r/dreamingspanish

I just got back from a couple weeks of vacation in Mexico with my wife. We spent time on the beach on Isla Mujeres, and explored Yucatan. Because we were flying out of Cancun, we spent our last day there.

One really surprising discovery on this trip was how much fun I had speaking Spanish even in touristy areas like Isla Mujeres and Cancun! As it turns out, I now have something in common with the bilingual people who work in places like these, and I had a blast communicating with them in a somewhat chaotic mix of Spanish and English.

We were usually greeted with "hola" or "buenos días", and I would respond and begin the interaction in Spanish, so people tended to get a sense of my Spanish from the start. A lot of folks were visibly relieved to be able to fall back to Spanish with me when things got complicated. Even people with great English switched to Spanish sometimes for convenience. A server at breakfast one day was speaking very fluent English with my wife, but while taking her coffee order, she turned to me and asked "¿Cómo se dice «deslactosada» en inglés?"

Others were eager to practice their English and struggled through rough patches despite clearly realizing I could understand them in Spanish. (One cheerfully tenacious hotel clerk couldn't remember how to say "forty-five" and tried valiantly to express the idea some other way before finally giving up and saying it in Spanish.) I could relate, and I tried to use English with them whenever possible. Similarly, people with a near-native command of English would sometimes kindly prefer Spanish with me anyway so that I could practice. With others, our abilities in each other's native languages would turn out to be similar and we'd end up settling on pure Spanglish, switching languages at the slightest provocation.

But it wasn't all Spanglish in touristy areas on this trip. We spent time in Valladolid and Mérida, where I had lots of chances to get myself into situations where Spanish was a necessity. We did a day trip to Sisal, a little beach town on the gulf coast, and I didn't hear a word of English all day from anyone except my wife. I was super happy with how all of that went. I had no difficulty doing everything in Spanish, including renting a car, getting gas, and asking whether our room was available for an extra night when we had a change of plans. I had a great time making small talk, and chatted with a bunch of people on a variety of topics.

I also spent a lot of time on the beach and on the train reading Isabel Allende. It's La ciudad de las bestias, meant for adolescent readers, but still, reading Allende in the original Spanish was one of my goals when I started DS, and here I am! I'm having an easy time with this one and I suspect I don't really need to stick to YA fiction. 1,500 hours is feeling pretty great.

The DS team has now made over 1700 hours of fantastic Spanish CI. I'm very grateful for the team for all the work they do to make great content for learning Spanish.

I'm finding the site quite overwhelming though. I wish there was more ways to organise the vast amount of amazing content available in the DS library.

Would love to be able to see my liked videos so I can revisit videos I marked as liked. Having only one place, the list, for liked videos, to watch videos, videos that were hard and I want to come back to in a month or two, etc. gets very overwhelming when you have been using DS for over 400 hours and add to the list a lot. Being able to organise the list and/or filter it would be even better.

I also wish there was a way to filter out videos I'm not interested in. Perhaps the unlike button could be used for this? The only work around I know of is to mark videos as watched without adding the time, but this isn't a solution when you're including watched videos in your search.

Adding some more functions like these would be extremely helpful.

I'm considering taking a break from DS for a while and going back to my physical book and CD progressive course because the DS site is overwhelming to navigate.

Just crossed over the 50 hour mark end of September (probably another 50-100 ish hours from prior knowledge, but haven’t officially counted that). Today I started watching Spanish Boost Gaming, specifically the supermercado series, and it’s amazing how much it feels like a cheat code. I enjoyed every minute of it, ended up getting 3 hours of SBG in, on top of 2 hours of DS for a total of 5 hours of input in today, and I felt engaged the whole time I was watching SBG. I would rate my comprehension around 80% give or take, but it was so much more engaging than the SB content on DS.

If this is what it feels like when you get to more advanced levels, it’s very encouraging. I don’t think I’ll get anywhere near 5 hours a day most days, but I could see how it would be much easier to get input in when the content is engaging like this.

Well chicos, I did it again. Another 50 hours in the books as I cruised by 800 hours. For the uninitiated, I reward myself by eating an ice cream when - and only when - I pass 50 hour milestones.

For these last 50 hours, I turned away from DS for a bit and cruised into some Netflix shows, starting with El Inocente, followed by El Cuerpo en Llamas, and I'm two seasons in to Entrevias.

This time, my family and I went to an ice cream shop that was closed the last time that we came, as they are only open from May to October (we caught them before they closed for the winter months). I normally hate cherry flavored ice cream (Cherry Garcia in Ben and Jerry's worst offering), but when the ice cream vendor told me they had a special Amarena flavor, I tried a scoop and it was incredible (and matched well with a scoop of chocolate).

I'll see you all in 50 hours. Keep dreaming! And now, for the ice cream related question: What ice cream flavor has really grown on you over the years?

I’m currently just under 300 hours of CI and will be going to Mexico in January and really want to improve my speaking skills. I already converse with my barber as much as I can in Spanish. By that time I’ll be close to 600 hours of CI, has anyone done courses like Lingoda or base lang? I’ve done a few Italki classes with a tutor but I’m not sure how to feel about it. I want to turbo charge my speaking but not sure where to continue. Lmk is anyone has any suggestions. Gracias a todos!