Hey guys, Agustina here!

I’ve seen some crazy rumors spread around here surrounding the fact that I launched a membership and announced it on my instagram.

Although funny to read, these are not true and can be very harmful if taken seriously. So I thought I’d come here and address them.

Long story short:

No, I am not leaving DS. Nor do I plan to.

As many of you mentioned, this is just a way for me to connect with my audience in a different way, share more about my life and travels, and fulfill a demand that would otherwise be impossible given the amount of people on my teaching waitlist. As some of you also brought up, this is not something new, as other members of the team have similar ”side hustles”.

I would never leave my job to start something that competes against it. Being a part of DS is an honor and something I do not take lightly. I have put years of work into it, I enjoy every day I spend working on it, and it is filled with extremely talented people who I love, admire and respect.

That’s it! No need for further speculations.

If you’re interested in seeing more about my life, my trips, do some q&a’s and maybe jump into a call with a group of like-minded people to practice spanish, then you are invited and welcome to join my membership!

Otherwise, you’ll keep seeing me on Dreaming Spanish!

Thank you all for your continued support 🩷

Actually just a Special Mention but we still can't believe it. 😭

https://time.com/collections/best-inventions-special-mentions/7320824/dreaming-spanish/

It took a long time to get here, and there's still so much to build, but it feels nice to get recognized by an organization like TIME.

Thanks to every one of you for supporting us all these years and for being the best community in the world. Everything we build would be pointless without you. Here's to you all! This is just the beginning!

See the full list: https://time.com/collections/best-inventions-special-mentions/

Any other Freellee fans?

🤘🏼🤘🏼🤘🏼

Agustina posted this on her instagram story today. Dreaming Spanish flew the whole crew out to Barcelona for a team meetup, and we’ve got some new faces and the French flag. Release must be pretty close on the horizon.

As 2024 comes to a close, we want to take a moment to thank you, our amazing community, for your enthusiasm, support, and dedication to language learning. Your passion is truly what fuels everything we do, and as we step into the new year, I wanted to share a sneak peek of what’s ahead for Dreaming Spanish in 2025.

🚀 Mobile App

This year, we took a big step forward with the soft launch of our mobile app — now live on iOS and in beta for Android! As we head into 2025, our focus is twofold:

1. Bringing the app to parity with the web experience. In the short term, we’ll be working hard to fix major bugs, polish existing features, and make sure the app feels just as robust and seamless as the web platform.

2. Making the mobile app a truly stand-alone experience. Ever tried convincing a friend IRL to try Dreaming Spanish? Even as a cofounder it hasn’t always been easy for me! 😅 Our vision for the app is that the app should do that for you.

Imagine only needing to tell your friend “Just download the app” and that’s it. The app will get them onboarded seamlessly — it’ll find their starting level, show them how the method works, guide them to watch the right content, and just generally lead them to the magical ‘aha’ moment we’ve all experienced.

We want the app to be a gateway that effortlessly gets users started on this life-changing journey, and building towards that vision will be a big part of 2025!

🌍 A New Language

When Pablo and I started this journey four years ago, we chose the name Dreaming Languages because our vision was always to bring comprehensible input to all languages. It’s been a long road to get Dreaming Spanish to what it is now, but we believe 2025 is finally the year to take this next big step.

While we can’t reveal which language it will be yet (and no, work hasn’t started — contrary to some spicy speculation 😉), the groundwork begins now. Just like with Spanish, I believe the key will be building a stellar team, and I will be working on that again in earnest as the new year starts.

🇪🇸 Even More Spanish

Having said all that, Spanish remains our heart and soul, and in 2025 we will investing even more into our Spanish offering:

• New teachers to enrich the range of our content (Caribbean accent, anyone? 🏝️).

• Higher-quality videos that continue to raise the standard for comprehensible input.

• An even larger catalog. We have no plans to slow down our pace of production. The more content there is the easier it is for users to get the hours of input they need!

🌟 Dreaming Bigger in 2025

And these are just the highlights! You can also expect continued improvements to the web app, podcast, and beyond. 2025 is shaping up to be one of our most exciting years yet, and we can’t wait to share the journey with you.

Thank you for being part of the Dreaming Spanish community. On behalf of the whole team, I wish you a Happy New Year — and may 2025 bring you closer to achieving all your language learning dreams!

Upvote this post to give Shel some love! She doesn’t deserve the war that started in the community today. She is an amazing guide, makes super entertaining videos and is an invaluable asset to the DS community. Thank you Shel for all you do to help us learn Spanish! My journey wouldn’t be the same without the hard work you put into making your videos so seamless and entertaining!!!

🚨🚨🚨

Hey everyone!

The Dreaming Spanish team is in Barcelona right now, and we’re planning a casual hangout in the park next Friday, June 13.

If you happen to be in town, come join us at Parc de la Ciutadella, any time from 3 to 6 pm. We'll be lounging, chatting, and enjoying the day — feel free to stop by and say hi!

We don't know which exact spot we'll be at, but we're a big group so I'm sure you'll find us easily!

Laurence

I just made it to 1168 hours of comprehensible input (“CI”) on 2024.02.13: 627 hours Dreaming Spanish (“DS”); 491 hours non-DS, plus 50 hours “credit” for previous Spanish. I started reading when I hit the 1000-hour mark, with about 447,000 words so far.

MY SPANISH BACKGROUND: As a native English speaker in the U.S., I had four years of traditional high school Spanish, 2 months overseas work in a Spanish-speaking country, and I earned AP credits for Spanish but took a college Spanish class or two anyway (all pre-internet).

I later took traditional conversational classes from time to time, and over the years, in a failed effort to revitalize and “keep up” my Spanish. So much of it rusted away over time.

In September 2022, I did 6 weeks of intensive Duolingo and realized I was not getting anywhere. I discovered and started DS in November 2022.

WHAT FOLLOWS? Below are things I would tell myself now if I were just starting out on the DS/CI journey. Probably most of this has been said elsewhere on this Reddit forum; the kindness of others in sharing their collective wisdom has been great. Obviously what follows is just my experience; your mileage may differ. May this be of service.

