Dreaming Spanish Level 1

I finished my first 50 hours of Spanish input and am excited for the start of this journey. Dreaming Spanish is a program that preaches learning Spanish through Comprehensive Input. No direct memorizing of words, conjugations, and phrases. Instead you watch videos curated to your level meant to help your listening grow. Speaking isn’t intended to be done until much later with this program.

The instructors talk about tons of different topics in Spanish and use visuals and hand gestures to help you follow along. Then your brain takes in the sentence structure and words and suddenly you understand more and more. It’s really cool.

The first 50 hours were tough to find a balance. I’ve been on and off with wanting to learn Spanish and finally have the time to lock in. There are four levels and each level can be sorted by difficulty. I started in Superbeginner and quickly found myself getting bored. A lot of the early videos utilize whiteboards while the newer ones use more visual popups. The whiteboards quickly wore me down and I now find myself skipping a lot of these in favor of popups.

The amount of growth to my listening skills already is highly encouraging. I went to Mexico for a recent cruise and could mostly understand when people spoke Spanish around me. I’d have trouble speaking back, but I’m getting better at trusting the process and doing my best to get the time in. My goal is to have at least an hour of input a day, but I’m hoping to greatly exceed that.

Level two goes from 50 to 150 hours, so I’m looking forward to seeing where I’m at after that time. My goal is to hopefully be able to watch simple YouTube vlogs and listen to easy podcasts/music by the end of this year. I know that’s probably a little further off than 100 hours, but I know I can get there eventually.

Rating: 879/1000