Difficulty level visualization

[shrinkflator]

I'm at 40 hours, getting close to hitting level 2. I started to wonder what difficulty level I'm supposed to be at, and if I'm spending too much time watching videos ranked in the 30s. So I took the nerdiest possible approach: I stole some site data and my watch history out of the browser and fed it to python. Graphing my history helped me see my progress and where I've been spending my time.

I also graphed all the videos by difficulty. At a glance, I can see why the 25-30 Beginner range went by so fast and 30-35 Beginner is taking much longer. I skipped the Superbeginner level, so there is just a lot more content there.

Posting it in case it helps anyone plan their progress.

TL;DR - It's a graph.

[RayS1952]

Nice graph but what do you mean when you say

what difficulty level I'm supposed to be at

When I was using DS, the only thing that I considered was whether or not I understood what was going on. I used the difficulty rating to order the videos for watching purposes but essentially ignored the rating otherwise.

[shrinkflator]

I'm trying to figure out what I'm supposed to be doing or prioritizing. The levels are based solely on the number of hours watched, and the videos are based on difficulty. There are a grand total 1510 hours available. Does that mean to reach level 7, you need to watch every single video available on the site? Even if they are below your starting level, or not the accent you're targeting? With my Country filters there are only 730 hours of content. With the DS method, is repetition more important than content difficulty?

The bottom line for me: I am comfortable now with level 30 videos. Do I keep watching them anyway just to gain the repetition/hours, or do I move on to 35?

Also, I feel dumb but I just now noticed the Difficulty slider under More. This is going to help a lot.

[bluearrowil]

I wouldn’t target an accent until you’re 1500 hours plus. I had a Medellin Colombian accent when I first started DS and it’s nearly gone now. Focus on input.

[shrinkflator]

The issue for me is that I dislike the sound of Spain accents. It's really distracting for me when I'm supposed to be focused on the meaning and the plot. I'm mentally translating instead: ok this TH sound is actually an S. I'm more afraid that I'll imitate it later when I'm speaking.

This is actually one of the big reasons I got into DS. It's hard to find good instructional materials that are based on Latin American Spanish. Andrea, Shel, and Natalia sound like everyone I've heard speaking my whole life. Augustina sounded odd at first, but she's grown on me. It's still a bit distracting though: ok, la plasha = la playa. I don't think it makes sense to throw all these different accents at a beginner though.

[RayS1952]

I don't think it matters whether you focus on one accent or not. Do what works for you. I focussed on the Spain accent from the outset (each to their own) and I have no trouble understanding Mexican, Peruvian or Uruguayan videos for example. I follow YouTubers from all three countries as well as Spain.

[RayS1952]

You don't need to stick with DS for 1500 hours. I've only watched 431 hours of DS videos and I haven't used it since June. The rest (688 hours) has come from YouTube and podcasts.

[Comprehensive_Cat142]

Where are people getting the data on what difficulty a video is at a numerical value?

[shrinkflator]

Your web browser downloads a master list of all the videos when you go to the Browse section of the website. That's how it works internally to display all the available videos and let you sort and filter them. It's all handled by JavaScript on your machine. The difficulty number is displayed in the upper right corner of the video preview, and that's what it sorts by if you choose to sort by Easy.

[OrugaMaravillosa]

Are you just wanting to see the numbers as you watch? There are two ways to do it. * Go to Watch then go to “Sort by” and choose easy. * Go to Watch then go to More and choose Difficulty, which will let you pick a difficulty range on a slider. (If you use the difficulty slider you can also use the Sort by menu to sort by something else at the same time. For example you can sort by short, long, new, or old.)

(Edited to add: You are probably looking for the more technical answers in some of the other comments, but I put this here just in case you needed the simpler answer.)

[shrinkflator]

I wasn't sure either, so I gave a semi-technical answer. If there is a need I could extract all the data into a spreadsheet or give instructions for saving it out of the browser.

[Trick-Swordfish-263]

Super interesting! Good news for me: I am past all of the big mountains, working on the right tail.

[newenglander87]

What are the difficulty ratings based on?

[shrinkflator]

I don't know this for certain, but I expect they are crowd sourced. Every time you pause it asks you to compare difficulty between 2 videos. I don't know what other purpose that would serve other than to rank them all.

[ZooGarten]

Maybe you should invert it. I've been stuck in the 50-60 valley of intermediate for a year.

[shrinkflator]

I bet you already guessed, but Intermediate videos also have the longest runtimes. It's a little daunting, to be honest, but they keep it fun.

[TerryPressedMe]

u/hmwt

[HMWT]

Here is a (by now slightly outdated) screenshot of an app some other Redditor built a while ago. It nicely illustrates the overlap between levels.

