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u/Forsaken_Bet_5954

▲ 2 r/dreamingspanish

Difficulty Question

I basically have two questions. 1. I know there isn’t any single right answer because everyone is different and has their own journey, but what is around the difficulty level someone should be listening to if they are ~200 hours in? 2. Also, what do people mean when they say to “sort by difficulty”? I think I am overthinking it. Obviously they are trying to say that you should go by the difficulty instead of the level. But does this also mean to watch each video within a difficulty range before moving onto the next?

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u/Forsaken_Bet_5954 — 8 days ago
▲ 32 r/dreamingspanish

150 Hour Update (LEVEL 3!!)

Just hit 150 hours and officially entered Level 3, so I wanted to make another progress update since my last post at 100 hours. I have been doing dreaming Spanish for a total of 56 days.
Over the last 50 hours, I feel like things have changed pretty noticeably. I can now relatively comfortably watch videos around difficulty level 45, which honestly feels kind of crazy considering I started around level 10–15 at 0 hours.
I also have about 14 hours of input outside of Dreaming Spanish now:
6 hours from the Spanish Boost Gaming Supermercado series
Around 8 hours of podcasts
The podcasts I’ve been listening to are:
Cuéntame
Chill Spanish Listening Practice
Español al Vuelo
My comprehension with those feels roughly like:
Cuéntame: ~99%
Chill Spanish Listening Practice: ~97%
Español al Vuelo: ~80%
Español al Vuelo definitely feels like a noticeable jump up in difficulty compared to the other two.
One big change over these last 50 hours is that my daily input has gone way up. Before, I was averaging around 3 hours a day pretty consistently, but now that school ended, Spanish is basically all I do. The last two days I got around 7 hours each day.
I also completely stopped doing outside study like Babbel. Every time I tried doing other forms of study, I kept thinking, “I could just be getting more input right now and moving through the roadmap faster.” So eventually I just stopped.
That said, I still don’t necessarily think a pure CI approach is the absolute most efficient way to reach fluency. I just think it’s the only method I genuinely enjoy enough to sustain long term, and consistency matters more than theoretical optimization.
One thing that’s been bothering me lately is conjugated verbs and tense recognition. This happens constantly:
I’ll understand literally every word in a sentence, including the subject and the verb, but I still won’t fully register when the thing is happening.
Most of the time context fills in the gap, so comprehension overall is still fine, but it’s frustrating noticing how often tense information slips past me even when the rest of the sentence is crystal clear.
I’m hoping that naturally resolves with more exposure.
My current long-term goals are still:
Begin reading around 600 hours
Begin speaking around 800–850 hours
At my current pace, I’m hoping to hit 600 hours sometime in August.
I also experimented a little bit with crosstalk. I don’t really have anyone in my personal life I can do actual crosstalk with, but I’ve used AI a few times for it. I basically prompt it to:
speak only Spanish,
keep things fairly easy,
adjust difficulty based on what I seem to understand.
I’ve probably only done maybe 30 minutes total so far, but honestly it surprised me how much I could understand and respond to.
Now for the part I’m questioning a little:
The roadmap says that at Level 3 you should be able to start watching intermediate videos. But I’ve also seen a lot of people say they stayed in beginner for another 50+ hours watching harder beginner videos before transitioning.
So I’m wondering:
Is being comfortable around level 45 where I “should” be at 150 hours?
Should I just dive straight into intermediate videos?
Or should I spend another chunk of time squeezing more out of advanced beginner content first?
Another thing I’m conflicted about is the roadmap’s description of Level 3.
Some of it feels very accurate:
I definitely rely much less on visuals now.
Podcasts are becoming genuinely comprehensible.
Sometimes I can even look away from the screen during Dreaming Spanish videos and still follow along.
But the roadmap also says you start developing a good intuition for grammar and sentence structure.
Honestly, I don’t really feel that yet.
Maybe for extremely basic sentences, sure. But if you asked me to produce a genuinely useful sentence with correct grammar, I would have absolutely no clue where to even start.
So I’m curious if that’s normal for this stage too.
Overall though, even if progress still feels slow day to day, there’s obviously something happening because 50 hours ago level 45 content would have felt significantly harder than it does now.
Would appreciate any feedback, advice, or reassurance from people further along the roadmap.

u/Forsaken_Bet_5954 — 10 days ago
▲ 22 r/dreamingspanish

This is my very first update that I am posting on this subreddit because I just recently found it. I also just hit 100 hours of Dreaming Spanish, and I wanted to share some things and give a progress report.

I am in Level 2, and currently I’m consistently watching videos around a difficulty level of 35 to 40, and I find about 37 to be the best level for me.

I did do a very small amount of Spanish study when I was in high school, but it was only for one semester, and it was an intro class. So I knew very basic things like basic nouns, verbs, and present tense regular conjugations, and things of that nature.

I am not doing a 100% pure approach, although I am primarily doing Dreaming Spanish right now. My routine is three hours of Dreaming Spanish every day, and if there’s a day where I don’t have anything going on and I’m bored, I will do some lessons on the app Babbel, but that’s the extent of my study.

It’s weird because I feel like I’m not progressing at all, even though I know that when I started at zero hours, I was watching videos that were around difficulty level 10 to 15, and now I can watch videos at a much higher difficulty level. But for some reason, I still feel like I’m not progressing, even though there are a bunch of words that I know I’ve picked up.

I still struggle with translation. I feel like everything that I hear, my brain automatically tries to translate into English, and that’s how I understand it, but I’m trying not to do that.

I’ve fully picked up things like the days of the week, the names of the months, the names of the seasons, and numbers for the most part—until it goes above 1,000. I don’t know why, but every time they say a date or something, I just don’t understand it at all.

I’m wondering if what I’m doing isn’t beneficial, because I get most of my input while I’m doing something else, with the exception of maybe 30 minutes a day. For example, I walk my dog for 90 minutes a day, so during those 90 minutes I watch Dreaming Spanish and give it my full attention as much as I can. I also do 30 minutes of cardio on the treadmill a day, and I watch Dreaming Spanish then as well. During my normal lifting workouts, in between sets and during rest times, I’ll watch it.

I also have to drive a lot, so while driving I either have Dreaming Spanish playing and listen to it like a podcast, or I have Cuéntame on.

I’m not doing the Dreaming Spanish approach because I think it’s the most efficient or optimal way to learn a language—I’m doing it because I enjoy it, and I find that it’s the only method I can really stick to long-term.

My goal is to begin reading at around 600 hours and then to begin speaking at around 800 hours.

Also, since summer is coming up, I won’t be taking any college classes, so I’m hoping to increase my input to about five hours a day.

Give me any tips, recommendations, or feedback. Thank you.

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u/Forsaken_Bet_5954 — 22 days ago