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¡305 horas — felicidades a mi!
May. 1st, 2025 10:53 amWith 6 hours spent listening to ¡Cuéntame! yesterday because of time blindness, I not only reached level 4 in Dreaming Spanish but surpassed my goal of hitting 300 hours by the end of April by 5 hours!
Technically ¡Cuéntame! is a little easy for me (CI-wise) at this point but I've been enjoying re-listening to it at a more advanced (read: early intermediate) level because, while it was at a good comprehension rate as a beginner, I'm now catching a lot of things that I didn't in my first listen through! There are still occasionally things that I won't fully understand every word but will at least understand through context clues, and it's nice to see that progress! I've mostly been working through the higher difficulty rating beginner content and the lower difficulty rating intermediate videos that DS provides lately, but it's also nice to go back to lower level/early beginner audio format content like ¡Cuéntame! on days when I have a lot of things to do that require physical labor but not a lot of brain power, like cleaning/driving/hand stitching/etc. (Not to imply that those tasks don't require focus/skill, but I can enjoy easily comprehensible Spanish content while doing so in the same way I can listen to native English speaking content while doing these tasks).
I also love that Marta does each episode at a very slow super-beginner/beginner rate (with occasional English hints when there's little or no context for what a word means like there would be in video content) and then repeats the same content speaking faster/without those hints. I remember the first 100 hours of super-beginner video content was such a slog to get through — the DS Guides do their best, but there's only so many times you can listen to/watch most of it without getting mind-numbingly bored / feel like you're being talked to like a child. This is not helped by the fact that most of the super-beginner content feels like it was intentionally made to be child friendly, which is a good thing to have, of course, but it can be frustrating when you're a full ass adult and it's all that's available, haha. But my QPP kept telling me to keep pushing and that once I hit 100 hours, it would feel so much better/easier, and that I'd be able to hit my daily goals easier, mostly due to there being a wider variety of content. But yeah that first 100 hours was rough and when I finally felt ready to try something outside of DS and tried ¡Cuéntame! it was amazing. I was so shocked and delighted that I could easily understand what was being said, even without visual clues, and even in the second half when she was speaking much faster than I was used to. It was so motivating and In the last few months since I passed level one, I've been slowly increasing my daily hours just because I can and I'm enjoying it!
But anyway, I'm just really proud of myself. Doing Dreaming Spanish every day for the last 4.5 months has been really empowering/affirming. I've been going through a really hard time for the last 8-9 months(Hawkeye Pierce voice: I could have had nine tenths of a baby by now!), taking hit after hit after hit and feeling like I can't drag myself out of the pit I've been knocked into because every time I drag myself towards the surface something else knocks me right back down. Someday I might get into it on here, but a big thing has been my long-term unemployment. The current job market is humbling (read: devastating) in the most brutal way and I have felt so useless. But it has at least given me the time to focus so much energy on my art and on learning to speak another language — something I have always struggled with. I know I wouldn't be able to spend 13 straight hours hyper-focusing on learning animation through trial and error or spending 3-6 hours a day most days (with a base minimum of 1 hour/day) studying Spanish if I was still working full time. And while I am desperate to become employed again (because as much as I actually do probably need to be on Disability tbh, I am afraid to be recognized as disabled by the state in this current political climate, and the only reason I did not become homeless several months ago is the kindness of my QPP/their parents), this has been one of the few bright spots of the last 9 months.
Like I said, I have always struggled with language learning and tbh, I spent most of my life wishing I could be multi-lingual but failing every time I tried and eventually just assuming I was too stupid to learn a second language. But finding Dreaming Spanish and actually having success feels like when I discovered I was autistic and realized the reason I had always struggled in school was not because of me being incapable but because of our educational system not being built to set even high masking people with learning disabilities (because it took me until I was almost 30 to accept that even my ADHD was a learning disability) up for success. Traditional language learning methods didn't work for me and that didn't ever mean I was stupid or lazy. I just didn't have the resources to know that other methods that would work for me were available.