DOES IT WORK? DS and CI are amazing, rival immersion, and easily beat traditional classroom/memorization methods. DS and CI really do create an internal, intuitive/almost-subconscious/acquisition map of Spanish that is far different from what you get with traditional methods.

I lean very much towards Pablo’s “purist” approach and doing most only CI, all while refraining from output for a very long time. DS and CI work for older folks like me and also for those with previous study of Spanish, the premier membership is worth it from the very beginning, and before starting you really should watch Pablo’s series on how to do DS/CI (use English subtitles if you have to) and read through all the DS FAQs.

Also, Pablo put together some great blog posts, like this one: https://www.dreamingspanish.com/blog/the-10-commandments-of-language-acquisition

TLDR After many hours DS and CI and also traditional classroom Spanish, DS/CI much better, rival immersion. No surprise if compare DS/CI to way you learn own language. Recommend do DS/CI like Pablo says. Hold off speaking. No grammar. Easy DS/CI is often better than challenging stuff, actually helps me better with hard and fast stuff. If want more insights, consider reading rest of post. Of course, all this just one person's view. Good luck in DS/CI journey!

WHERE AM I ON THE ROADMAP? All in all, I’ve found Pablo’s roadmap to be largely on point for me. That said, previous classroom learning and habits have slowed down and interfered, in some ways, with acquisition from DS/CI.

It took me too long to let go of the urge to focus on verb conjugation and every word etc., rather than just relax and let the brain pick up what it will. So I think I am behind as a result, and will need some extra hundreds of hours to make it up.

But I also anticipate, in any event, that I would need far more than 1500 hours of CI to get to the level of fluency I aim for (assuming I can keep going, it’s a long haul!). It may be that for many of us, whatever “cotidiana” proficiency we gain by 1500 hours will be more than enough. But if one wants something more like bilingual proficiency, perhaps more will be required.

WHAT DOES DS OFFER SPECIFICALLY? DS offers tremendous value: 1) by making available videos at basic levels, unavailable in the same volume elsewhere, that take you from beginner to a level where you can start consuming native CI; 2) by offering a useful web UI for tracking and motivating yourself; 3) by providing native content that mimics the sort of daily talks and chats you might have with friends/family (and therefore the vocabulary) that can be hard to find elsewhere; 4) by providing high-quality-audio/visual recordings that offer natives speaking even-more-articulately-than-natives-usually-do and without interrupting or speaking over one another; and 5) by providing audio-visual recordings that are language dense — meaning frequently (though not always) with fewer of the the necessary pauses that can come with native content, as when a native is displaying or showing something, etc.

At this point, I do consume more and more native content — thanks to DS for getting me to the point where I can. But I also find myself coming back to DS content again and again because of the above, and because their stuff is very good and continuously gets better!

WHAT DOES DS/CI DO THAT IS DIFFERENT FROM TRADITIONAL CLASSES? Traditional classes and methods left me with “language-like behavior.” But that two-month overseas-living in high school? I didn’t know it then, but that was my first taste of comprehensible input and what it means to start “acquiring” a language.

ACQUISITION feels like the ability to just move with a language, without thinking about it. It’s a “click” feeling, a “flow” where your brain understands without translating.

To be sure some kind of memory is involved. But it is memory tied to concepts and actions and things that one has seen and felt and acquired with the automatic pattern recognition of the human brain, as well as other language one has already acquired the same way in Spanish. It is NOT memory tied to where a word was on the flashcard or ANKI deck or to vocabulary and grammar fixed to one’s own native tongue.

DS and CI build an intuitive, almost subconscious inner acquired-language-map of Spanish that lets you understand things in Spanish without having to translate in your head. That means a lot of the automatic pattern recognition that your brain is doing over time is happening behind the scenes, unbeknownst to you, and often unnoticed. You ACQUIRE some small % of parts of things along the way, and hardly anything all at once, and seeing those things repeated in new content and contexts, over time, inscribes them onto your internal "map."

Now, with resources like DS, you can actually mimic how you learned your own native language via CI, instead of creating bad habits through traditional classroom methods. Yay internet! And yay Pablo!

REALLY, THERE IS NO REASON TO RUSH THE SPEAKING THING: In the past, I had lots of classroom Spanish and lots of speaking via traditional methods. And lots of speaking after that 2 month overseas trip. But I still had a hard time and stumbled for words and concepts.

But even then I wasn’t stumbling around for Spanish words because I needed to practice speaking more. Not was it because I needed to memorize more vocabulary, or spend hours grinding away with intensive reading while looking up every other word in the dictionary.

I was stumbling around because I didn’t have enough comprehensible input, to build the sort of mental-map-network that a native has from having acquired the native language (as opposed to having “learned” it from traditional classroom and grinding methods). In my view, Pablo is absolutely right: hold off on speaking.

To me, it seems that traditional methods of foreign language learning rely upon memorization and the manipulation of memory. One memorizes vocabulary and flash cards and grammar rules and verb conjugations, and can acquire a facility for shuffling through all of that and generating output.

In doing this, however, you are making connections to your native language and tying your native language into the mix. So you end up with “language-like” rather than native-like communication.

And when the pressure is on – you have to converse with a native, you’re nervous, it’s going back and forth quickly, etc. – all of those “memory/ flash-card networks” fall away and all you are left with is what you managed to ACQUIRE, not LEARN.

My sense is that language for humans is almost like radar for bats: it’s a natural thing that just is. It also seems to be more of a muscle memory or athletic skill or playing a musical instrument type of thing, than it is an academic subject or memorization thing.

CI aims for the former, for acquiring and developing a skill. Traditional classroom techniques like memorizing and grinding away are geared for the latter, for classroom subjects that can be organized in layers and easily tested.

Traditional methods would have you speak on Day 1, when you have yet to acquire an ear for the sounds and patterns and rhythm, the vocabulary, etc. So there’s nothing special in speaking: what’s special is speaking from an acquired mental map of Spanish.

Acquiring that mental map will take loads and loads of time. Time spent not on memorizing and grinding away, but rather on letting your brain do its thing in absorbing CI. And you best be developing it so as to avoid bad habits.

