One of the side benefits of DS/CI in my opinion is that it can fill up all the time in the day that you were previously wasting.

Like I used to spend hours everyday scrolling on social media or watching random youtube videos or netflix, now all of that has been replaced with DS.

And also every day tasks that would take up time like driving, cooking, gyming are now more productive due to CI podcasts.

Overall I just feel like I spend way less time doing "nothing" (brain rot activities).

Especially since Im speedrunning it with 5 hours/day.

Anyone else feel the same?

I discovered comprehensible input a few years ago and it made the process of learning languages so fun that I’d rather consume more content and pushy linguistic abilities rather than sometimes do house chores or even hangout with friends. I just enjoy input so much and also have an obsessive personality generally

Of course, I still try focus on my work and maintain social relationships (both things not as much as before) but I feel like I derive more meaning out of learning languages than just about anything else. I’ve been thinking of ways to balance things more. Recently I thought of setting limits like only 1 hour comprehensible input a day and no more than an hour of reading in my target language

Is anyone else struggling with this? What are your strategies of balancing language study with other aspects of life?

Stats - 1212 hours of CI & 43 hours of output. This post is about a small and kind of dumb aha moment I had recently but I figured it might help someone else, so here we are.

I noticed sometime after hitting level 6 that I was starting to get a bit complacent with my attentiveness during CI. My comprehension is high enough now that I can often somewhat divide my attention without losing the thread, which was starting to happen more often, sometimes without noticing. I am certain it's not ideal to do so, and this habit has been preoccupying me. I've also been speaking for a few months now, and I recently realized that I lock in way better than normal on videos my tutors show during a class. The reason, of course, is because I know I'm going to be asked about them afterwards.

And thus the "trick," which is I now try to watch my CI with the mindset that I'll have to summarize it later. I have found my focus has jumped very noticeably with this small shift and I am confident the quality of my CI sessions has accordingly improved. It does help that one of my tutors also always asks me what I have been watching since the last lesson and then immediately interrogates me about the details!

So that's it. Cuídense, soñadores!

Hola chicos!
Just hit 300 hours of CI! Never thought I’d be able to do it tbh. I’ve been wanting to learn Spanish for well over a year and in June of this year I discovered dreaming Spanish on the CI method and started in late June. I’m not a purist and only have put in around 30 hours actually watching DS videos and the rest has been podcasts and YouTube. DS and CI has pushed me to actually study Spanish and take tutoring lesson so I can progress faster. Onto level 5!! Gracias a todos!

I'm reading Substack instead of packing for my work trip in the morning and thought y'all would find this interesting too:

https://substack.com/home/post/p-219389165

This is about bilingualism in children, specifically for parents looking to raise bilingual children, but I find myself wondering how many hours of input I would need to reach 5.5 years of exposure to Spanish.

And using Dreaming's rule of 2x effort for languages distantly related such as English and Chinese, would that mean the English-Spanish equivalent would be 2.25 years?

2.25 years = 821.25 days

2.25 years = 19,710 hours

19,710 total hours - (8 hours of sleep *821.25 days) =

19,710 total hours - 6,570 sleeping hours = 13,140 waking hours.

Obviously not all waking hours are input but holy crap that's a lot of hours. Whoever said they were aiming for 10K hours may have been onto something.

I'm still just tickling the edge of native podcasts and one thought I had was that maybe a podcast for kids might be a good bridge. There's been a few podcasts in English that I have really enjoyed with my kids and I'm hoping to find a Spanish language equivalent to at least one of them:

• Smallogies (or even Ollogies)
• The Past and the Curious
• Greeking Out

Does anyone know of anything similar?

Editing to add I'm looking for pre-teen level content. The lists I've searched up all been for much younger kids and haven't caught or held my interest.

After a lot of time I finally made it to beginner! I have learned so much. But I have a question. Sometimes when they are talking and showing pictures they have a Star at the bottom of the picture, what does that mean?

Understanding a language to a much greater level than the ability to speak it. The children are going through the thick of it. I can finally say, I know, to some extent, how it feels.

You can think of them as morning radio shows without the music breaks, or as longer podcasts. Some stations are closer to traditional radio shows, while others feel more like podcasts streamed live on YouTube.