I wish that schools made things like CI (Comprehensible Input, by the way) available to students, even if only when traditional methods don't work for them at the bare minimum. I have always had so much respect for anyone who can speak more than one language and I would never try to denigrate the functionality of traditional methods for the people they work for — which I know is many! But they don't work for everyone and language learning would be so much more accessible to so many people if alternative methods like CI were more widely encouraged instead of dismissed by a lot of the language learning community as I've seen. I think part of the reason that it can get a bad rap is because of the bullshit fake CI apps (Lingopie, for example 🙄😡) that are just like "yeah just watch foreign language TV with English subtitles!" and call it CI. But denouncing the actual method of Comprehensible Input over bad faith actors putting out things that aren't CI and don't work and calling it CI, is a critique of the wrong thing. When you're doing real CI you are watching/listening to videos/audio content that is made specifically for learners at your current level of difficulty that you can follow through visual aids and context clues (and without subtitles) and not moving forward in difficulty level until you have consistently reached at least 80% comprehension.
Like, I tried watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in Spanish recently because QPP said it might be accessible for me now, and I decided not to count it as CI because even though I could understand it if I slowed it down to .75 speed, that made it less enjoyable, and the only reason I could follow it at all at full speed is because I've watched ATLA hundreds of times. Watching a foreign language show that is too advanced to comprehend without subtitles is not Comprehensible Input, just like painting a design on fabric is not embroidery. And to be clear, just like there's nothing wrong with painting designs on fabric, there's nothing wrong with watching foreign language shows with subtitles — that is a good and enjoyable thing to do! And not only is it valuable just for the enjoyment it brings, it also broadens your worldview and you may even pick up on a few words or phrases with enough time watching them. But it is not CI (for the majority of people).*
As I explained above, CI is a very specific thing (words mean things!) and it has not only helped me learn a new language but has also helped me become a better listener in general and given me more faith in my own ability to learn, even though I'm getting older and language learning is already going to be harder for me now than it would have been if I'd had this resource when I was a kid. And I know that if something like Dreaming Spanish had been available to me in high school, it would have made such an incredible difference in my life.
So for anyone with ADHD or even anyone in general who have found language learning difficult in the past, I cannot recommend the CI method enough.
Here are some resources that I recommend checking out!
Spanish CI content I have tried so far/has been recommended to me:
☆ Dreaming Spanish — Available on YouTube and the Dreaming Spanish Website
DS is a fully fleshed out library of content with thousands of videos spanning from super-beginner content (comprehensible even if you've never even said "¡Hola, soy [your name]!" before) all the way to advanced/expert level content. If you use their website A large amount of their videos are available for free, though there is a paid membership for $8/month that has more videos/full series/etc. I find the premium membership to be worth it (one of the few things that I have continued paying for through my unemployment until my QPP offered to pay for it when I finally reached the point that I couldn't keep paying for it it). That said, it is not necessary and I have heard from friends who exclusively use the free content that they have been using it for months and still have not run out of free content. Additionally, I have talked about finding a lot of the super-beginner content really boring but there is some good older content in that level and they have really been killing it lately on improving the variety of their SB content.
Lastly, I do personally recommend making an account on the website (which you can do for free/without signing up for premium). Their interface will track your time and it can be really encouraging! They also have an app that is in Beta right now for Apple and I do like it. I prefer using it on web because of the unofficial reporting extensions I use/that show numbered/user generated difficulty ratings even if you're not filtering by difficulty (Dreaming Spanish Insights and Dreaming Spanish Toolkit).
☆ ¡Cuéntame! — Links to Podchaser, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, though likely on other Podcatchers as well.
I explained the format of ¡Cuéntame! above, but in short, it is a podcast made by a woman named Marta who is from Mexico and now teaches high school Spanish in Wisconsin. Each episode is 5-10 minutes and she talks about everything from Cats vs Dogs to explanations of holidays to show how to talk about them in the language to various subjects about Mexican culture/history, and everything in between. I began listening to the podcast at about 100 hours, but I probably could have started much sooner. I think the podcast is probably accessible even to a lot of complete beginners, it just depends on what your personal level of confusion tolerance is.
☆ Destinos — Free on YouTube: Episode 1 / Episode 2 (bootlegs with Russian? subtitles), Episodes 3-13, Episodes 14-26, Episodes 27-38, Episodes 39-52.
