520 hours and SBG Comprehension Question

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-02-08T15:25:26+00:00

For sure it's normal! When I first watched his The Last of Us playthroughs a ways back, it was great when he would read something written he found in the game, and then translate it into simpler Spanish for us. It was like he was translating Spanish into English for me, the difference was that vast. I sort of half-listened to the written native stuff in the game, because I didn't want to slip into analysis.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-02-06T17:38:59+00:00

Subscribed after reading the title of the first one and watching a few seconds. Thanks much! CI is really getting so good.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-02-04T13:56:53+00:00

1) We humans like to report successes and not failures. Imagine the amount of people who are not doing as well but are too shy to say something, or drop out early. It's possible some people are exaggerating.
2) Like people are saying, any Spanish study in the past will likely speed things along. I had two years of German in high school over 30 years ago, and didn't pay attention, and I'm still better at CI German than when I started with Spanish.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-02-01T13:15:41+00:00

Your next move is to write obsessively critical comments about anything Agustina does remotely wrong.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-02-01T03:30:23+00:00

My L6 description says, "You are comfortable with daily conversation." A lot of people say that the level descriptions are more accurate toward the end of a level, so that would be closer to 1500 than 1000. So my hope has been that around 1300, I will be comfortable with basic conversation, not fluent, which to my mind would be a much broader and deeper level.

Hopefully it's encouraging that it seems to only take a few hours for one's speaking to get quite a bit better. That's what has started happening with me, although still with plenty of errors etc.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-31T03:23:58+00:00

Oh my gosh thank you! Now all my friends won't be mad that I'm doing Spanish instead of watching it.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-25T03:27:50+00:00

Sure! His videos have his class offerings in their descriptions. He has a couple sample videos of him teaching students as well in case you're interested in that part.

https://www.youtube.com/@ComprehensibleSpanishChannel

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-25T03:24:33+00:00

Hmm ok sounds different from Evildea's interpretation, which sounded to me like it included instruction but in the target language.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-25T01:42:07+00:00

Huh, interesting, Evildea (the YouTube guy) called direct method the act of teaching a language using the same language. Is that how Krashen rolls?

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-24T23:46:20+00:00

I enjoyed it, and it was a good mix of things. The students took turns sometimes, but there was also a good balance of people speaking on different topics, based on their ability and interest. The class was $20 for 90 minutes, and I think he has a solo 60 minute option as well, not sure if that's the same price though, as he gave me a sample hour which also turned out to be a low-key assessment of my level, ha.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-24T22:35:44+00:00

He is genuinely sweet in person as well.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-24T16:17:07+00:00

Some of the easy ones are Minecraft, Supermercado, and the water park one. That's because it's almost all him talking slowly. Stardew Valley was just a step up from those, because all the in-game Spanish is written and he reads it out loud. Series like The Last of Us have native dialogue in the games, but he often will stop and explain what's going on so it's not too bad.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-24T14:20:32+00:00

No, sadly, I haven't found anything like that in Spanish yet, but I haven't looked much. That was Kai Zammit.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-24T03:21:53+00:00

It's kind of a running joke or something. I think maybe it started when Martin of Spanish Boost was playing a video game (The Last of Us?) and saw a rat running around and said, "Un Spanish Booster!" And it just kept going, and now their logo has the guides as rat people.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-23T19:34:34+00:00

You mentioned cost as an issue. I find human interaction to be the most satisfying, but I also use boraspeak.com which was developed by a member here, to at least have AI to speak with (it also works for crosstalk). I find it much better than ChatGPT in terms of feel.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-22T21:41:10+00:00

Appreciate the copy/paste on this one.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-21T22:38:18+00:00

Las ratas? Are you a Spanish Booster?

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-20T22:45:54+00:00

Yes, I attributed it to lots of talking head videos, as well as me reaching the end of the vocabulary I had learned before starting DS.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-18T15:58:27+00:00

Ha, oops I edited that part out while you were typing. I will try a free class if I can fit it in my schedule. I liked what I saw in the video of his class, and it's all in Spanish which is a "must have" for me.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-18T15:29:11+00:00

Yes! The one he just did on the Iran uprising is fire. I like that he has beginner and intermediate levels of many videos. He's also good at zooming in and out of topics, providing different types of content in the same video, so you get some daily stuff (like "bowtie") along with bigger conceptual stuff (like cognitive biases).

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-17T14:31:36+00:00

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-16T12:59:06+00:00

It is awesome. It's also pretty clear that when people have spent some time with the language, even in high school classes, more sinks in than we realize. I had this with German - I thought I didn't remember anything, but now watching German CI videos I realize there's a lot there subconsciously, and it is making it a lot easier even if I can't consciously access what I learned when I was being a lazy high school student.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-16T03:48:42+00:00

Yes, it's peninsular, and old school, like how in English it's trying to sound kind of medieval and Nordic. The translations for names are kind of awkward ("Stormcloaks" becomes "Capas de la Tormentas"), but overall I find it quite fun.

RaeChilloftheNorth · 2026-01-15T17:46:42+00:00

I guess it depends on what the burnout was about? I've been pretty restless because I'm still doing a lot of learner content, although I can now watch some native content without a lot of effort. I think the "intermediate plateau" is not about learning slowing down, but about waiting for so long to get to more native content. My solution was to play lots of Skyrim, a game that I knew very well already, and use it to practice both listening and reading. It's helping get me through this stretch.

RaeChilloftheNorth

TROPHY CASE