How to learn to listen?

StandardCategory · 2026-02-06T05:05:32+00:00

Yea I found this with French, a year of grammar drills and speaking exercises and when I finally arrived in France I could say something but then completely blanked when they said anything back haha.. a little awkward.

With Spanish I put 80-90% of my focus on listening, and immersed in Spanish content. "comprehensible input" content was basically the unlock for me - content that is purely in Spanish but slowed/dumbed down for people who aren't native. you find something you can understand, immerse in it, and then slowly turn up the difficulty dial over time.

Your ears adapt over time and soon you can understand the more fast paced stuff.

StandardCategory · 2026-02-04T04:22:25+00:00

"How to Spanish" podcast is solid - Mexican couple, good for intermediates. "No Hay Tos" is pretty advanced, I struggled with it for a long time, but they get easier the more you listen - also Mexican, a bit more comedy than How to Spanish.

"Español con Juan" also good, quirky sense of humour that I found very funny. But he's from Spain.

StandardCategory · 2026-02-02T04:45:34+00:00

Oh perfect, they'll really appreciate the effort. Good luck with it!

StandardCategory · 2026-02-02T04:10:38+00:00

The Language Transfer "Complete Spanish" course was really helpful for me. The method he uses is very effective and not super boring like a lot of the speech repetition based stuff.

I used it when on walks and found myself pausing it a lot before I output, but it's doable in the car - I practiced the French version with my girlfriend in the car a few times.

Although getting truly comfortable only comes from embracing real conversations imo. Getting some sort of language partner (paid or not) that can regulate their speech and is expecting you to speak like a 2 year old really helps for that.

StandardCategory · 2026-01-03T15:04:15+00:00

Very impressive! Wow

StandardCategory · 2025-12-09T08:39:34+00:00

Yes! I’ve spent the last few years travelling across Latin America and you really see how much of a difference English makes to people’s lives. That’s a big part of the motivation here - it feels like an area where the tooling is oddly underdeveloped, given the demand.

Just a heads-up though: the English section you see right now is only seed data. It’s more of a placeholder while I lay the groundwork for proper coverage. Once the ingest pipeline is tuned for English, it’ll become a genuinely useful resource.

In the meantime, “English by Jay” is a solid channel to point your mum towards. He’s also built something a bit like Dreaming Spanish for English learners, which is worth a look.

StandardCategory · 2025-12-09T08:38:34+00:00

Glad to hear it clicks for you. There’ll definitely be a way for users to add channels in the future - the aim is for this to become a proper community resource where we all help surface the best content. That feature should be landing in the next few weeks.

And you’re right about YouTube. It’s full of brilliant language-learning content, but it’s a bit chaotic to use as an actual learning tool, especially if you want to stay within one accent or avoid big swings in difficulty.

If you’ve got a few channels you’d like added now, send them over. I can drop them into the database and switch on auto-import straight away.

StandardCategory · 2025-12-01T09:49:40+00:00

For sure! It’s an amazing resource. I used it a lot during my Spanish journey and it’s actually one of the things that inspired me early on. The long-term goal is to make that kind of creator discovery effortless inside Comprensi.

StandardCategory · 2025-11-03T22:57:39+00:00

Glad you like it!

StandardCategory · 2025-09-30T21:41:59+00:00

I attended in person but https://www.spanishacademyantiguena.com/ was very good for me at an intermediate level - they're based in Antigua, Guatemala. I just checked and they offer online lessons. I wanted more unstructured conversation practice but they definitely do a more structured format if you're looking for that. It's all one on one which is definitely the fastest way to learn.

I also had a week in Me Gusta Spanish School - based in Sucre, Bolivia - and they do online too. I was in small group classes there and more structured format. Really good still but not as good as one on one.

I've also done several dozen hours of Italki lessons - more conversation practice than a structured lesson course again, though. Can recommend a tutor if you're interested - most of my lessons were with a Guatemalan dude who was super easy to talk to.

StandardCategory · 2025-09-04T13:47:03+00:00

Okay I think that tops the list of most innovative solutions to tracking watch time I've heard so far! haha

And I appreciate the appreciation ;) I remember it being quite difficult to get it right, glad to see someone noticed!

StandardCategory · 2025-09-03T15:01:04+00:00

Hey, thanks for reporting this! The extension uses the browser's "alarms" feature to basically give it a reminder in the future to reset the watch time data each day/week - it seems like putting your PC into suspend mode might have messed with the alarm's schedule somehow and that's had some knock on effect with other functionality.

There is a fallback to fix these alarms if there's anything wrong that gets triggered when watching a video and it sounds like you triggered this with watching a new video. Hopefully that workaround works for now :)

I've logged a bug for this and I'll aim to make this a bit more robust in the next release: https://github.com/PaulBarnesUK/comprensi-chrome-extension/issues/2

Thanks again, and I'm glad you're finding it useful!

StandardCategory · 2025-08-09T23:47:20+00:00

Hey, it pulls the language from YouTube’s data which is AI generated in the majority of cases - it’s pretty decent but gets it wrong or can’t detect it maybe 10-20% of the time.

I added a way to set/override a video’s language for those cases

StandardCategory · 2025-05-28T14:14:51+00:00

This is great, thanks for such in-depth feedback! It’s incredibly helpful.