Destinos is a telenovela made specifically for language learners to teach Spanish. It was made by the University of Illinois and is very corny, but also fun and incredibly 90s. The basic premise is an elderly man is dying and calls his family together to share a secret he's been keeping from them their whole lives. They send a lawyer (for some reason? instead of a private investigator?? lmfao) named Raquel that is a friend of his brother on a journey to try to find someone, so you follow Raquel on her travels to Spain, Argentina, PR, etc — various Spanish speaking countries, so you get experience with different dialects and you also learn a bit about the cultures/dialects of these different places.
It starts at a very beginner level with a decent amount of English mixed in that decreases as you go (iirc, they stop using English at all after episode 10?), and the difficulty level increases throughout the show. I would recommend starting the show around 100-150 hours I think? I started around 150 hours and I think if I waited much longer, the English at the beginning would have been really irritating for me. But the difficulty also scales somewhat rapidly and I eventually had to take a break because it started surpassing my comprehension level. For context, I believe the above playlists are sorted by difficulty level — technically I watched through to the end of Episode 38, but I think I only had decent comprehension until around episode ~30, so I think I'll probably rewatch the 27-38 playlist before continuing when I pick it back up, which I think I'm probably more than fine to do now. I may have to pause again though when Destinos starts reaching more Advanced levels, we'll see.
That should get you started but there are SO many other Spanish podcasts/video content for learners made independently that are also available, the above is just what I've checked out so far!
As far as I am aware, there is no fully supported platform like Dreaming Spanish with a full library of content that spans from Super-beginner to Advanced for other languages**, however, there are CI Resources for other Languages! I haven't tried them, but I'll link some things here that I've seen as a place to look into if you want to try CI for additional languages. I will also include resources that I have found helpful that do not count as CI. I will specify which I have personal experience with:
☆ Dreaming Spanish Reddit
I haven't spent much time here but QPP does. Some of the CI purists can be a little intense but there's a lot of really friendly people there who are very encouraging and it has so many resources available, including an up to date spreadsheet tracking what non-Dreaming Spanish content people say they're listening to/watching at what levels which should give you more options for content!
☆ The Comprehensible Input Wiki
"This wiki is intended to provide a list of resources for people hoping to learn a language using comprehensible input." I haven't spent time here but it has links to CI resources for literally DOZENS of languages from ASL to Italian to Zulu to Biblical Greek and Hebrew. A wealth of information seems to be available here and it seems like a great place to start if you're looking for content in other languages.
☆ Dreaming Languages Reddit
Again, I haven't spent much time here but it's a community for people wanting to apply Dreaming Spanish's methods to other languages They also have a "What I'm Listening To" spreadsheet that currently has tabs for Mandarin, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Russian.
☆ Lingvano
An app to learn ASL from d/Deaf/HoH instructors. I have used this app and found it incredibly helpful! There are videos showing you how to sign and not just the signs but also the grammar (not just Subject/Object/Verb order, but also the ways facial expressions and area in relation to your body where you do the sign), and some stuff about d/Deaf/HoH culture. I don't do this every day like I do with Spanish just because I don't have to capacity to put such intense hyper-focus on both, but ASL is my secondary priority re: language learning and I think this is a fantastic resource for beginners like me.
☆ HelloChinese
An app for learning to speak Mandarin. I have used this app and found it incredibly helpful! As previously stated, my primary focus has been Spanish and my secondary focus ASL, so I haven't spent a TON of time on Hello Chinese, but I found it incredibly accessible and while it is in some ways a more traditional style of teaching than CI, it is — in my opinion — SO much more genuinely helpful than Duolingo. They have interactive lessons in not only speech but also to teach you to read and write Chinese characters. It came highly recommended by Chinese folks on Red Note and is a fantastic app. I will probably spend more time here when I'm next ready to put more focus into a fourth language.
*re: the above "But it is not CI (for the majority of people).*" — This is my personal stance as well as the stance of the majority of people I've seen in the CI community on Reddit. THAT SAID. As much as my brain loves the simplicity of a simple black and white statement, nothing ever is. My QPP has been doing Dreaming Spanish/CI for over a year now and has, I believe, fully reached the Advanced level, and they watched content that was above their comprehension level a lot in the early stages.
Our brains work very differently and whereas I get hung up and stressed and don't enjoy myself if I'm not solidly hitting 70% comprehension (even if I've just moved up to a new difficulty rating and even if the content available to me at my current level is boring as hell), for them, valuing interest over comprehension (within reason) has been very successful for them, because if it wasn't keeping their interest, they would get bored and not do it. We both have ADHD but I also am Autistic and even if I weren't, ADHD isn't the same for everyone.
