On August 26th 2025 I watched my first Dreaming Spanish video. 57 minutes later I was hooked. I had spent the previous 1.5 years trying to learn Italian on my own and I wasn’t getting very far. I could barely understand anything I heard in Italian but my reading was starting to get decent. But since I wasn’t really seeing much progress I was getting frustrated with Italian. I remember thinking, I just wish I could watch a video of someone telling me they are cutting a carrot, while they are cutting a carrot. Somehow I had figured out that what I needed to learn a language was comprehensible input. I just didn’t know that’s what it was called, or that it was a genuine way to learn a language.
Eventually I came across the company Dreaming Spanish in some language learning sub-reddits and people really seemed to like it, so I started researching if there was anything out there for Italian but I didn’t find anything. I decided to stick with learning Italian for a little bit longer but eventually I made the tough decision to pause my Italian learning and start learning Spanish with Dreaming Spanish.
I wasn’t sure if I would regret that decision, but here I am a year later with 1188 hours of Spanish comprehensible input logged and about 274,000 words read and I am extremely happy with my current level.
Out of the past 365 days, I have only missed practicing Spanish for 3 days. My goal has been about 200 minutes a day or around 100 hours a month. I haven’t reached that goal every day or every month but I am pretty damn close.
And most of all, I’ve been having fun for almost every minute of input and reading that I’ve done. I can’t say the same for when I was learning Italian or French back in school.
I started practically from zero (I had two semesters of Spanish in college) a year ago and now I can watch some native Youtube channels (depending on topic/slang/speed) and can read at around a B2 level. I’ve been mostly a “purist” in how DS recommends you stagger your learning. I started reading around 800 hours, but barely. I started incorporating reading into my daily routine at 1000 hours of input. I’ve hardly looked up words and I also haven’t done much grammar study.
And although DS recommends starting to speak at around 1000 hours, I have yet to really do so. I will say random things that pop into my brain now and then, but I haven’t deliberately sat down with a native speaker and tried to have a conversation. A part of me is afraid to do so, I don’t really want to feel discouraged if I can’t say the things I want to say when I want to say them.
To combat my fear of starting to speak I plan on doing some shadowing practice as well as reading out loud for while before I book a class with a tutor. I also plan to wait on trying to write until I can speak fluidly for a bit.
The DS learning roadmap ends at Level 7 with 1500 hours of input. I’m currently in Level 6. My research and own personal experience has helped me realize that 1500 hours is not going to be enough to get me to the level I want to be. My “end” goal, although learning a language never really ends, is 3000 hours of input and around 3 million words read. At that point I will stop tracking and I think I will be able to read just about any text put in front of me and I should be able to understand just about anybody that I speak with. Especially since I have been getting a variety of accent input since the beginning. At that point, I think I will feel like I can move on to my next language.
If I keep up my current pace, that will be about 30 months of learning, or about 2.5 years. Not too shabby if you ask me.
Now that I know how to learn a language in a way that is fun and engaging and where I can truly see my own progress, I think language learning has become my newest hobby. Dreaming French has recently become available, and I’m hoping that they will have a large inventory of videos by the time I am ready to start learning French again.
French was the first foreign language I ever remember hearing and I’ve been somewhat in love with it ever since. I took it for 6 years in school but like many people who learned a foreign language in an American school, I can barely speak a word. Qué triste!