r/DreamingFrench

I think I know about the same amount of French as before I started. Dreaming Spanish has been working really well for me, so I had high hopes, but alas there's just simply not enough there yet for the freeloaders such as myself. I imagine for those paying for premium it's well worth it, so perhaps I will go that route when I have the budget for it. Any other free users run into this issue?

When you compare Dreaming Spanish, which has 4 times the video content. Plus, it is more consistent and interesting.

Do you think Dreaming French is worth the price increase? I found it was barely worth at the original price considering it didn’t have as much content at all, especially for beginners.

I love Dreaming French’s teaching method. I’m currently level 2 with around 40 hours on DF, another 40 hours of outside content, and I already see huge progress with my comprehension.

But one thing that keeps frustrating me is the subtitle timing. Many times a video has very smooth audio to subtitle sync from start to finish, but sometimes half the video's subs are out of sync. With a lot. The worst cases are when a subtitle stays on screen for barely a second before changing. I notice this a lot when subtitles are broken into chunks of only 3-4 words instead of full sentences. But even with longer sentences, the subtitles sometimes change 2-3 times before the guide has even finished speaking the first sentence. Another annoyance is that in maybe half of the videos, subtitles don’t appear right away at the start. If I refresh the page, they usually show up immediately at the correct timestamp.

Compared to this, Youtube videos have perfect subtitle timing. Even the ones with embedded subtitles added by the creator before uploading.

I’m not sure if most DF users even rely on subtitles this much since I don’t see complaints in the comments or on this subreddit. For a long time I thought the problem was my browser, computer, or internet connection, especially since I’ve only seen one comment about it on a DF video.

Has anyone else had this issue?

I don't get why we can leave comments on videos, and there is a notification feature on the website, but we don't get notified if people reply to our comments.

This can be frustrating if we leave a comment asking the guide a question, and we never get notified about the response.

This has happened to me multiple times now, where I have had to go back to a video days or weeks later to see that the guide from the video responded to me or even asked me a question regarding my comment, but I had no way of knowing.

I feel like this is a really strange and basic oversight.

What do you all think? Have you thought about this or experienced the same thing?

Very excited to be at Level 2, finally. I have been prioritizing Dreaming Spanish (and I’m almost at Level 5 there!) but enjoy both equally.

A breakdown of the input:
- ~19 hours of French Comprehensible Input (lots of rewatching beginner videos)
- ~10 hours of Immersion
- ~20 hours of Dreaming French
- A single 2 minute Alice Ayel video (not because her content isn’t good! Just because I’ve been focused on the others)

No podcasts yet for me though I listen to Radio France a lot when I’m working and wish there was an equivalent for Spanish and English (I feel like Radio France has NPR vibes if that makes sense). I don’t count any of it towards input, I just like listening to French speakers🫣

My +1 at a wedding this weekend turned to me and said, "Wow, so I guess it really works and I should learn French too!" after the nice French couple we sat with for dinner were complimentary on my French accent.

All I said (in French) was "Ah, you're from France? I'm learning French, but I can't speak yet - I'm still a beginner." When they followed up to ask how I was learning I told them it was a natural method and I watch a lot of YouTube. I couldn't remember comprehensible input for some reason, LOL.

"But you do speak French! And you don't have any accent at all." the man told me. (That part and the rest of the evening was in English).

I'm at around 350 hours now, using DF, FCI, and many other resources from the "What are you listening to?" spreadsheet.

It was a nice dopamine hit and impressed my date :-) So, keep getting input!

Bonjour 👋 I've created this reddit as I sign up for Dreaming French. I studied French at school, nearly 25 years ago, aside from some basics (Bonjour, Ca va, etc) I remember pretty much nothing. French isn't my top priority at the moment (I've set daily goal to 15 minutes) I want to do a little bit every day. Compound interest. Soon adds up.

Hello - just hit 500 hours and want to share a report

Background: Native English speaker. Have >2,000 hours in Spanish and happy with my level (though I’m always learning more). Last year I was doing Portuguese CI with some French CI, but then focused on French when DF launched. In addition to learning French, there were two questions I wanted to answer by doing DF

1. How will the experience be strictly following the roadmap and doing 100% CI:

When I learned Spanish I had some high school courses >15 years ago, and did traditional methods like Language Transfer + grammar study. Once I discovered DS I switched to that method, but gave myself a couple hundred hour credits for the prior learning.

Unlike Spanish, I’ve never studied or had exposure to French before I started watching some CI content last year. I haven’t done any grammar/vocab study either, so this is a good opportunity to see what CI on its own is like.

2. Is there a 2x bonus if I know Spanish?

Last year I did ~50 hours of Portuguese and it was veryyyy obvious my progress will be much faster with my Spanish background. A 2x bonus wouldn’t surprise me there given the similarities between the languages

But French seems quite different from Spanish/Porto/Italian so curious to see how that progress goes.

****

So here’s my progress:

#1 - no surprise here, I’m learning French fine. My first ever video was an Alice Ayel story about a crepe that sounded like gibberish to me. I rewatched it now and it’s really funny to think I didn’t understand it before, now it seemed a bit slow. My DF video level seems to be ~70.

On podcasts I find “French Decoded” is regularly comprehensible, and “Inner French” varies a bit more with some episodes being comprehensible and others being a bit too difficult, especially with 2 people.

On YouTube I watch the usual channels like “FCI, and found some new quality ones like “French with Isis”. Im starting native content like YT travel shows (Echappees Belles) or dubbed series I already know (the Office). This approach worked for me with Spanish.

#2 - The progress is faster but still not sure about the 2x bonus (unlike Portuguese). Looking at my Spanish report my Level 4 experience is similar to where I am now, with the exception that in Spanish I started dubbed content at 1000 hours whereas in French I’m experimenting with it now.

On speaking I haven’t tried it yet and don’t feel ready, whereas in Spanish at 1000 hours I felt like I had enough exposure to the language to start speaking with a tutor.

So to summarize, I’m moving to dubbed content faster than in Spanish, but I don’t feel like the 1000hr description (2x my 500hrs) applies to me yet, especially with speaking. My very unscientific conclusion is to assume there is a 1.25-1.5x bonus and reassess at 750 hours.

***

So yea, so far so good. It’s very weird to learn a language with no grammar tables in my head to reference, but I’m enjoying the process and it seems to be working fine. Maybe the 2x bonus won’t apply to me, but either way I know I’m going to get to a good level of French, it’s just a matter of time.

Hi! I’m a 28M from France. I started learning Spanish a few days before moving to Barcelona about 6 weeks ago and managed to practice a bit every day since then. I can follow Dreaming Spanish intermediate videos and some advanced ones. However I’ve barely practiced speaking so I’d like to start with that to feel more comfortable in everyday situations and enjoy more of the culture.

About me, I like football (Arsenal), anime, photography and I speak some English (C1) and German too (B1)

Would gladly help you with French, and maybe English too (if you don’t mind the accent!). Probably easier if you’re in a similar timezone, even better if you’re from Barcelona!