This post is part of a series! Check out the other posts here:
Spanish Learning 350 Hour Update
¿Por Qué Español?
Howdy,
One of my goals for this year is to actually make progress in my Spanish. Like many Americans, I have been “learning” Spanish on and off for almost 15 years. I’ve done it all: mountains of flashcards, high school and college classes, 6 month streaks on Duolingo…nothing has worked. I’m even marrying a woman fluent in Spanish and that hasn’t helped!
Learning Spanish has always felt like a “nice to have.” Something that I know would improve my life, but was never worth the monumental effort required to do it. Or at least that was the case until I proposed this past Christmas.
My fiancee and her entire family are from Mexico. As such, their first and oftentimes only language is Spanish. This fact became apparent to me when I went to visit for the first time last year. I spent the entire week nodding like an idiot and saying “Sí” whenever someone asked me a question. I’m still hoping that I didn’t unknowingly promise to loan someone money or hit on one of her Tias.
Everyone was patient and welcoming which is what you would expect from a Mexican family. I’m pretty sure that I got a pass for my first trip but I doubt that patience will last forever. It’s one thing to be the new boyfriend who doesn’t speak Spanish. It’s something completely different to be the husband of 20 years who has refused to learn the language. Frankly, I refuse to be the latter.
Once we’re married, her family will be mine. Which means I will be attending MANY more Spanish only events. We are also getting married down in Mexico at the end of the year. We will also be visiting every few months to finalize plans and see family. If ever there was a time to live más, it’s now.
What’s a Gringo to do?
I need something different. I’ve done classes, but they move at a snail’s pace and my schedule is all over the place. I’ve done DuoLingo, but I never feel like I’m learning and it’s so boring that I burn out before making progress. My fiancee will practice with me, but she’s not a teacher and it’s not her job to be my personal tutor.
I was talking with a friend of mine about my issue when he offered some advice. He is also learning Spanish and he had something for me. He recommended that I check out a YouTube channel called Dreaming Spanish. He claimed to have learned more Spanish in the last two weeks than he had in the last two months. It sounded good enough for me, so I looked into it.
It turned out that Dreaming Spanish was much more than a YouTube channel. It was an entire language learning platform for teaching Spanish to anyone. Dreaming Spanish is also different from any other language learning site I’ve used.
They have no grammar drills, no flash cards, and no condescending green owls. The main difference is that the platform revolves around one central thesis. The idea that Comprehensible Input is the most effective way to learn a new language.
What is Comprehensible Input?
In the 1980’s, linguist Dr. Stephen Krashen proposed a new hypothesis for how humans learn languages. Dr. Krashen proposed that language learning is driven not by grammar rules and rote memorization. Learning comes from listening to your desired language and understanding what is being said. In other words, students need to receive input (listen to the language) at a level that is comprehensible to them. Thus, the idea of Comprehensible Input (CI) was born!
CI is different from the language learning techniques we were all exposed to in school. Traditional teaching involves memorization, grammar exercises, and direct translation of common phrases.
The CI method instead uses watching videos, listening to podcasts, and reading at a level where you can understand the majority of what is being said. It is the consumption of content in your target language at a level just beyond your current understanding. This level is called N+1 Difficulty and it is the cornerstone of the CI method.
N+1 Difficulty
Imagine a spectrum of all the potential Spanish content ranked in order from easiest to hardest. At one end (point 1) would be the lowest difficulty content. All the way at the other end (infinity) would be the absolute most difficult content. Your ability would be somewhere in the middle at point N. It would look something like this:
Assume that you would be able to understand everything easier than N. As you move down the spectrum past N, you would understand less and less until eventually you have no idea what is being said.
The goal is to be always watching and listening to content that is just past your level. This point is N+1 as it’s the point just past where you are. As you continue to consume content that is just past your level, you will pick up new words, sounds, and phrases. You will creep from the left side of the spectrum to the right side as you learn over time.
You should be able to follow 90–95% of the material if it’s at the correct level of difficulty. Your brain is then able to focus on the remaining 5-10% of the words. Using the context provided by the words you DO know, you will figure out the meaning of the unknown words. If you continue doing this over time, you will eventually learn all of the words that you don’t know. Or at least that’s the idea!
The hard part is having a ready supply of N+1 difficulty content. As the name implies, this is a moving target. In the digital age, there is an unlimited amount of Spanish content to consume. However, i. is disorganized and leaves us with a lot of questions.
How do I know how difficult a certain podcast is? Is this tv show going to be at the same level of difficulty for every episode? How do I get started from zero if the easiest content is for kids who already speak Spanish? Luckily for me, this is where Dreaming Spanish comes in.
Dreaming Spanish
(I should probably say that I have no affiliation with Dreaming Spanish. I only think that this is such a cool idea and it’s been unbelievably helpful to get me started. I imagine that the team will expand to include other languages in the future!)
Dreaming Spanish (DS) is a project started by Pablo Román in 2017. Pablo, a native of Spain, first encountered Comprehensible Input (CI) when he used it to teach himself English and Japanese. He later launched a YouTube channel, where he gave brief history lessons in Spanish using visual aids like drawings and photos.
What started with a series of stories drawn out on a white board is now a language learning platform with over 6,500 videos and almost 1,400 hours of content. The DS team has also expanded to include teachers from Spain, Argentina, Colombia, and Mexico.
The DS team organizes their content into 4 levels: Superbeginner, Beginner, Intermediate, and Advanced. Each level corresponds with their learning roadmap (covered later). As your spanish improves, you move up in levels.
But that’s not all! Each video is also ranked by the users and given a relative difficulty level from 1 to 100. This is one of my favorite features as it’s so simple but works so well. Every time you finish a video, the website prompts you to compare the video to the last one you watched. The users are the ones to rank each video, so the difficulty is accurate.
As more users watch videos, the rankings get more refined. You can also filter by difficulty level to make sure that you are staying at an appropriate difficulty.
The website also has a built-in tracker to record how much you have been watching. You can set a daily goal and watch your viewing time increase as you learn!
“Wow that’s awesome…wait does that say 341 hours??That feels like a long time!”
The Dreaming Spanish Roadmap
The DS team measures input in hours and they have tied hour benchmarks to proficiency levels. Their program has 7 levels before you “graduate” to native content and it takes 1500 hours to reach level 7. The levels correspond with key learning benchmarks along your journey. They also help provide some objectivity to an otherwise very subjective endeavor.
The levels aren’t a perfect, but your understanding of Spanish should track with the graphic below:
If this looks like it’s going to take a long time that’s because it is. Learning a language is hard no matter what technique you use.
This happens to be one that is working for me so far and I’m willing to put in the time.
So what’s my plan?
I’m getting married in Mexico at the end of the year, so I have an acute desire to blast input for the next few months. I recently hit level 4 (300 hour mark) and am on my way to level 5 (600 hours).
Once I hit 600 hours, I plan on adding in hour-long speaking lessons 5-6 days a week. I’ll use Worlds Across or a similar platform. The roadmap actually discourages speaking practice until you hit 1000 hours of input. I’m going to ignore that and push it up to get some practice in before the big day.
I’ve done the math and I can hit 700-750 hours in time for the wedding. That should put me well into the “can understand full-speed language” category.
If this works and my spanish improves at the level that’s advertised, then I should have enough positive momentum to push me through to 1500 hours in 2026.
If this system works and I learn Spanish, expect for me to be incredibly annoying about it.
If it doesn’t work, then at least I tried!
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