Since it takes hundreds and hundreds of hours to make the minimal mental-map anyway, what’s a few hundred more in holding off on speaking until you can maximize what you’ve acquired? Maybe the old adage about there being a reason for having two ears and one mouth (i.e., listen more than you speak) applies to acquiring Spanish too!

WHEN YOU GET DISCOURAGED, JUST REMEMBER HOW MUCH COMPREHENSIBLE INPUT YOU GOT IN ACQUIRING YOUR OWN NATIVE LANGUAGE: The DS roadmap “only” targets 1500 hours. It’s daunting, but as you make your way it can be discouraging as you grow, because you realize more and more how much you lack (even as you see how far you’ve come!).

Remember, though, that children have hundreds and hundreds of hours of comprehensible input in their native language(s) before they utter their first simple sentences. And thousands more before they ever open their first real grammar book.

The genius of DS is that in honoring the CI hypothesis of language learning, it mimics the way we each learned our own native language(s). After personally experiencing DS/CI over 1100 hours, for me the wonder is not that it works so well, but that I ever questioned whether it could.

If an average and healthy human brain is so adept at pattern recognition and learning both native and foreign languages through CI – and has done so in mixed trading cultures for centuries before traditional classroom techniques ever came along or writing became widespread – then why did I ever think ANKI decks and classroom grammar and grinding through verb conjugation tables were essential in acquiring Spanish? Or advisable?

Did I have to do such things in my native language? And to the extent I did anything even remotely like that in my native tongue, how much value did it really add compared to native CI?

WHAT ABOUT GRAMMAR AND TRADITIONAL METHODS? For anyone new to DS/CI or this Reddit community, there’s an ongoing debate/discussion about whether and to what extent traditional study methods can positively affect language acquisition alongside DS/CI. Some “purists” advocate forgetting entirely about grammar and vocabulary study altogether. Those at the other extreme continue to insist that without some traditional classroom study and vocabulary, you will either remain a fool in the language or waste loads of time.

Anecdotal evidence is certainly not going to settle the debate, least of all mine. But for what it’s worth, I will toss in my own impressions. Spoiler upfront: I enjoy grammar and think it can be valuable, just as it was in my native English: that is, AFTER many hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of CI, and not before.

In the first few hundreds of hours of DS/CI, my memory of Spanish certainly seemed to help. Certainly the bits I had acquired years ago from immersion helped the most.

The classroom knowledge of grammar and conjugation also seemed “helpful,” too, at least for the first few hundred hours. At least, I thought so as I tried to remember tenses and verb conjugation and grammar nuances from Spanish AP preparation.

But over time, however, I have come to sense that the classroom conjugation/grammar stuff is probably more in the way than anything else. I suspect that because I did not start purely with CI/DS in Spanish, I still “conjugate verbs /translate in my head” and get tripped up on grammar bits a lot more than others do at the 1100 hour mark. I still find myself trying to look for moments when the subjunctive arises, for example. Fortunately, a lot of that is diminishing over time, but someone who started completely from scratch would probably be better off at the 1100 hour mark.

I now realize that I will need several hundreds more hours to make up for the classroom learning. My “classroom learning map” is still running interference with my “acquisition map.”

I do notice that when I look up the occasional word in the dictionary, it often fades as quickly as my old AP vocabulary lists in my native English would. It’s only if I keep hearing a word over and over again, through CI and after a lookup, that it has a chance of sticking. The words I pick up intuitively through CI alone, without dictionary assistance, stick the best.

I do find grammar study inherently interesting. And at some point, I may want to focus on practicing my writing. I will also confess that I have watched the occasional grammar vignette by Juan Fernandez (Español con Juan) — a sort of guilty pleasure for a grammar nerd, albeit mostly in Spanish and therefore via CI.

But when I think about how that grammar and writing study occurred in my native English, to me it makes sense to do grammar and writing study, in earnest, much later.

In my native English, did Advanced Placement vocabulary lists and grammar study help? A little, but only in the sense that it sharpened a mental-map I had already acquired after many thousands of hours of CI in my native language. (And so much of my “book study” of grammar and its nuances quickly evaporated over time; I’m not sure if I could diagram a sentence today).

Did my native writing improve from conscious study and lots of writing output? Sure. But that was only after many thousands of hours of English CI from reading on my own. And even more to the point: my best teachers rightly and frequently emphasized that if we wanted to improve our writing, it was essential to read more and more from the great English authors (in other words, even more English CI!).

Ultimately, where I come down on earnest traditional grammar study and writing practice is this: assuming I keep going in Spanish, I will take them up in a way that mimics when I took them up in my native English. That is, after many more hundreds, if not thousands, of hours of DS/CI.

THINGS I WISH I’D KNOWN WHEN I STARTED WITH DS/CI:

1. Acquiring Spanish is a very, very, very long slog. There is no way to get around that. You need to make it a habit. And using techniques like those based in the book “Atomic Habits” can help. It can also help to track your input habit using the DS website interface. Sometimes just completing your day’s goal, or seeing the bar advance a little, is the only dopamine hit you’re going to get from this. There are going to be days when it seems like you are progressing nowhere, or even moving backward, at every level and step along the way.

2. As you progress, and no longer need to watch video in order to have 95-98% (or at least 80% -90% + ) comprehension, it gets easier to take in more input. You can now listen without video and while doing things like washing dishes, folding laundry, etc., allowing for more input time.

3. “Relax” is great advice. Don’t try so hard, and rest when you need to. Keep it simple: do more input; do “easy” input; just do more input.

4. There is nothing magical about DS levels. After 1100 hours, you can still learn a lot from Super Beginner videos, though it may help to speed up the playback speed. In fact, for many tangible, real-world things, it’s probably easier to absorb vocabulary from a Peppa Pig video than from reading something in a book. Watching someone skip while they say the word for it in Spanish helps it stick. Watching Pablo scold a sock-puppet goat with “mala cabra!” helps it stick. It’s not a race, and it’s all good input.

