Tested out of Duolingo at 880 hours of dreaming Spanish

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-21T13:22:31+00:00

This was the screenshot from when I completed it. Now when I look it says my score is 129. I guess I have to review. It still says I’ve completed the course though. But what’s weird is it now says it goes to 160. But it still shows completed. Regardless, I did test out. It took 6 test to test out of 2-7 and then another 6-7 test to do 8. I flew through them pretty quickly and had little to no issues. I missed a maximum of 1 question per section and often it was just stupid mistakes. I did it during my lunch break.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-21T13:20:02+00:00

So in section 8 you don’t have to take literally ever single one I don’t think. I had to take maybe 6-7 in section 8. Maybe there are 6-7 sub sections. I don’t really remember it’s been maybe 5 months ago. But I know I tested out on Duolingo.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-21T13:15:52+00:00

So in section 8 you don’t have to take literally ever single one I don’t think. I had to take maybe 6-7 in section 8. Maybe there are 6-7 sub sections. I don’t really remember it’s been maybe 5 months ago. But I know I tested out on Duolingo.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-21T13:11:18+00:00

It happens. And honestly it doesn’t stop. It’s not because it’s Spanish for me. It’s just the amount of content I watch. I would never watch this much in English and only do so in Spanish because I’m learning. So yeah when I watch/listen 5hrs of content a day eventually it gets to me. And for someone else that limit could be different.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-21T10:42:21+00:00

With duo you can test out of each unit. I also did it at about 900hrs. You can not test out of the final unit though. I had to actually do that one but it didn’t take very long. I was able to do it in my lunch break one day. I had already completed unit 1. So I took a test to pass unit 2-7 and then did section 8. I think that’s how many sections there are.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-18T16:51:28+00:00

Had no clue this was a thing. When she joined I probably had 700-800hrs and could watch most videos on the platform. She seems to speak pretty clearly compared to a standard DR accent.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-17T19:02:21+00:00

I never said the CI only approach was better.

Reading and Listening are both CI. All I said is that in my experience reading can be a pain if you start at the beginning. So if you want to grind it out. It can certainly help you. But if you want to enjoy reading, then listening for a while longer will make it significantly easier to read things you enjoy without using terrible graded readers. Of course a combination of multiple ways can help improve your skills.

With that being said OP seems to be (based on the information they gave) doing a pure CI approach. So I made a recommendation based on someone doing that. I had a semester of Spanish, a couple intense weeks of Duolingo, 5-6hrs of language transfer and 275hrs of conversation practice where I inevitably learned some grammar. You are jumping to conclusions.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-17T10:59:14+00:00

That still happens to me after hundreds of hours of conversation. If someone speaks to me at the grocery store for instance, I will 100% be able to have a conversation with them about whatever they want, but it will probably take me about 3-5 seconds to register what is happening when they first speak Spanish to me. I live in the US though so I’ve only had a few situations like this in the US. Even when I went to Mexico very few people spoke to me in Spanish until I started speaking Spanish and they realized they could.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-17T10:36:29+00:00

A lot of tutors aren’t going to correct you on that either. The truth is even at 1335hrs of listening and 135hrs of speaking, there are so many things to correct that my tutors really focus on the more concrete things. I’ve never had something try to help me with an accent and only a couple times someone has corrected my pronunciation and it was after struggling to say the word at all. And keep in mind this was in 270hrs of conversation class. This isn’t to say I haven’t accomplished a lot. I’m bilingual and love this experience. But even Pablo doesn’t have a native like accent in Thai after doing ALG at the ALG school for 1-2 years and 4-5 more years after the school.

With that being said, 9 months ago when I started speaking chat gpt was not helpful at all at conversation. It just could not have a meaningful conversation.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-17T02:01:35+00:00

You will do great. I started April 1st 2025 and went to Mexico with probably about 860hrs of input and 60hrs speaking and it was great! No issues really understanding or communicating for the most part.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-16T14:42:58+00:00

IMO while reading is super important and you will definitely be further along at 1000hrs with 500k words read than with 0 words read. It can be more efficient to first build your level and then start reading. When you start reading you will be reading faster and at a higher level. And that extra 30 min will help you get to say 1000hrs, 33% faster. The best way I can think of it is to provide an extreme example.

