Dreaming Spanish 150 Hour Update (after a 4 month break) 

It's a bummer that your friend was so negative and unsupportive. Of course when you first start out you're only understanding because of the drawings, pictures, and gestures. That's kind of the whole point of early comprehensible input. However, you do start learning the vocabulary and sentence structures this way. I would bet that at 150 hours podcasts like Cuentame and Chill Spanish Listening are accessible for you. Listening to those will help dispel the thoughts that you can only understand with visual ques at this point. I'm around 550 hours, and it is amazing to me how far I've come with my understanding. All of the intermediate DreamingSpanish content, and a lot of the advanced are easy to understand and even feels slow to me now. Native RU-vidrs and dubbed shows are accessible to me now too! You'll get there too if you keep going! It's a roller coaster of a process, with a lot of wins and a lot of doubts. Just keep it fun and you'll get the best results. You got this! Good luck on your language learning journey!

You're adorable, I love your video and it's super relatable! We understand about the "putting sentences together" part. Even at 750 hours we aren't the greatest at that but we are definitely better than we were a year ago. We can put present tense sentences together no problem but the past and future take some thought. My advice would be to be careful about jumping into content that is not comprehensible too soon. We did that and it probably wasn't the best choice. I know the doubts are there and I felt the same way. I too had the thought that I was only understanding because of the drawings....but one day, you're going to shock yourself when all of a sudden you understand an intermediate video with no drawings. (then of course the very next day you'll not understand a single video you watch...haha!) It's a roller coaster but trust the process. You'll hear that A LOT. Trust the process and we'll all get there! Happy Dreaming!

I just passed 150 hours on Dreaming Spanish. I have had the exact same experience as you. Virtually identical. This makes me think it's working!

dont worry about "only" understanding because of the visual cues, you are still learning! I would encourage you to watch/read a lot of progress updates just to confirm to yourself that it really does work. i was in your same position and now at 375 hours i can watch youtube videos and pokemon entirely in spanish. if you put in the time your brain will slowly figure it out. everybody at 1500 hours and above had to use visual cues and photos when they were early in the journey. ive had people doubt my abilities as well because im not learning in a traditional way but I know it works. congrats on 150 and keep going!

Thank you for sharing your experience and thoughts! I am a DS beginner with ~100 hrs input end can echo much of your trepidation. I keep telling myself that really, at the beginning it is all about getting the sound and flow of the language into the subconscious and it takes time...100s if not thousands of hours. I think the mission of making DS entertaining and easy to watch really helps--it is no burden to get input. I do feel vocabulary increasing as well and can watch and understand some intermediate videos which makes me feel that at some point things will just take off as it will be easier to consume more and more varied content, read and maybe officially think of some gramar rules (I still do that sometimes in my native language).

I just reached 150 a few days ago, will be a full year on the 15th of July lol Anyways, I had some apprehensions about whether I was really learning much although experiencing all the things you mentioned so I bought a practice makes perfect basic Spanish book and that’s really shown me that I do know quite a bit of Spanish and I actually get to see how words are spelled and how sentences look when forming a question vs a statement and so on.

I can relate to a lot of what you said in the video. Don't worry, you are learning and it's definitely not a waste of time even if it feels like it sometimes. I really recommend trying to get into some of the easier podcasts like cuantame and chill Spanish, you should be able to understand them pretty easily at this point and it is extremely gratifying to listen to something and be able to understand it without any visual reference. Keep up the good work, I look forward to seeing more updates

Don't worry about the grammar at 150 hours, it'll come. I´m only at about 270 hours but it´s starting to come :)

Great job! Keep up the good work. I compare language learning to human birth. In the dark womb of incomprehensible chatter and after 9 months of labor - comes the light of understanding.

You really need to trust in the process. Your brain will work it out given time. Thanks for sharing your experience

welcome to the community! :) congrats on reaching on 150 and good luck on your journey! ii also kinda do the echoing thing to help focus in and prevent translating as well so hey! it helps hahah

Im trying to learn Spanish too. Im thinking of signing up for a local org that teaches it for private lessons. Perhaps we can have a small conversation here in the RU-vid comments in Spanish by the end of the year. =)

Hi sabrina! Gongrats for your progress! Why are you learning spanish in the first place?