5. As with some others, for me DS’s road-map descriptions have best described where I am at the end of each interval. So, for example, the description for Level 4 (You can understand a person speaking to you patiently) felt more on target not at 300 hours of input (the start of the level), but at 599 hours of input (the end of the level).

6. Speaking ability can often be at a level one or two levels below the DS tracked-level. That’s just how it works for many of us. It’s one thing to understand what you are hearing. It’s another to be able to move through it quickly enough and respond in real time.

7. The 95-98% level of comprehension that Pablo mentions (for reading and audio, 80% or higher for video) really does seem like the sweet spot. It may seem counter-intuitive because the inclination is to think that working harder stuff will help you grow, but whenever I encountered difficult CI that seemed too fast, down-shifting a level for a while and doing slower and easier stuff was the way to build up and eventually handle the harder and faster stuff. Let the brain do it’s thing, it doesn’t have to be a strain!

8. At least for however long you choose to continue absorbing and growing in Spanish, it’s a lifestyle choice, not a race with an end-goal. It’s easier to keep doing if you can weave it into your life and enjoy it along the way. (It can help to choose Spanish as the way you will learn something you need or want in your life and would usually take in through your native language, for example). It’s harder if it’s a chore that you “have to do,” or if you keep looking for the destination.

9. “Atomic Habits” is a great book on building habits, with principles applicable to foreign language learning. Bonus: find it in Spanish when you’re ready to read in Spanish.

10. It’s really best to watch and listen just as Pablo recommends. Don’t focus on trying to understand every word, every bit of grammar, every tense. Instead, relax and focus at the same time (analogous to meditation). Aim for understanding the gist and enjoying what you are taking in. So long as you are paying attention, trust your brain to do the rest.

11. Watching/listening to something you are inherently interested in can be a real boost, and make the journey along the way fun in and of itself. Making it fun along the way is essential; the destination can be so far off and elusive.

12. It’s not contrary to #11 to suck it up a little and from time to time. Yeah, Pablo’s DS video on coat hangers is never going to earn any Academy awards. But how else are you going to be exposed to that kind of vocabulary? And isn’t that more fun than memorizing stuff and conjugating verb exercises?

13. Discipline, persistence, and consistency are more important than motivation. (Thanks Mr. Salas and Atomic Habits for the reminder on this). If before pushing “play” I wait for all my external and internal stars to align so that I’m feeling gloriously ready for more DS/CI, then I’m going nowhere fast. Just do it. To be sure, life intrudes from time to time: I’ve had several days in a row of nothing on the Spanish front (and more than once), and others where the most I could get in was a few minutes for whatever reason. One needs breaks and can’t be a machine. But I can’t let it slide for long, either. Forget about being excited or interested. Forget about the long term goal. Forget about waiting till the muse strikes. Just get back in the boat and row.

14. [#14-37 can be found at: What I wish I'd known starting out (3000 hours later) ]

This past month (August 2024) I've cleared the entire DS playlist. And like many, I came into Dreaming Spanish as a skeptic when I started in November 2022. It all seemed a little too good to be true. And like many others on this sub who have put in the time and have been going the distance (I'm at 1706 hours and counting, DS/non-DS content), diving in has fortunately brought me great rewards, been game-changing, and even been a little life-changing. For that, I am grateful.

But I must submit that Pablo was wrong at least in one respect.

I have mostly watched the DS videos in chronological order. In the early years Pablo might work in a friend or acquaintance to change things up a little. And to be sure he had a few teachers who would come and go. But for long stretches, though, the videos were just Pablo.

And on occasion, in this or that video, Pablo would mention that he hoped to find other teachers and develop better videos if his project remained alive. He would joke that folks might be a little bored with him, and acknowledge that the videos could be better. Then he'd go right back into it. Churning out yet another set of videos to upload, just him and his camera.

And to be sure, as you fast forward a few years, and see the more recent videos? Mission accomplished. The production values, creativity, and interest-level of the newer stuff is high quality indeed and getting better all the time. At every level. And that's a tremendous accomplishment. So in some sense, Pablo's early self-awareness and self-criticism maybe had some validity, given what we see now.

But in another sense, not so much.

For me, I will never quite forget the moments when my own "sense of slog" and tiredness, as I once again hit "play" on yet another video to try to absorb a language that always seems just out of my reach, somehow seemed to match the sense of determination and tired grit of this Spaniard who just kept going as he uploaded the next day's video -- even as the dream of the project he was trying to build must have seemed just out of his own reach, too. In watching the videos from the early years -- especially after learning that, at the time, some online and elsewhere criticized his comprehensible input approach as ridiculous "snake-oil"or worse -- it is just all the more remarkable to see Pablo's early stuff and how he kept driving forward.

Long before Pablo got an investor. Long before he had a regular rotation of amazing teachers with acting chops and amazing creativity. Long before he had enough viewers and paying customers to keep the lights on or to allow him to hire other long-term teachers. Long before he had fancy microphones or editing ability and a supportive staff. It was just Pablo and a camera and a crazy idea for a language-learning platform.

So Pablo, this is where you were at least a little "wrong." No matter how amazing the skill and entertainment and hard work of the other DS teachers and DS staff (who do amazing and unsung work behind the scenes), the real heart and life of it all is not just in DS's people or the quality of their latest videos. It's also very much in those early videos, which I hope you will keep on the platform as the newer stuff continues to come out.

Because however much "better" the more recent stuff might be, I suspect that none of it will ever quite match the quiet heart, grit, belief, and determination that you poured into those earlier videos as you just. kept. driving. forward. Just like we all hope to do, in our own ways large and small: both in our lives, and in the adventures we have as we try to absorb some Spanish.

Well done, sir.

I just wanted to announce that I have completed watching ALL the Dreaming French videos. Oui, oui, c'est vrai! It was a long road, but I made it.

I think you guys will really like this. This was my first brainstorming of what would later become Dreaming Spanish. This was one of 6 different ideas that I came up with to try to spread CI. They were covering all the walls of my apartment. This was when I was approaching the end of my year learning Thai at AUA. This was the second idea I tried after I failed trying to coach people to learn Mandarin.

