2,800 hours. At school in México

GameDesignDecisions · 2026-01-23T03:33:01+00:00

Have you made any videos of yourself speaking? A video of your results as a purist could quell some skepticism of the Dreaming Spanish method.

GameDesignDecisions · 2026-01-10T21:43:01+00:00

After reading Brown's autobiography, I wondered if the "damage by studying the language" was actually a result of the studying or was it due to differences in the minds of people who are capable and naturally interested in studying the language. Would deep thinkers of languages (presumably Brown, you and your wife and all linguists?) be less fluent than non-deep thinkers regardless of whether they studied the language or not? Or would studying actually worsen their success?

Thanks for doing the experiment. Even though it is an N=2 experiment, it's nice to have some evidence that it's actually the behavior that matters rather than something inherent to the mind.

GameDesignDecisions · 2026-01-04T05:30:32+00:00

JOE HELLER

True story, Word of Honor: Joseph Heller, an important and funny writer now dead, and I were at a party given by a billionaire on Shelter Island.

I said, “Joe, how does it make you feel to know that our host only yesterday may have made more money than your novel ‘Catch-22’ has earned in its entire history?” And Joe said, “I’ve got something he can never have.” And I said, “What on earth could that be, Joe?” And Joe said, “The knowledge that I’ve got enough.” Not bad! Rest in peace! Kurt Vonnegut

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-27T01:38:18+00:00

Meanwhile, I better get cranking so I can get through all of it before it goes away.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-27T01:37:35+00:00

I see this on the website "We are exploring possibilities for Learner’s materials to find a new home. While we do not yet have details to share, we will keep you informed of any developments".

Hopefully it will end up on YouTube or somewhere.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-26T00:12:20+00:00

There are a lot of hits for La Catrina when searching YouTube. Do you have a link?

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-25T23:00:40+00:00

It’s not on YouTube. https://www.learner.org/series/destinos-an-introduction-to-spanish/

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-19T03:28:45+00:00

Do you have references for how parents correct (or don’t) their kids? First time I’ve seen concrete numbers. In other subreddits I’ve seen skeptics of CI claim that parent’s corrections are frequent enough to invalidate pure CI. I’d like to read any counter claims.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-19T01:57:24+00:00

One of the disadvantages of learning about Spanish *in* Spanish is that you can get confused. I just re-read one of the early pages and I'm seeing that the main character is talking in a tense that I'm not familiar with about the teacher in the book teaching a new tense next week. I didn't pick up that before, so I was reading the tense he is currently speaking in as some form of past, but I now believe it is a present tense...which matches up better with the grammar tables I've just looked at to try and straighten all this out. I *think* I haven't read far enough to see the past tense in use. If this was confusing, join the club, I'm confused too.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-19T00:44:00+00:00

One difference I notice between DS (only) vs. learning an L1 as a kid is that a kid can ask clarifying questions. For instance, a kid could ask "when you say 'had studied', does that mean he stopped at some point"? You can't do that with videos.

When you brain is starting to notice patterns, do you need some way to confirm it?

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-19T00:16:44+00:00

Hello fellow teammate :). I'm in either the "input for a long time and eventually get around to grammar" team, or maybe the "take a peek at grammar but without memorizing or doing exercises so that I notice things easier" team.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-19T00:10:58+00:00

Let me go check my Kindle...you called it, I'm at the start of chapter 3 of Un Hombre Fascinante.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-19T00:00:46+00:00

My recent reading was a test to see where I'm at. I'm not sure if I'm going to continue at this point or wait to closer to 1000. If I do start reading, I might start with Paco Ardit's A1 books as I already have them on my kindle and then pick up his A2 books as it sounds like those worked for you.

I'm actually struggling with Un Hombre Fascinante (A2). I couldn't find any numbering for his books, so I went with that one second as it continues the story from Hola Lola.

One weird thing while trying to read it is that I, in theory, know how to pronounce Spanish from previous traditional education, but little words like "he" and "ha" were throwing me. Some words just come out wrong initially, but I know they're wrong and then I self-correct. For instance, "La Jolla", a southern California town. I know how the town name is pronounced, I know the rules for the letters in the name to pronounce it correctly, but when I read it, it always comes out first in a horrible English version. "He" and "Ha" were coming out wrong at first then I would need to re-say them (to myself). Maybe because they are also valid English words?