If you're desperately struggling with the content available to you and want to try something above your level (again, within reason) to see if it works for you, I think that's okay! Just be real with yourself and how much time you count while calculating your hours (if you track them).
** Dreaming Spanish is working on developing content for a second language. I don't remember if it's been announced and this is official or if it's just an educated guess from the DS community, but we suspect it will be French.
Technically ¡Cuéntame! is a little easy for me (CI-wise) at this point but I've been enjoying re-listening to it at a more advanced (read: early intermediate) level because, while it was at a good comprehension rate as a beginner, I'm now catching a lot of things that I didn't in my first listen through! There are still occasionally things that I won't fully understand every word but will at least understand through context clues, and it's nice to see that progress! I've mostly been working through the higher difficulty rating beginner content and the lower difficulty rating intermediate videos that DS provides lately, but it's also nice to go back to lower level/early beginner audio format content like ¡Cuéntame! on days when I have a lot of things to do that require physical labor but not a lot of brain power, like cleaning/driving/hand stitching/etc. (Not to imply that those tasks don't require focus/skill, but I can enjoy easily comprehensible Spanish content while doing so in the same way I can listen to native English speaking content while doing these tasks).
Some more personal notes:
I also love that Marta does each episode at a very slow super-beginner/beginner rate (with occasional English hints when there's little or no context for what a word means like there would be in video content) and then repeats the same content speaking faster/without those hints. I remember the first 100 hours of super-beginner video content was such a slog to get through — the DS Guides do their best, but there's only so many times you can listen to/watch most of it without getting mind-numbingly bored / feel like you're being talked to like a child. This is not helped by the fact that most of the super-beginner content feels like it was intentionally made to be child friendly, which is a good thing to have, of course, but it can be frustrating when you're a full ass adult and it's all that's available, haha. But my QPP kept telling me to keep pushing and that once I hit 100 hours, it would feel so much better/easier, and that I'd be able to hit my daily goals easier, mostly due to there being a wider variety of content. But yeah that first 100 hours was rough and when I finally felt ready to try something outside of DS and tried ¡Cuéntame! it was amazing. I was so shocked and delighted that I could easily understand what was being said, even without visual clues, and even in the second half when she was speaking much faster than I was used to. It was so motivating and In the last few months since I passed level one, I've been slowly increasing my daily hours just because I can and I'm enjoying it!
But anyway, I'm just really proud of myself. Doing Dreaming Spanish every day for the last 4.5 months has been really empowering/affirming. I've been going through a really hard time for the last 8-9 months
Like I said, I have always struggled with language learning and tbh, I spent most of my life wishing I could be multi-lingual but failing every time I tried and eventually just assuming I was too stupid to learn a second language. But finding Dreaming Spanish and actually having success feels like when I discovered I was autistic and realized the reason I had always struggled in school was not because of me being incapable but because of our educational system not being built to set even high masking people with learning disabilities (because it took me until I was almost 30 to accept that even my ADHD was a learning disability) up for success. Traditional language learning methods didn't work for me and that didn't ever mean I was stupid or lazy. I just didn't have the resources to know that other methods that would work for me were available.
I wish that schools made things like CI (Comprehensible Input, by the way) available to students, even if only when traditional methods don't work for them at the bare minimum. I have always had so much respect for anyone who can speak more than one language and I would never try to denigrate the functionality of traditional methods for the people they work for — which I know is many! But they don't work for everyone and language learning would be so much more accessible to so many people if alternative methods like CI were more widely encouraged instead of dismissed by a lot of the language learning community as I've seen. I think part of the reason that it can get a bad rap is because of the bullshit fake CI apps (Lingopie, for example 🙄😡) that are just like "yeah just watch foreign language TV with English subtitles!" and call it CI. But denouncing the actual method of Comprehensible Input over bad faith actors putting out things that aren't CI and don't work and calling it CI, is a critique of the wrong thing. When you're doing real CI you are watching/listening to videos/audio content that is made specifically for learners at your current level of difficulty that you can follow through visual aids and context clues (and without subtitles) and not moving forward in difficulty level until you have consistently reached at least 80% comprehension.