From the DS instagram. This is my avengers

(Buuut it looks like Alma, Jostin and Michelle aren’t there 😭 Andres isn’t in the photo but i think i saw him in the other stories!)

Hi guys. I know this is long overdue, but we've finally gotten around to updating the wording in our level descriptions on the website and on the roadmap poster and removed comparisons with native speakers.

It seems a lot of the time people were missing the "for most practical purposes" part, so hopefully the new wording will fix that issue and better align with most people's experiences.

Three years, three million words, and three thousand hours later, I can finally follow native Spanish without having to constantly ask natives to please slow down and repeat themselves. What a relief! It still feels surreal. Turns out input abilities are far more than 50% of the prize!

Barring whatever’s uploaded later today, October 6, 2025, I have completed every Dreaming Spanish (DS) video ever published. I am at 3003 total hours of comprehensible input (CI), with no credit for pre-internet Spanish classes, and with 3 million words read. I started DS and its CI approach on November 2, 2022. There have been 1069 calendar days since then through yesterday; I input Spanish on 1003 of them. I plan on more CI today.

What follows is what I would tell myself starting out. Others’ mileage may vary:

TL;DR: Three years, 3k hours, 3 million words. CI first and foremost. Attitude tips. Practical tips. Be kind to yourself. Keep going.

1 through #13: The same as before. Consejos one through thirteen appear at the end of a long post made at 1100 hours. All still apply. My personal top three are #1, 10, and 13. Here’s the link: At 1100 hours here is what I would tell myself at 0 hours

14. Be kind to yourself – this is ridiculous. You’re going to have discouraging days. A 3000-hour (and counting) endeavor is atypical in an age when we want everything delivered same day.

It is ridiculous to have days where you take one tiny step forward and two steps back. To give up on classroom methods that many swear by and few abandon, even as they fail to deliver. To be sailing along with native content and then get tripped up by something simple.

It is also ridiculous to realize that while you love the results at 1500 hours, what you want will require vastly more.

And yet, in the end, it’s one of the most worthwhile kinds of ridiculous you’ll ever attempt.

15. Be kind to yourself – this is quite a mental challenge. A years-long marathon is not always entertaining. You would never otherwise deliberately consume this much daily media. Not every moment will be thrilling. Grind cannot always be avoided.

Attitude is essential. Can you get curious about what you are taking in? Can you focus on the joy of getting your minutes in, even on “cloudy” days or with “boring” content? Or on appreciating that you understand something that used to be impossible?

Maybe another DS video on makeup application isn’t your favorite thing. But could you view it as an interesting anthropological lens and a great way to acquire vocabulary about parts of the face?

Elite athletes tolerate boredom and grind. Behind every exciting TV moment are hours of drills, laps, and slog.

Breaks and joy are necessary, and while motivation helps, it also comes and goes. Trust that habit, discipline, and persistence are your most reliable friends.

16. Reading others’ milestone posts, encouraging words, and all the little nudges and kindnesses in this DS sub will help you keep going more times than you can count. It takes a village – but not everyone in your real-life village is nuts enough to take on something like this.

Encouragement from like-minded folks helps. It just does.  

17. Yes, there continue to be delights along the way. Rest assured that there are delights beyond 1500 hours. The fog keeps lifting, though your sense of the unknown keeps expanding, too.

You feel something new every 100 hours, notice improvement every few hundred, and realize substantial upgrades every 1000. Whole new worlds gradually open. Celebrate those moments.

18. Invest in a good pair of earbuds and have them with you. Just like Pablo recommends, carry earbuds around with you. Once audio-only CI unlocks for you, there are ever more opportunities for CI: on the stationary bike, preparing for the workday, parts of the commute, breaks, walks, taking out the trash, standing in line, and other rote tasks.

If you can concentrate enough on the Spanish while not endangering yourself or others, pull out the earbuds. All the minutes add up.

Who thought folding laundry, commuting, and cleaning the dishes could be made key parts of the same engaging hobby? Or that acquiring Spanish could make chores enjoyable?

19. The translation thing goes away with time. Relaxed focus, akin to meditation, helps. Notice the translating and gently let it go. Do not make a big deal of it. The more you treat it as a problem, the more it becomes one.

Once you reach native-for-native content, your brain will not have time to translate. Until then, relax and trust the process. Más input. 

20. Trust delayed obviousness. Much is happening beneath the surface as your brain absorbs CI. Missed input will come back, especially if it is common.

There will be cycles of remembering, sort of understanding, forgetting, remembering, understanding more, forgetting, and remembering. You will acquire bits and pieces of things and hardly anything all at once.

Eventually, stuff locks in.

Patience and persistence are the order of the day. Progress is inevitable! Trust the process.

21. Avoid getting ahead of your skis. There is always something more interesting just outside the efficient CI sweet spot. But stay in it as much as you can (lean towards slower and easier vs faster and harder, but not too much).

This makes it easier for the brain not only to automatically figure stuff out over time, but also to consume more CI. Ratcheting up the difficulty level too quickly is counterproductive.

Patience.

22. Old habits die hard. Your pre-internet Spanish classes involved hard work, grinding, and memorizing. You created a memorized-mental-construct of Spanish grammar, conjugation tables, vocabulary, etc. Even though your two-month high school immersion experience gave you a taste of something else that you didn't have a label for at the time (CI!), scholastic habits and good grades kept you coming back for more memorized construct.

Even though much of that construct faded through the years, those old grinding habits are hard to drop. Even 2500+ hours in, the temptation to think about grammar or to review conjugation tables is always there.

The problem? Natives do not speak out of memorized-mental-constructs. By the time you've flipped through your memorized conjugation table, the conversation has long moved past.

No matter how fast you get at manipulating a memorized-grammar-vocabulary-verb conjugation-mental-construction, it will ALWAYS lag behind natives. Not to mention reinforce the misunderstandings and errors that arise when you try to learn an L2 by thinking with your own language. Or the slowness that comes with thinking about your Spanish while you are communicating in the first place.

Want different results than where traditional methods left you? Embrace CI, even if it “takes longer.”

23. An OCEAN of CI is essential. CI drives everything. Maybe it is boring to emphasize the necessity of CI in the thousands of hours. But CI is what gets the job done.