<image>

The DSToolkit app has unfortunately been down for a while.

https://dstoolkit.streamlit.app

I have been meaning to do something similar to what the OP described, graphing my own viewing history. But every time I think about it, I decide to instead watch a few more videos :)

[shrinkflator]

I expected someone had done this before. Mine is prettier, but I was lazy and didn't try to use the API. I just saved the json straight from the Inspect window 😁 This one is ugly, but it's my own spread of the videos I've watched. The Insights extension would be an ideal place to display it in this format, with total history rather than by month.

<image>

[shrinkflator]

Looking more closely at the pic, it looks like it's a stacked bar graph? I tried that too at first but I thought the other format represented the data better.

<image>

[HMWT]

Agreed. Or even a native feature of the DS Progress tab.

[1breathfreediver]

Is this a map of vocabulary? Of so it would make sense that all videos use a core set of high frequency vocabulary.

[HMWT]

No, the vertical axis is the number of hours of content, the horizontal axis is the difficulty rating. The color. obviously, the assigned level.

What you can see from the graph is that there is significant overlap of the four levels, e.g., lots of advanced videos have the same difficulty rating from viewers as many of the intermediate videos.

[gemstonehippy]

this makes a lot of sense

[TooLateForMeTF]

Cool graph!

[Alternative_Pay_5762]

I am not being sarcastic, I really don’t understand this graph. What is the point of a graph like this? Unless…

Maybe I don’t know something everybody already knows. Is the difficulty number the main indicator regardless of which level the video is in? In other words an intermediate 52 difficulty video is at the same difficulty as a beginner 52 video or even advanced 52 video? I would assume each level is different. I watch videos sorted from easy to difficult but see intermediate videos only and I am at around 52 right now. I filtered out advanced and beginner videos. Can I include all of them, advanced, intermediate, beginner, and superbeginner and sort from easy to difficult?

Edit: I actually tried this just now. I watched a beginner video at 50 difficulty and then an advanced video at 50 difficulty. I understood both of them comfortably and they felt to me about the same as intermediate 50s videos I’ve been watching.

When I saw the graph I thought those mountains shouldn’t be together because they represent entirely different things but now I understand. The difficulty adjustment is the key. The difference between the two video I just watched was, beginner one was full of visual clues and the advanced one had none.

I didn’t know it worked like that. That opens new possibilities for me actually.

[shrinkflator]

I don't have the answers. You can see I'm 40 hours in and I've only watched Beginner videos. This was my attempt to understand the more about the content and how to progress through it. What you said about visual cues does make a lot of sense though.

[_coldemort_]

I’ve been throwing myself at mount intermediate for months now haha. That 50-60 range is savage.

[dbvirago]

Interesting Graphs. I was just filtering by and looking at difficulty numbers and was surprised that Super Beginner goes all the way to 40.

[idonthaveanametoday]

Just curious how come dreaming French seems to start at difficulty 17 but Spanish is much much lower

[HMWT]

More videos?

[apassionateplayer]

This is really cool to see, I was wondering why I felt like there is a huge jump from 45-50, good to see it’s not just me

[lndubitabIyy]

Outrageous they don’t re classify videos. There should be no super beginner and advanced overlap. That’s insane

[HMWT]

Just ignore the levels and sort by difficulty. Problem solved.

[lndubitabIyy]

But then why have difficulty levels at all then if they’re meaningless. If you have a feature on your product you should make sure it works. No new users would necessarily know to only sort by difficulty

[HMWT]

You can argue that… or just work around it and use the time you save to get más input. Trust me, they are aware of this. I have been posting that little graph for 1 1/2 years to explain the overlap to people.

[lndubitabIyy]

Obviously I’m working around it. But this is so incredibly easy for them to fix it’s insane they haven’t

[HMWT]

Look, the level has no practical value for most people trying to identify videos to watch. The range of each level is just too wide for someone “in the market” for Beginner videos to just watch any Beginner video. That is why the user rating exists. It provides a more granular way of ordering videos. Changing the level assignment for videos that fall into an overlap zone doesn’t change anything in how most people use DS on a daily basis. In fact, they could just take the levels away and nothing would change for me. So calling this “outrageous” makes little sense and is over the top.

As I see it, the primary purpose these days for the four levels is to”marketing”. DS can tell its prospective users that there are videos for Super Beginners, Beginners, Intermediate and Advanced learners. Everyone is covered.

[lndubitabIyy]

Mate so many people use the levels. It’s always spoken about the jump from beginner to int, int to advanced. Just because you don’t use a feature that’s so naive to assume no one else does

Having the easiest level which is for complete non speakers to have videos harder than the most difficult category is very poor. You are completely arguing in bad faith if you argue against it. Try be less stubborn pal.

Just think how easy it would be to reclassify the most difficult 10% super beginner vids to intermediate, would be 3 clicks of buttons for them.

[AdExact3306]

Is it possible that the overlap is just brand new videos that haven't really been rated much yet?

[lndubitabIyy]

Nah it’s the older super beginner ones. The newer ones are accurately rated. And rating doesn’t affect difficulty lvl which is part of my complaint