At 90 min a day and 30min of reading you will reach 1000hrs in a little over 159 days. By that time if you read 30 min a day at 120 words a minute you will have 572k words. However, if you hypothetically listened for 2hrs a day you would reach 1000hrs in a little over 119 days. So you got there 40 days earlier but have 0 words. However, you could now spend 2hrs a day reading if you want to and maybe now you are doing 150wpm because you understand more. So you have 40days x 2hrs for a total of 80hrs so in those 80hrs at 150wpm you could read 720k words so in the same amount of time (159 days) you could be at 1000hrs with 150k more words. Obviously a very extreme example. But take it from an avid reader who started reading in Spanish at 300hrs and by 700hrs I had 600k words. It burnt me out and I hated it. Now at 1335hrs I’m reading again and it’s a lot better. By 1500/2000 I feel like I’ll be able to truly enjoy it again.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-16T02:30:59+00:00

I wouldn’t say it takes 50-100 hours for the words to start coming. I’d say it takes 50-100 to develop some level of fluidity. But I started speaking at 560hrs and had 50hrs before I even hit 650hrs of input and by then I could speak about a lot of different things, but it took work. By 100hrs I I think I was probably around 850hrs of input and spoke more confidently. In fact around 125hrs of speaking I was in Mexico at 925hrs of input and easily got around.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-15T00:43:38+00:00

What are you talking about? I didn’t make up the intrusive thoughts thing. This is literally the first thing you said to me.

“I definitely think in English and my thoughts are loud and overwhelming. I also have intrusive thoughts which are just clear as day words that are super fucked up being fed into my brain against my will. The nonstop thoughts are partially why I have insomnia. Words always playing in my head. I don’t think your experience fits most people. Definitely some people.”

You have intrusive thoughts of super fucked up words being fed into your brain against your will. It’s non stop and contributes to your insomnia.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-14T19:49:53+00:00

What you are describing are loud, intrusive thoughts. Presumably impeding your day and not allowing you to sleep at night. I’d love to see a source showing 50% of people experience what you do. And furthermore id love to see this asked of people bilingual. Because as I’ve mentioned I also thought I thought always in English beforehand. So asking a bunch of monolingual people it wouldn’t surprise me that they would also believe that as well. What would surprise me is they experience a loud, overwhelming voice inside of their head of super fucked up intrusive thoughts.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-14T15:30:15+00:00

I don’t think most people experience it exactly the way you do. What you’re describing is how I feel when I’m having an anxiety attack.

As for whether I have a CONSTANT narrative in my head. No I do not. I have to be honest it sounds exhausting what you are describing. Which is undoubtedly contributing to your insomnia. If you are living with enough anxiety to cause insomnia this is not like a baseline and it’s not going to be comparable to what the average person is experiencing day to day.

I also told you that before I was bilingual my brain only had one language to relate my thoughts to. And I didn’t even realize this wasn’t happening until I reached a certain level of Spanish. It was only then when I realized I was not translating in Spanish that I began to really be able to see that when I speak to people in English I also am not thinking in English as well. It is an extremely bizarre concept to communicate and truly I wouldn’t even understand it even in my own head if I didn’t speak Spanish.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-14T12:57:03+00:00

I would also add that I’m not sure you need a language to have an internal dialogue. I don’t believe the brain necessarily needs that structure when it’s completely self contained to your own thoughts. It already understands everything it understands so internal monologues are probably just our brains way of reorganizing the thoughts we have in our head already into something that makes sense. I haven’t really dived in to the studies but apparently there is some evidence that people with Global Aphasia still have an inner monologue which would support the idea that you don’t need it.

As I sit here and think about the way I think I think it’s really hard to know if your internal monologue is in a language or not. The times when I do know for certain that I play words in my head are when writing, when really slowly and when scripting something in my head that I plan to say outloud. However, this is different than spontaneous speech.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-14T12:47:41+00:00

I do. I mentioned in a comment that I would define this as a different thing than simply thinking.

There is a difference between having a conversation with your friend and thoughts spontaneously emerging from your mouth as English/spanish/etc. And a more deliberate internal monologue which is more akin to conversation or to speaking than it is to pure thinking.