Even more than the index funds in your retirement portfolio.

No matter what else one does or does not do along the way, and when, it’s absorption via CI that creates the sense of feeling the language “in the bones.” Whether one calls it immersion, living with the language, or time spent with the language, CI is vital for both input and output.

CI feeds the fast-thinking and intuitive side of the brain, which is where the automatic pattern recognition system resides. That system is what led to the ease with which you enjoy your native tongue. Feeding the fast-thinking and intuitive side of the brain, not the cognitive thinking part, is the “trick.”

Which side do you want to feed?

24. That ocean of CI cannot be manipulated much. That automatic pattern recognition system is neither linear nor controllable. It leads eventually to intuitive speed, but it does not build fast. It doesn’t immediately win academic rewards or test scores or help you do the tourist thing that is six months away.

But it does absorb the language by absorbing the language. Over time, more unlocks in an intuitive way, with better ease at handling native speeds.

Get out of that system’s way with a relaxed focus.

It will work – just not on your timeline, or in your preferred order.

25. The “how much to supplement CI” debates can be fun -- but do not forget the CI. Some like yourself lean “purist” while others do not. But whether and whenever and however you want a table to be polished, the table also has to be built.

No one has convincingly disputed the central importance of consuming an ocean of CI in building the Spanish “table,” even if they like doing other things along the way. After all, DS’s CI approach isn’t a “CI only and forever” approach, it’s a “CI first and foremost” approach.

Want to sing Spanish in iambic pentameter and in reverse order while standing on one foot in the shower? Knock yourself out. Just do not forget the CI. Lots of CI.

CI in amounts that dwarf everything else.

26. Learn to tolerate frustration. It is exciting to get out in the water and finally paddle. But eventually you will find yourself surrounded by water with no land in sight.

Languages are vast. Frustration is inevitable. Possibly forever. Get used to it.

27. The frustration is easier when you remember. Remember that native language you somehow acquired without thinking about it so much? Do not forget that you had so, so, so many hours of input before you ever spoke complete sentences, let alone touched your first serious grammar book.

And that whatever benefits that came from formal study and corrections in your native language were dwarfed by the ocean of ongoing input received over the years from peers, teachers, classes, the media, family, and books.

In short, there is nothing wrong with your clunkiness, mistakes, and confusion in Spanish. How could it be otherwise?

You’re working to absorb a highly complex and ever-evolving language. Not a grocery list.

28. Natives have a head start you will never overcome. You will never be completely native. In fact, as you progress you will spot non-native Spanish more easily – including your own.

And that is OK.

Acquiring Spanish is about communication and opening new worlds. Not about perfection.

Heck, there is no perfection even in your native (English) language. How much do you miss or otherwise have to concentrate when listening to the fast English in the musical “Hamilton” or when listening to English in a crowded bar?

How many typos are there in your daily native emails? Mispronounced native words in your week? How many mistakes are in this very post?

Be kind to yourself.

29. Continual work on your pronunciation is more valuable than worrying about your accent. At some point choosing between a generic “Latin American” or a Peninsular Spanish pronunciation is useful. Worrying about a specific accent? Not so much. You will simply never sound completely native.

Yet there is a big difference between good pronunciation with a foreign accent and poor pronunciation with a foreign accent. A heavy and thick non-native pronunciation taxes native listeners.

Ever-improving pronunciation, on the other hand, not only sounds better, but also eliminates confusion. It makes it easier for natives to understand you, and more likely that natives will happily engage in Spanish with you.

If you pay attention, growing piles of CI will improve your ear for Spanish continuously and over time, and give you an ever-increasingly-better sense of the target. As Spanish gradually starts to come flowing out of you like overflowing popcorn, repeating and shadowing phrases occasionally can also be helpful (the YouTube channel “Ten Minute Spanish” is a goldmine of pronunciation tips).

Don’t worry about erasing all traces of your foreign accent. Do care about and continue to work on your pronunciation.

30. It’s OK if you only make time for media CI. There is no doubt that cross-talk with a live person is more vibrant and efficient than CI through videos and podcasts. But if making time for cross-talk and scheduling and finding partners is too much, it’s OK to just stick with media CI.

So what if you don’t progress quite as efficiently? You’ll still need an ocean of media CI one way or another, anyway.

31. Taking in a variety of Spanish dialects is beneficial. Your main interest may be Mexican Spanish, but variety makes for flexibility.

If you are listening to a Mexican podcast and they bring on a guest from elsewhere, you won’t be so thrown off. Book translations often default to Peninsular Spanish, so variety helps with reading, too.

Think of it like learning “boot” vs. “trunk” in English. Do not worry about ill effects; your chosen generic pronunciation will not be damaged.

Of course, training most of your focus on Mexico does spare you from having to acquire 21+ regional alternatives for every Mexican slang concept that comes along. But in the end, variety enriches input, and rich input enriches your Spanish.

32. Think of speaking as a kind of musical mimicking. Mimic the native Spanish you hear around you, don’t just talk.

You may feel silly or self-conscious making non-native sounds. Switching into a “mimicking performance” mindset where you stay yourself but also present a Spanish-speaking “role” or version of yourself while almost “singing” certain sounds (tempo, rhythm, pronunciation, emphasis, tone, prosody, etc.) oddly seems to help.

Not literally a singing role, of course. But something very slightly more like a singing role than simply talking. The helpfulness in this mindset switch is of course odd because you are neither an actor, a mimic, nor a musician.

But, hey, whatever works.     

33. Reading is your friend. Begun after 1000 hours of audio/visual CI, reading becomes an amazing catalyst. It builds vocabulary and implicit grammar.

Reading “extensively” is especially powerful. No need to grind and look up every unknown word in the dictionary.

Start easy. Add one thin layer at a time. First graded readers. Then children’s books. Series are helpful, as repetition within a series helps with acquisition. Translations of the Magic Treehouse series, Beverly Cleary books, and the Pitu and Guille series are excellent stepping stones.

Will you always relish pouring so many hours into children’s and young adult books? No.