Like, I tried watching Avatar: The Last Airbender in Spanish recently because QPP said it might be accessible for me now, and I decided not to count it as CI because even though I could understand it if I slowed it down to .75 speed, that made it less enjoyable, and the only reason I could follow it at all at full speed is because I've watched ATLA hundreds of times. Watching a foreign language show that is too advanced to comprehend without subtitles is not Comprehensible Input, just like painting a design on fabric is not embroidery. And to be clear, just like there's nothing wrong with painting designs on fabric, there's nothing wrong with watching foreign language shows with subtitles — that is a good and enjoyable thing to do! And not only is it valuable just for the enjoyment it brings, it also broadens your worldview and you may even pick up on a few words or phrases with enough time watching them. But it is not CI (for the majority of people).*
As I explained above, CI is a very specific thing (words mean things!) and it has not only helped me learn a new language but has also helped me become a better listener in general and given me more faith in my own ability to learn, even though I'm getting older and language learning is already going to be harder for me now than it would have been if I'd had this resource when I was a kid. And I know that if something like Dreaming Spanish had been available to me in high school, it would have made such an incredible difference in my life.
So for anyone with ADHD or even anyone in general who have found language learning difficult in the past, I cannot recommend the CI method enough.
Here are some resources that I recommend checking out!
Spanish CI content I have tried so far/has been recommended to me:
☆ Dreaming Spanish — Available on YouTube and the Dreaming Spanish Website
DS is a fully fleshed out library of content with thousands of videos spanning from super-beginner content (comprehensible even if you've never even said "¡Hola, soy [your name]!" before) all the way to advanced/expert level content. If you use their website A large amount of their videos are available for free, though there is a paid membership for $8/month that has more videos/full series/etc. I find the premium membership to be worth it (one of the few things that I have continued paying for through my unemployment until my QPP offered to pay for it when I finally reached the point that I couldn't keep paying for it it). That said, it is not necessary and I have heard from friends who exclusively use the free content that they have been using it for months and still have not run out of free content. Additionally, I have talked about finding a lot of the super-beginner content really boring but there is some good older content in that level and they have really been killing it lately on improving the variety of their SB content.
Lastly, I do personally recommend making an account on the website (which you can do for free/without signing up for premium). Their interface will track your time and it can be really encouraging! They also have an app that is in Beta right now for Apple and I do like it. I prefer using it on web because of the unofficial reporting extensions I use/that show numbered/user generated difficulty ratings even if you're not filtering by difficulty (Dreaming Spanish Insights and Dreaming Spanish Toolkit).
☆ ¡Cuéntame! — Links to Podchaser, Apple Podcasts, and Spotify, though likely on other Podcatchers as well.
I explained the format of ¡Cuéntame! above, but in short, it is a podcast made by a woman named Marta who is from Mexico and now teaches high school Spanish in Wisconsin. Each episode is 5-10 minutes and she talks about everything from Cats vs Dogs to explanations of holidays to show how to talk about them in the language to various subjects about Mexican culture/history, and everything in between. I began listening to the podcast at about 100 hours, but I probably could have started much sooner. I think the podcast is probably accessible even to a lot of complete beginners, it just depends on what your personal level of confusion tolerance is.
☆ Destinos — Free on YouTube: Episode 1 / Episode 2 (bootlegs with Russian? subtitles), Episodes 3-13, Episodes 14-26, Episodes 27-38, Episodes 39-52.
Destinos is a telenovela made specifically for language learners to teach Spanish. It was made by the University of Illinois and is very corny, but also fun and incredibly 90s. The basic premise is an elderly man is dying and calls his family together to share a secret he's been keeping from them their whole lives. They send a lawyer (for some reason? instead of a private investigator?? lmfao) named Raquel that is a friend of his brother on a journey to try to find someone, so you follow Raquel on her travels to Spain, Argentina, PR, etc — various Spanish speaking countries, so you get experience with different dialects and you also learn a bit about the cultures/dialects of these different places.
