Learning Spanish Update
I wrote about starting Dreaming Spanish earlier this year and wanted to give an update since I've just reached (drum roll) Level 4! I'm currently at around 350 hours of input and watch around 90 minutes of Spanish content per day.
So, when I first started, I struggled to understand "superbeginner" videos. Back then, I only did an hour a day and it felt like an eternity. I had to think so hard and I felt really tired after I finished watching videos. However, over time, the videos got easier. A few months in, once 60 minutes no longer felt like torture, I went up to 90 minutes.
A few months ago, my husband decided he wanted to improve his Spanish too and bought a subscription to Lingopie, which is basically a site that lets you watch Spanish videos with translatable captions. We tried watching a few series on there, but found them too difficult to comprehend. I could only understand cartoons, and I still had to slow them down a bit.
I was talking to a friend about learning Spanish, and she recommended I watch La Rosa de Guadalupe. She basically said it was a "terrible" show that gets memed a lot in Mexico for being hilariously awful. But she said the show is pretty easy to understand since the plots are so simple (and ridiculous).
So I went on YouTube and started watching episodes with my husband. I did have to slow it down a bit, but after that, I could understand it just fine. It's honestly the best show for comprehensible input because it really holds your attention. The plots are so outlandish and awful, and the Spanish is over-dramatized and over-enunciated, which makes it shockingly easy to understand. The show has been on the air since 2000 and there's literally thousands of episodes. So these days I mostly just watch Rosa de Guadalupe instead of Dreaming Spanish.
So, to recap, I've watched over 350 hours of Spanish content, can comprehend 80% of most things I watch, but I still need to slow it down by 25%. Now that I'm at level 4, the next step is to start reading more things in Spanish (right now it's mostly just Reddit comments) and start speaking more.
Dreaming Spanish advises to wait before beginning to speak because, if you begin too early, you might have a stronger accent. But honestly? I don't think having an accent is that big of a deal and I'm starting to think it might be bad advice. Sometimes I feel like I'm hitting an intermediate wall and I think that wall is the lack of reading/speaking.
Despite that, I'm still genuinely surprised by my progress so far. The other day, I was on YouTube, and the algorithm recommended a BBC Mundo video about "how to learn things quickly." It was entirely in Spanish and I understood the entire thing. As much as I like to shit on algorithms and targeted ads, they've been sort of coming in handy. Half of my suggested videos on YouTube are now in Spanish, I have Spotify ads that scream at me in Spanish, and I get Spanish-language subreddits appearing magically in my feed all the time. Even on days when I don't feel like practicing my Spanish, I'm forced to interact with the language every day. I always assumed you had to move to another country to experience "immersive learning," but I guess this is one thing technology is actually quite useful for.
So yeah, I'm pretty proud of my progress so far. Level 5 is 600 hours, so I'll probably be stuck at Level 4 for a while.