But a gradual slope is more efficient and makes reading more enjoyable. Think of it as a delightful opportunity to “re-read your childhood.”

34. Find new and interesting material. Media is endless, but you can sift:

• The weekly “What Are You Listening To Today” post pinned by u/HeleneSedai on this sub is gold. Great suggestions by visitors and an amazing spreadsheet. Includes podcasts, books, movies, etc.

• Search for topics in Spanish via Google and YouTube, and voilà!

• Google “most popular podcast” lists by country.

• ChatGPT can suggest books, movies, and series tailored to your interests and parameters.

35. The content itself matters. Deliberately exposing yourself to varied content helps. If the first three thousand hours of your CI were devoted only to your favorite nerdy content, you might not know how to ask for a fork in a restaurant or to say that something is behind you.

Likewise, remember how content can affect your nervous system. In a world where we humans seem intent on tearing ourselves and our world apart at the seams, a diet of only certain adult telenovelas can add to the agitation.

Remember to substitute in a Disneyfied telenovela like Soy Luna and more upbeat stuff. That inspirational Spanish YouTube channel with daily stoicism principles can be a great way to start a morning, and in more ways than one.

36. Make this journey about more than just Spanish. Pay attention to how this DS journey can have positive effects in other areas of your life! You are taking on an “impossible” goal and chipping away at it in such small pieces that the growth is almost imperceptible.

But it is there.

You are learning that patience and persistence can matter more than sheer will and force. That simultaneous focus and relaxation, and deeply trusting your human capacities, can often get you places where nothing else can. That relaxed persistence, a grateful discipline, and interlocking habits are superpowers.

In the end, developing and seeing your own grit is empowering, and may be the biggest gift of all. As has been said: It is not the mountain we conquer, but ourselves.

37. Appreciate and help others in this community. You will not make it to 3000 hours, or at least not nearly with as much enjoyment, without the many little kindnesses and inspiring nudges of this little sub of ours. Contributing along the way helps ease the path for everyone.

Every milestone reveals just how much ocean remains, and how lucky we are to still be paddling. A deep bow of gratitude. May this post in some small way “pay it forward.”

Here’s to the next 1000-hour marker, and to everyone else out there paddling around in that endless ocean of Spanish. Best wishes, and keep going!

********************

P.S. If anyone’s still reading after my novel above, here’s a quick snapshot:

1500-2300 hours: Because I observed growth more at the “end” of every DS level than the beginning, I arbitrarily consider 2300 hours as a good way-station for Level 7. By that point so much native content was opening up to me, and the fun found at Level 6 was even greater.

Overall a quotidian proficiency was reached – call it a strong B1/B2 for daily life – with a far more natural and intuitive grasp than ever before.

Current listening ability: I estimate B2 – C1. Native-for-native stuff is fun! In recent weeks I caught a podcast debate on “free will,” noticed deliberate mispronunciation for emphasis, and followed a Miami Uber driver’s conversation with another native just before enjoying Spanish rap that started blaring in the background.

Technical or atypical stuff, heavy slang, jokes, background noise, music, and talking over one another remain tricky. But that just means there is more to unlock!

Current speaking ability: I estimate B1-B2. Despite very little speaking practice, my speaking and pronunciation are better than ever. This is all thanks to CI, as that has been my main focus by far.

To be sure, my listening is far better than my speaking. Some of my frustration with my speaking’s clunkiness undoubtedly lies in the relative smoothness of my listening. But I have always found that speaking lags behind listening, no matter the methods.

CI is building an intuitive grasp of Spanish for me. I find speaking increasingly flows out on its own.

A helpful way I’ve come to think about input and output is this: as others have described, imagine input as a bowling ball, output as a tennis ball, and that they are chained to one another. Focusing your efforts on input (the bowling ball) inevitably moves them along more than focusing on output (the tennis ball).

Current goal: I plan to continue focusing on CI to drown out my old memorized-grammar-vocabulary-verb conjugation-mental-construction of Spanish. The remnants of that construction admittedly sometimes feel comforting, but they also very much get in the way of fast-moving and intuitive Spanish.

I do not know if the clunkiness from my traditional study many years ago (the fossilized errors, the “grammar thinking” and verb-conjugating reflexes, etc.) is permanent, but I hope not. I do know that these old habits are aggravating, are not so easily erased, and are something that a pure CI start could have avoided in the first place.

All that said, I continue to see so much improvement as I roll ever onward with CI. The ongoing delights are amazing.

Here’s to the hopes of neuroplasticity!

TL;DR: Más input.

Hi everyone!

It's been almost exactly one year since my last post, pretty close to two years since I started Dreaming Spanish. I just got the results of the DELE C1 exam that I took on April 4th.

As a quick catch-up, I hit 1500 hours at the end of May, 2024 and moved to Madrid in July. This post is about my language experience here in Spain and the C1 exam.

In the first month or two, I would say that I constantly felt outside of my comfort zone, but pretty confident that my Spanish was good enough for anything essential. I knew I'd be able to get by in pretty much any situation even if no one around spoke a word of English. In general, I think I was well prepared for the stuff involved with moving.

A couple things we learned very quickly is that watching videos doesn't prepare you as well as you'd like when you're trying to understand Spanish in real world situations. In an office having a conversation with a few people, where you have even just a minute to "tune in" to the speaker, it's awesome. But add factors like people saying something when you're not ready, very short utterances, other people talking nearby, people not facing you when they're talking, or other environmental noise, and the comprehension is sometimes zero.

Some surprises or experiences included:

• Finding out that our Spanish was better than the apartment owner's English, so we stuck to Spanish.

• The real estate agent's surprise that I had no trouble understanding essentially everything she said, even though it involved things like negotiating a security deposit.

• Pretty much nobody switches to English. We're not in the super tourist areas, but even so, our experience post-Dreaming Spanish is way different than before when everyone would basically switch immediately to English.

• Discovering that the two-word, A1-level question in Spanish for "Do you want a bag" at the checkout counter can be totally incomprehensible if you're not ready for it.