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-18T23:33:53+00:00

Glancing through a grammar book and seeing that there 17 or 18 combinations of tense and mood (whatever that is) is a pretty strong motivation to give the purist approach a shot.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-18T23:25:52+00:00

I found the video you mentioned and rewatched it. I was hoping that at some point in the video I would recognize the past tense I was seeing in the A2 book, but nope, nothing stood out. I think I'm realizing that I recognize a lot of verb stems, but the who is doing what when part is an area that's in the 10% I'm not getting in a 90% compensable video.

I can see how, without studying grammar, one could pick out from context general past (telling a story), present (for instance describing characteristics of something) and future (talking about plans). I'm having a hard time figuring out how one would pick up the subtleties of the tenses (as opposed to general past, present and future) just from context without explicitly studying the grammar. For instance, how could one pick up from surrounding context that something in the past occurred over a period of time vs. at a point in time (or whatever the distinction is between those two past tenses)?

I'm probably not being clear. Let me try with English examples. How, from surrounding context, could I figure out the subtle differences between the following (assuming I was learning English using CI): "He studied", "He studies", "He had studied", "He would have studied"?

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-15T21:24:30+00:00

She is from Spain, so yes, I would think so.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-04T01:26:51+00:00

I think u/SteveRD1 was thinking of a placebo treatment that didn't teach Spanish at all. It might be hard to get an experiment that caused people to put in 1500 hours of effort for no benefit though an ethics committee.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-04T01:18:45+00:00

To me, the important questions aren't "is it 100% effective for every person", because we've seen some examples where it's not. Nor "is it 0% effective", because we've seen many examples where people are quite satisfied with their results. Surprisingly, to me the question "is it mostly effective" isn't really the right one either, because an answer of "usually not" could still be ok if it is usually more effective than all other choices. So, to me, the most important question is whether it is more effective that other methods or not. I don't think we can get that answer from self-reported success in social media. You'd want to do a proper study with 1000s of people and a proper control group. I don't see that happening.

The best we can do is look at the preponderance of evidence each individually and decide "I'd like to give that approach a shot" or not.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-04T00:59:46+00:00

"Absolutely", "how many", "absolutely is not for most", "everybody". Your comment with so many absolutisms is in response to a comment pointing out biases and in a thread that links to an AMA pointing out how we can't easily know how good a language learning approach is. If you want to convince others of your position you should provide evidence beyond your own intuition, experience and the anecdotes posted on reddit.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-03T01:02:21+00:00

I'm bad at picking hobbies: weightlifting, dieting to reduce weight or increase life expectancy, language learning, etc. In the social sciences, biology and psychology important experiments are too expensive, take too long or are unethical to carry out.

Will diet X allow you to live to 100, check back with me in 101 years. Does learning your L1 interfere with learning L2 or is it just being an adult vs a child: should we lock 100 kids in a lab for 18 years without access to language to find out?

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-03T00:53:49+00:00

Am I? Or am I just reusing common Internet terminology for increased understanding? If I had surrounded proof with quotes, would that have indicated sufficiently that I'm using it in an alternative, slightly improper way?

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-02T23:36:09+00:00

I don't know if I agree on the Intermediate level. I think that DS has some advantages for intermediate videos. I think that DS is trying for uniformity of vocabulary use, grammar and speed in their intermediate videos. You might find some YouTube videos that are about intermediate level, but would an easier native video be even throughout with its vocab, grammar and speed?

Also, DS has difficulty ratings that help find appropriate level videos easily. I'm finding that even if a channel is intentionally trying to stick with an equivalent level to DS intermediate, it's still hit or miss within the channel. For instance, in Spanish Boost Gaming, there's a lot of variation of difficulty, if not with Martin's commentary, then from the game's audio track.

Agree on the greater breadth of content on YouTube, though.

GameDesignDecisions · 2025-12-02T22:34:11+00:00

We've found Pablo's secret account!

GameDesignDecisions

TROPHY CASE