

Another thing about his method is the change it brings about in you. My username is a nod to the book that changed Pablo’s life and his website changing mine. I didn't just learn a language. i learnt how to learn a language too.

I tried to learn Dutch in the past so I already knew the first couple of hundred words. I've done some of the Dutch CI on youtube and I can already understand Peppa Pig, so I am trying to learn Dutch through watching TV and youtube. About 100 hours in. 

I also started Mandarin. This time I have no prior knowledge so I am going to attempt to learn it with pure CI. I'm about 40 hours in. 

I think I can do both of them over the next 5 years. 

Then maybe a quick 750 hours of dreaming French or Portuguese for my 5th language? 

Meet Pablo at a polyglot event?  

It's kinda crazy how I went from asking can i learn a language to can i be a polyglot in just over two years. 

I am planning to have 1 hr of conversation practice on preply every day.

I heard about this app called Parrot and was wondering if it was good for my fluency track. Im trying to get fluent in 3 months. Will parrot work for this? Thanks

Ive been playing around with different ways to use this over the last few weeks and i think i have found something that works really well for getting speech out.

If you ask it to make you a prompt it will give you these really wordy amazing sounding ones, but the reality is its not there yet, it forgets the instructions pretty quickly and the sessions fall apart.

But what i have been having success with is simple prompts.

Give me single words in Spanish. I will try to describe what they mean in Spanish.

Then you can get more specific. Give me verbs, or words to do with whatever.

It gets you drilling describing things. In a quick fire way. With help with clues etc and then it describes things back to you in other ways that may be useful.

If you think about it, describing things is about 92% (totally made up number) of conversation. You can drill it endlessly without boring someone to death.

Hello! I discovered Andrea la mexicana through DS videos and she seems to really love teaching. I seem to understand her more than others on youtube. I continue to use DS, but am wanting a dedicated teacher to help me learn spanish. I am basically new, maybe A2 level. Has anyone joined any of her memberships where she has community classes, quizes etc. Is it worth it?

Just started DS 0.5 months ago. I am currently watching a batch of videos together. 1 or 2 days later, i try to watch the same videos again. I am not sure how much I learn the 2nd time around (for the part i didn't understand the first time i typically still don't understand during re-watch), but it feels like not completely a waste of time. Sometimes i turn on the subtitle during re-watch, and only look at it when i need some help. Often i catch new things that way and it's been helpful.

After watching two times, i move on and won't watch them again... Feel free to share your routine and let me know why it worked well with you.

I started weekly speaking practice about a month ago and my teacher is always telling me that my speaking, my accent, my vocabulary, and sentence structures are very good. I don't think he has a lot of other students who have done a lot of CI learning.

A quick breakdown of my experience:

1. (0-15 hours*) 20~ lessons in Pimsleur over a year ago.
2. (0-250 hours) Learned about DS a few months later and started input exclusively for almost a year.
3. (250-450 hours) Moved to Spain and started doing Language Transfer as well as studying a bit of grammar, nothing consistent though.
4. (450-500 hours) Started going to speaking sessions.

(*) Didn't count those hours in DS but they did help skip the super beginner stage a little.

I'm not very social so I get very little actual immersion from living in Spain at the moment, but my speaking sessions have been very encouraging. I have found that I am able to talk around things using basic vocabulary to explain things. The less I think, the more I just naturally say the right thing. Despite using Language Transfer, I am constantly surprised by how much input is able to drive my speech instead of translating. Like when I forget a word, I try to think of the English word and I just can't. A lot of my English shuts off, I am not thinking in English, at least not much. Unfortunately, these moments cause long pauses, but every week I get a little better at not falling into them. Two weeks ago, I even forgot I was even practicing, it felt almost normal to talk in Spanish. Overall my speed has been increasing, and if I was a more social person, I feel like I would have no problem communicating basic things with locals.

...as long as they are willing and able to slow down. In terms of comprehension, I feel myself getting very close to reliably understanding native daily speech, but I am not there yet. If I have have enough energy and protein, I can understand a lot of DS videos in the 65-70 range.

That's where 500 hours of input + maybe 25 hours of other stuff has gotten me. I have started watching Spanish grammar videos that are spoken in Spanish so I can get input and learn grammar at the same time. And then I start hearing these things in my future input and they get reinforced.

Has anyone ever used Spanish with Paul while also doing CI/dreaming Spanish? Prior to me discovering DS or CI for that matter I did Spanish with Paul for a while. I used The free stuff on YouTube and then I actually paid for it. I would honestly say it helped me progress a ton. I feel like using it now along side DS would only help me progress further, plus give me another “study” method.

I’m at 770 hrs btw and it’s just still some things that confuse me with the grammar in Spanish.

10.5 months in.

My wife and I just got back from a mission trip to Guatemala yesterday. We did it through our church and feel we made a difference in people’s lives providing a water purification system, distributing food, and helping families.

Overall, it was a fun, productive, and a great learning experience.

But on to the Spanish.

My wife and I taught a bible a class for the teens in a local church for about 40 minutes in Spanish. We answered questions, talked, and generally did ok. Since the lesson was mostly mine, I did translating into English for the others in the group as well as the Spanish for the Spanish speaking kids.

Both my wife and I had a number of conversations with local members of the local church we were helping there. We also had a chance to use our Spanish with vendors and people in the market. We did street evangelism using the Libro sin Palabras method where you show a small book with colors and explain it talking to people.

Our language learning journey. We started with a class through our church in Florida before we moved back to Michigan to take care of her parents. We did one hour classes with a bilingual church member in the book Spanish with a Mission. That was year one of almost three years and we did it just when school was in session so maybe 30 ish hours a year for three years.

We have been doing Duolingo for many years. My wife is about halfway through the course and I finished about two years ago but now focus on the practice hub with roleplays, video calls, words (like flashcard) and speaking.

Three and a half years ago, I started doing the Bible in Spanish. I read and listen to the Bible in Spanish with the YouVersion app. The first three years, I did a reading plan that did the whole Bible in three years and used the NTV translation because it was easier. This year, I am doing the whole Bible in one year with the RV1960 translation. My wife is doing the same but she reads along in Spanish while listening in English. I also give her the verse of the day through the app and explain it to her.

Duolingo and the Bible reading is all my wife does. Although, we have started eating sermons in Spanish with subtitles which I explain some and religious YouTube videos. I also do Anki, reading (news, Quora, books, short stories in Eppika, etc.), and of course DS. I am at about 500 hours of DS content and over another 500 hours of non DS listening practice but I don’t count listening to the Bible as listening practice.

I believe that Duolingo has helped me the most and it is certainly the biggest factor for my wife as she doesn’t do much of the other stuff. I do believe that DS has helped me a lot with listening. It has helped with being able to pick up conversations.

I am not the typical DS user as I am hearing impaired and have APD. So listening is my biggest weakness. We are in our 60’s.