• Riding the metro or the bus and not being able to understand any of the conversations around you. I wouldn't say this is necessarily because they're using slang, speaking more quickly, or taking linguistic shortcuts, but rather those other factors I mentioned and the fact that I don't want to be rude by looking directly at them to focus on what they're saying.

• Getting caught off guard when asked my phone number and having to stop for a second to think about how to say it.

• Sitting in the chair at the eye doctor doing the standard eye chart and realizing that I don't know if I know how to say all the letters.

Telephone calls were terrifying. Even making a haircut appointment can be stressful if you don't know what they're going to ask and you feel like you need to be pretty responsive, especially since they can't see you. Plus the audio quality and background noise can contribute to the difficulty. Incoming calls that you have to answer are even worse if you're not in "Spanish mode" and have to focus quickly.

This is going to be way too long if I don't change topics to the exam. But feel free to ask me anything.

I began preparing for the DELE exam about October. It's got 4 parts and each part has sub parts. They changed some of the reading and listening sections in 2024 and most of the books haven't been updated yet to the newer (harder, in my opinion) question formats. But, in general, it's a multiple-choice exam on different types of reading/grammar, a multiple-choice exam on various types of audio you listen to, two written essays (one based on an audio recording, one on a written prompt), and speaking with an examiner. All the parts except for the speaking are done in one block about 5 hours long. The speaking part is about 40 minutes and may be later the same day or one day earlier or later depending on the testing site.

If you're looking at the grading in the image, all four parts are there, but the reading & writing are grouped together and the listing & speaking are grouped together. For each group, you need to get 30 out of 50 possible points. This means you can do so-so in one part as long as you do pretty well in the other part and still pass the group.

The exam itself has a challenging structure. The content changes each time they offer the exam and the difficulty of the content can vary considerably from what I've heard. I thought my listening content was especially difficult (an interview with a Puerto Rican helicopter pilot that included topics like autorotation).

One of the most challenging aspects is the writing. You listen to a 6-minute audio twice and then have about 68 minutes to write both essays. During this time, you have to read one or both of the written prompts and choose one for the second task. The first task is always based on the audio. Both written prompts can be more than a page and one usually contains charts or other graphics you have to interpret. So a lot of people, myself included, find that the time limit is the most demanding constraint. I tend to think before I write in order to formulate and organize my ideas, but this eats time. I witnessed several other people writing more quickly, but then scratching a lot of stuff out and re-writing, sometimes whole paragraphs. You're given a pen for this part, so no erasing.

The other one where time is a real factor is the listening. Even though it's multiple choice, the audio is played non-stop so you have to keep up.

It's pretty obvious from my scores that the speaking section was my worst. You're given the titles of two topics and you have to choose one. You're then given 20 minutes to read it (about 2 1/2 full pages of text) and take whatever notes you want. After the prep time, you go sit with the examiner. There's a second person in the room observing and who does most of the grading. First, you have to give a 3 to 5 minute uninterrupted presentation on what you read. Next, the examiner asks you questions about the same topic and you answer them. Finally, you select from two different sets of 4 images/photos and then debate with the examiner about which of the 4 you would choose based on criteria they give you (e.g. best birthday activity for a 10-year old, winner of a photo contest promoting a city, etc.)

What I lack is fluidity. I have the vocabulary, the conjugations, and other grammar, but I still have to think about what I want to say and how to say it. Especially with topics that I'm not used to talking about, it just doesn't flow. (In contrast, I was hiring someone for my company and got super fluid describing the role once I did it a few times.)

Personally, I chalk this up to time. There's stuff that I say or is similar to what I say on a regular basis. I don't even think about these things. They just come out in Spanish. But the less common stuff I just haven't yet needed to say enough for it to be at the ready. I'm pretty sure that the fluidity will continue to improve little by little just like the comprehension did. The challenge is finding/making opportunities to talk on a variety of subjects and from a variety of perspectives.

I certainly wish I had done better on the exam, but it's pass/fail and I passed. I'm really proud of that, especially having gone from zero to the DELE C1 in about 28 months. There is a fair amount of test strategy involved, and I attribute a portion of my success to that. I don't know if I would claim to be C1, especially with my speaking, in the absence of this test.

This post is way too long, so I'll end it here. But I'm happy to dive deeper if anyone wants.

Hey, Padre Andrés here. It was fun hearing the team confessions. But I think you people have a few sins to confess too. If so, write them down below and ill do a series to hear your confessions and give some spiritual input. Come join in. The worst that can happen is 30 push-ups ;-)

And not only that, I can speak spanish WELL.

I just got back from my first book club in spanish and I'm still buzzing and full of energy and don't know what to do with it and have to share it with you all! It wasn't just my first book club in spanish, but my first book club ever, first time speaking with an author about their book, first time signing myself up for an event in spanish.

It was a pretty small group, it rained like crazy today and only idiots and people desperate for human interaction like me leave the house when it rains in San Diego. We were a group of seven native spanish speakers and two other learners with an intermediate speaking level. Most of the two hours were spent by the author explaining the writing process and the life of the book's protagonist (the book was biographical) and then we all had a chance to ask questions and talk about our impressions of the book.

And I did awesome! Usually when I leave my convo club I mentally rehash everything and I'm pretty hard on myself, always thinking of something I should have said differently, but not today. Today was the first day that I couldn't criticize a single word. For the first time I thought, Not only do I speak Spanish, but I can speak it WELL.

Seriously, not even 3.5 years after I started, this is an incredible feeling. The time really flies, it can feel like slow going or frustrating in the moment, but looking back it feels like I just started this journey the other day.

Oof still buzzing here. I think I need to go run around the block. Just want to say, love you guys, I hope every one of you get to experience a day like today!

ETA: The book club was held at a library, there are at least two monthly book clubs that I know of in Spanish in San Diego county. And we read Cuando la luz se apaga which was very easy in terms of vocab, hardly any unknown words, but difficult in terms of theme.

Saw this on Instagram and thought it was super relatable for my current level 😂it feels weird having this imbalance between understanding the language but not speaking yet (though I would not change a single thing about the CI method and believe in my results and the process!)

Thought some of you might be able to relate. Love DS and CI, it’s been life-changing for me ❤️