It starts at a very beginner level with a decent amount of English mixed in that decreases as you go (iirc, they stop using English at all after episode 10?), and the difficulty level increases throughout the show. I would recommend starting the show around 100-150 hours I think? I started around 150 hours and I think if I waited much longer, the English at the beginning would have been really irritating for me. But the difficulty also scales somewhat rapidly and I eventually had to take a break because it started surpassing my comprehension level. For context, I believe the above playlists are sorted by difficulty level — technically I watched through to the end of Episode 38, but I think I only had decent comprehension until around episode ~30, so I think I'll probably rewatch the 27-38 playlist before continuing when I pick it back up, which I think I'm probably more than fine to do now. I may have to pause again though when Destinos starts reaching more Advanced levels, we'll see.
That should get you started but there are SO many other Spanish podcasts/video content for learners made independently that are also available, the above is just what I've checked out so far!
As far as I am aware, there is no fully supported platform like Dreaming Spanish with a full library of content that spans from Super-beginner to Advanced for other languages**, however, there are CI Resources for other Languages! I haven't tried them, but I'll link some things here that I've seen as a place to look into if you want to try CI for additional languages. I will also include resources that I have found helpful that do not count as CI. I will specify which I have personal experience with:
Community and non-Spanish language CI resources:
☆ Dreaming Spanish Reddit
I haven't spent much time here but QPP does. Some of the CI purists can be a little intense but there's a lot of really friendly people there who are very encouraging and it has so many resources available, including an up to date spreadsheet tracking what non-Dreaming Spanish content people say they're listening to/watching at what levels which should give you more options for content!
☆ The Comprehensible Input Wiki
"This wiki is intended to provide a list of resources for people hoping to learn a language using comprehensible input." I haven't spent time here but it has links to CI resources for literally DOZENS of languages from ASL to Italian to Zulu to Biblical Greek and Hebrew. A wealth of information seems to be available here and it seems like a great place to start if you're looking for content in other languages.
☆ Dreaming Languages Reddit
Again, I haven't spent much time here but it's a community for people wanting to apply Dreaming Spanish's methods to other languages They also have a "What I'm Listening To" spreadsheet that currently has tabs for Mandarin, French, German, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Polish, and Russian.
☆ Lingvano
An app to learn ASL from d/Deaf/HoH instructors. I have used this app and found it incredibly helpful! There are videos showing you how to sign and not just the signs but also the grammar (not just Subject/Object/Verb order, but also the ways facial expressions and area in relation to your body where you do the sign), and some stuff about d/Deaf/HoH culture. I don't do this every day like I do with Spanish just because I don't have to capacity to put such intense hyper-focus on both, but ASL is my secondary priority re: language learning and I think this is a fantastic resource for beginners like me.
☆ HelloChinese
An app for learning to speak Mandarin. I have used this app and found it incredibly helpful! As previously stated, my primary focus has been Spanish and my secondary focus ASL, so I haven't spent a TON of time on Hello Chinese, but I found it incredibly accessible and while it is in some ways a more traditional style of teaching than CI, it is — in my opinion — SO much more genuinely helpful than Duolingo. They have interactive lessons in not only speech but also to teach you to read and write Chinese characters. It came highly recommended by Chinese folks on Red Note and is a fantastic app. I will probably spend more time here when I'm next ready to put more focus into a fourth language.
Footnotes:
*re: the above "But it is not CI (for the majority of people).*" — This is my personal stance as well as the stance of the majority of people I've seen in the CI community on Reddit. THAT SAID. As much as my brain loves the simplicity of a simple black and white statement, nothing ever is. My QPP has been doing Dreaming Spanish/CI for over a year now and has, I believe, fully reached the Advanced level, and they watched content that was above their comprehension level a lot in the early stages.
Our brains work very differently and whereas I get hung up and stressed and don't enjoy myself if I'm not solidly hitting 70% comprehension (even if I've just moved up to a new difficulty rating and even if the content available to me at my current level is boring as hell), for them, valuing interest over comprehension (within reason) has been very successful for them, because if it wasn't keeping their interest, they would get bored and not do it. We both have ADHD but I also am Autistic and even if I weren't, ADHD isn't the same for everyone.
If you're desperately struggling with the content available to you and want to try something above your level (again, within reason) to see if it works for you, I think that's okay! Just be real with yourself and how much time you count while calculating your hours (if you track them).
** Dreaming Spanish is working on developing content for a second language. I don't remember if it's been announced and this is official or if it's just an educated guess from the DS community, but we suspect it will be French.