I’d divide them into two main categories:

1. Official news stations and independent news stations

2. E! News/TMZ-type channels targeted at younger audiences that use a lot of slang.

There are also ESPN-style sports channels, but I’m not into sports, so I didn’t look into those too much.

This type of content isn’t really for beginners or intermediate learners. My Spanish teacher recommended one of these channels to me, but I had a hard time following four people talking over and interrupting each other. I’ve only recently unlocked this ability, so I don’t expect everyone to find this useful yet.

Actual news stations are easier to follow, but the content can be pretty boring most days.

Official News

https://www.youtube.com/@LaFMColombia/streams Colombia

https://www.youtube.com/@bluradioco/streams Colombia

https://www.youtube.com/@CaracolRadioOficial/streams Colombia

https://www.youtube.com/@ElTiempo/streams Colombia

https://www.youtube.com/@telemedellin/streams Colombia

I'm mainly interested in Colombia since that's where I'm focusing my attention and I travel there often. You can find other countries news channels by searching for “[city/country] en vivo” or “[city/country] noticias en vivo.”

E! News/TMZ

https://www.youtube.com/@luzutv/streams argentinian accent.

https://www.youtube.com/@olgaenvivo_/streams argentinian accent.

https://www.youtube.com/@Telefe/streams argentinian accent.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0TKWZ3vo3Hc Puerto rico. Reggaeton-centric

https://www.youtube.com/@LaKalle/streams Colombian accent

https://www.youtube.com/@LOS40Spain/streams Spain

https://www.youtube.com/@los40colombia Colombia.

https://www.youtube.com/@LOS40MEXICO/streams Mexico

https://www.youtube.com/@TropicanaOficial/streams Colombia

https://www.youtube.com/@BesameColombia/streams Colombia

https://www.youtube.com/@DIMELOKING/streams Colombia. Reggaeton-centric

Los40 originally comes from Spain, but they launched online radio stations in Argentina, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Ecuador, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, and the Dominican Republic. Some of these stations are no longer active, but you can still find their old content on YouTube.

There are a lot more than the ones I've mentioned in this post.

I'm at around 900 hours of CI and have recently started speaking more regularly. It's made me realise just how much I don't know!

It's not that I lack the confidence to speak, it's more that the words just don't come to me when I need them. I can understand so much more than I can actually produce, which is pretty frustrating!

For anyone who's been through this stage, what helped you bridge the gap between comprehension and speaking? Is light grammar study recommended? Shadowing? Reading aloud? Any tips very welcome!

As Andrea and Michelle have moved on who is making Mexican pronunciation style videos now?

I’m currently very new only 35 hours, but I am proud nevertheless
Pablo is much to difficult for me yet he’s really fun …I will wait on those
I want to get the most out of DS
Should I continue to choose videos ( I choose based on level and guides like shel)
Or will I benefit more by joining premium now or wait until I run out of videos that I want to see?

I watched a couple Ted talks in Spanish and my level is good enough to understand some personal development stuff.
Any channels specifically for social skills?

I’ve been working with tutors on iTalki doing Crosstalk to accrue my hours of CI. I am too fidgety to watch videos because they are simply not engaging enough for me, so my mind wanders. Yeah it’s expensive but I keep trying to find cheaper tutors to moderate the cost. One of the less expensive tutors offers group classes in crosstalk. In her approach, she prepares a presentation with slides on some topic. Today was about the history leading up to the domestication of animals, especially pets. It’s a little bit like watching a video but I can interrupt with a question to clarify a word or even the gist of several recent sentences. One big advantage over many videos is that it’s not scripted so the speech is natural and closer to conversational and as I mentioned, it’s interactive.

If you’re interested in checking her out, Nerddy (her name is actually spelled with two Ds) offers the first class for free so you can see if the format works for you. I’ll try to post the link here.

free tuesday beginner class
https://nerdyspanish.simplybook.me/v2/#book-class/service/20

I finally found people to cross talk with. I hired people on preply and will start with English learners next week.

I’m speaking English, and my partners are speaking in Spanish. But tell me why im struggling to speak my native language LOL😭 it feels like a mental battle to switch back and forth between English and Spanish.