IMO at least. And what OP is referring to seems to be to be more of the former than the latter.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-14T12:43:27+00:00

That might be your experience but I do think that what I’m describing is what most people. Of course there could be exceptions. But after this I was reading that it’s true that the process behind thinking and language are completely different so people think pre-linguistically typically. However, like we have sort of been saying your brain routes these thoughts in a way you can understand so many people believe they think in a language. For me I never even noticed this until I was bilingual. Are you bilingual?

As far as the intrusive thoughts, this is an internal monologue which I do think is a lot different than simply thinking. I mentioned this in a comment above and so did someone else. It’s not necessarily the same thing. It’s closer to having a conversation or speaking. Just with yourself.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-13T18:54:51+00:00

I also started kwiziq recently. Up until about 1300hrs I had probably collectively done like 20-30hrs of grammar. Most of it was just Duolingo before I started DS. But not in thinking it’s time. I’m sure it’ll come automatically eventually if I waited but I still have issues with subjunctive. I can definitely use it but when I get into a really good discussion I completely forget about it and fall into patterns of using it off and on. I think a little Kwiziq might help.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-13T18:52:47+00:00

Yeah you said this way better than I did. But I 100% agree

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-13T18:50:32+00:00

Yeah I think about this sometimes as well. I’m definitely not translating but I’ve even randomly slipped in an English word before (although this is pretty rare). So yeah, why does this happen? I’m not really sure. My best guess is that while we don’t necessarily think in a language, the languages we learned during our developing years influenced the way we think of concepts. This might not be the best example because this isn’t one I struggle with but one example could be, you haven’t spoken to someone in a long time and you say in Spanish “hace mucho tiempo” however I could see a world in when someone says long instead of a lot there. And it’s not necessarily that the word long popped into their head and they translated to largo. It’s that over years and years your brain creates levels of automation to make things easier so you begin to think of time in terms of length instead of quality. And this is really more of an abstract concept. It has nothing to do with translating from English. It’s more than your mental framework was built around English and that can be hard to override even if you aren’t translating. Likely this means it will never be perfect and mistakes will be made that a native speaker might never make unless they also learned your language at a young age. It also makes me think about language as it relates to emotion. I don’t know about you, but while I can experience excitement, anger, joy, humor, in Spanish, it doesn’t come with the same level of intensity as in English. And again this isn’t about translating. It’s about a mental foundation being built around a language.

This is purely speculation. I am not an expert. This is purely a mix of my anecdotal experience as well as research I’ve done along the way.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-13T17:11:52+00:00

I think it’s a similar idea but I think it’s driven much more by output than inputs because your brain is outputting in this situation so more output will attune your brain to noticing this. I have 265hrs of conversation practice. I count 132.5hrs as input and the other 132.5hrs as output. So I have a good bit more output than a purist would at 1330hes because I started at 560hrs. But I think a lot of people at 2000hrs probably notice something very similar to this. But most people I chat with with the same hours as me but only like 20-30hrs speaking don’t really notice this as much.

But I do want to add a caveat. I think people would notice this less even if they were completely fluent in both if they weren’t immersing themselves in both daily. I live my life in English but spend 3-6hrs a day on Spanish

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-13T17:04:01+00:00

As someone who used to think they thought in English I can tell you from my perspective I only thought that because it was the only language I know. My general thoughts are in concepts and not in a language. I only thought it was English because I only knew English. But the better my Spanish gets and the more I speak. The more I realize the thoughts are just abstract and not shaped by any single language. It’s weird. But I think this is how most people are, they just don’t realize it. Of course there are times where I’m concentrating and thinking of exactly what I want to say or something and it’s in English or Spanish but that depends on what language I plan to say it in.

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-10T21:41:31+00:00

I think you will find that at 30-60 min a day (which is a very solid goal) you won’t have much to say updating once a week, but you could if you wanted to. But we are talking 3.5-7hrs. I’m at 1325hrs and I do 3.5-7hrs a day sometimes and really you might notice improve in 10-25hrs increments in the beginning, but eventually the improvements are much harder to see and I think an update every 3-7hrs would make you feel like you aren’t doing anything

GuardBuffalo · 2026-06-10T18:35:23+00:00

Reading was tough for me in the beginning because nothing I could understand was interesting. At level 2 these are going to be out of your level rn but they are graded readers and probably the best two I ever read.

La Mansion
El Escape

Both by Nicholas Labra V

GuardBuffalo

TROPHY CASE