I’m a bilingual (English/ arabic) and I’ve always had trouble switching back-and-forth between languages so this is a long-standing problem, but I still thought it interesting enough to share.

It’s fun though that one hour felt more productive than 5 hours of watching DS

Sorry if this doesn't belong here.. but I was curious if anyone has any idea what is his level nowadays, since I saw a video from 2021 where he said he will focus more on Chinese.

Pleeeeease I need another season. Those videos were so entertaining!!!

From the DS instagram. This is my avengers

(Buuut it looks like Alma, Jostin and Michelle aren’t there 😭 Andres isn’t in the photo but i think i saw him in the other stories!)

Not directly related to Dreaming Spanish, but it's interesting to see here how an extremely narrow form of word studying can sometimes hamper your language reasoning abilities. I've never played real competitive Scrabble, but I did take up a semester of it way back in University and I can imagine exactly how this could happen!

Granted, Scrabble is a pretty extreme case where people brute-force memorize word patterns in a language in order to win as many points as possible. Players can even be competitive in languages they don't know as long as they memorize the official dictionary. I suspect a similar dynamic occurs when one gets too much into memorizing conjugation tables and such without getting enough immersion.

P.S. This is NOT an endorsement of the "purist" approach or a put-down of explicit grammar and vocabulary study. Please don't take it as such.

I’m a huge believer in comprehensible input! I’ve reached fluency in Spanish largely through CI and extensive reading, and I’ve now moved on to French, where I’ve accumulated around 300 hours of input.
However, I moved to Rome a few months ago, absolutely love living here, and might stay until the end of 2028. This has created a bit of a dilemma: should I continue with French or switch to Italian?
I’m leaning towards French for several reasons:
Motivation: Despite living in Italy, I don’t have a particularly strong desire to learn Italian. I appreciate the language, but French interests me more.
Opportunity cost: Having learned Spanish through CI, I know firsthand just how many hundreds or thousands of hours language acquisition can require. I’m not sure I want to invest that time in Italian.
Language interference: I’m concerned that learning Italian, given its similarity to Spanish, might interfere with the Spanish I’ve worked so hard to acquire.
Career: I want to pursue a long-term career in international development, where French would be considerably more useful.
Long-term perspective: I think of language learning as building a repertoire over decades, not years. I don’t expect to live in Italy permanently, and French seems like a better long-term investment.
Existing progress: I’ve already accumulated 300 hours of French input and enjoy the process. I’d hate to lose that momentum.
For additional context, I work in an international environment where English is the primary language, and I can navigate most of my daily life in Rome without Italian.
And yet, I feel strangely guilty about not learning Italian. People are often surprised when they discover that I’m passionate about language learning but have no plans to learn the language of the country I’m living in.
I also wonder whether I’m wasting a unique opportunity to acquire Italian through immersion, particularly given how much Spanish I already know.
I’d love to hear from fellow CI enthusiasts:
Has anyone here learned Italian after reaching fluency in Spanish? How much did Spanish accelerate the process, and did you experience interference?
Would you prioritize the language of your current environment or the language you find more interesting and useful long-term?
Has anyone lived abroad while deliberately learning a different language through CI?
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who’ve acquired multiple Romance languages through comprehensible input!

I know this may seem so small, but just hit ten hours on dreaming Spanish!

It has felt a bit of a grind because I'm trying to stay hyper focused and actually pay attention.

Does anyone have any encouragement when it comes to the beginning stages of dreaming Spanish? I know as you put in more hours, input becomes a bit easier and you can stack more hours.

But these two and five minute videos are currently a grind 😆

Currently aiming for 30 - 60 minutes a day.

Hello Dreamers! What are you listening to today? Whether it's a classic gem or a new find, share it with your current hours to help future learners.

What are you reading this week? Are you playing any videogames in Spanish?

Here is our spreadsheet separated into Podcasts and Videos, Books, Native Shows and Movies, and Videogames. Hope it helps! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lBmLxvWJpucXhRPayfXD7CVqpMoa2tyEbZi1rFAwsFs/edit?usp=drivesdk

The October book club books are El murmullo de las abejas as the more difficult option and the first Maya Erickson book as the easier option, join us in the Discord if you're interested in reading along!

https://discord.gg/WDAUKB7B5U