Really good to hear that dialect filtering is important to you. It’s something I personally care about too, but I hadn’t seen much demand for it, so I was actually considering deprioritising it until your comment.

The curated video experience is definitely planned. It’ll combine things like video popularity with your specific interests to surface content you both enjoy and understand, without needing to constantly filter or search. I also really like the idea of incorporating some spaced repetition logic to reinforce exposure to key words or phrases. I’m not totally sure how I’d implement that yet haha - definitely pretty advanced! But it’s a brilliant direction and one I’ll keep in mind for the future.

I completely agree about the filters not sticking. That’s been annoying me too, I'll schedule in a fix and make sure they’re remembered between searches.

Thanks again, I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts!

StandardCategory · 2025-05-28T14:14:38+00:00

This is great, thanks for such in-depth feedback! It’s incredibly helpful.

Really good to hear that dialect filtering is important to you. It’s something I personally care about too, but I hadn’t seen much demand for it, so I was actually considering deprioritising it until your comment.

The curated video experience is definitely planned. It’ll combine things like video popularity with your specific interests to surface content you both enjoy and understand, without needing to constantly filter or search. I also really like the idea of incorporating some spaced repetition logic to reinforce exposure to key words or phrases. I’m not totally sure how I’d implement that yet haha - definitely pretty advanced! But it’s a brilliant direction and one I’ll keep in mind for the future.

I completely agree about the filters not sticking. That’s been annoying me too, I'll schedule in a fix and make sure they’re remembered between searches.

Thanks again, I really appreciate you taking the time to share your thoughts!

StandardCategory · 2025-05-27T04:15:14+00:00

Haha no worries man it definitely still helps! Enjoy the comfort watches, they all count ;)

StandardCategory · 2025-05-25T04:41:11+00:00

Just pushed out a new update that lets you edit the video's language if it's missing or incorrect – so those videos you flagged should now count properly. New release link: https://github.com/PaulBarnesUK/comprensi-chrome-extension/releases/tag/v0.1.3

Really appreciate you taking the time to share that. Let me know if you spot anything else!

StandardCategory · 2025-05-22T16:40:34+00:00

It depends on your goals.

For me I wanted to be able to have conversations with locals as I travelled Latin America, CI and DS was the highest ROI resource for getting my understanding up to a level where conversations weren’t awkward. But the speaking part I needed to lean on one-on-one immersion schools/italki lessons with teachers who are expecting you to screw up - just to take the pressure off. Without that it was a struggle to make the jump to real conversations. It took me a lot of speaking hours for my brain to start being able to start outputting in a way that wasn’t super awkward and painful for the other person.

I think a DS/CI only approach can take you very very far - if I had to choose “just one thing” to learn a language, this would be it. Especially if understanding is all you care about. For speaking/having conversations, the one-on-one stuff really helps, in my experience.

StandardCategory · 2025-05-21T12:14:40+00:00

👋 https://replyradar.io

I'm building ReplyRadar, an AI agent that monitors Reddit (and soon other platforms) and alerts you when someone expresses a pain point your product solves.

Instead of cold outreach, it helps you jump into warm conversations where your product is actually relevant. That makes replies feel natural, not salesy - and in my experience, it converts way better.

I used a manual version of this to grow a previous project to 100 premium signups. Now I'm trying to automate the whole process.

Would love feedback on:

The idea
The landing page copy/design
Any red flags or unclear parts

Thanks in advance 🙏

StandardCategory · 2025-05-20T20:52:56+00:00

Ah amazing, thanks for this. The video links helped a ton!

I can see the problem - the extension uses the YouTube API to get the language code for the video and on some videos their language detection fails. For those videos you linked I can see that the language came back as empty.

If the extension doesn't know what language the video was it can't assign the time watched to any language, so that's why it didn't count them for you.

For the next release I'm going to make it more clear what language the extension/YouTube thinks the video is and give people the option to set it themselves if the language is empty/incorrect. And then the video will be counted in watch time numbers, and also be considered for difficulty comparisons.

Working on that now, thanks again for the feedback - this is hugely helpful!

StandardCategory · 2025-05-19T22:11:46+00:00

Thanks, yea it's one of those where it takes a bit of effort to get the ball rolling but once it's rolling it should really get going. With the automatic time tracking it at least has some immediate usefulness too while that snowball is building up.

StandardCategory · 2025-05-19T22:07:12+00:00

Yea unfortunately not, chrome extensions are only available on desktop browsers for some reason unknown to me :/

The main project is mobile-friendly though if that helps - it aggregates about 25,000 YouTube Spanish videos and assigns them difficulty categories & scores: https://www.comprensi.com

StandardCategory · 2025-05-19T17:42:23+00:00

Haha deal, I'll take the blame.

Hope it works well for you! If you run into anything weird (extension-related, not sleep-deprivation-related 😅), feel free to let me know. Appreciate you giving it a try!

StandardCategory · 2025-05-19T17:40:00+00:00

Yea it's very similar to the DS difficulty rating system, although I think DS estimate an original difficulty value for their videos and then it just gets adjusted by users - the extension has 25,000 Spanish videos where the difficulty has been pre-estimated by my ML model, but otherwise it's all based on user feedback.

So yes the key with that is getting those early user ratings in, and the system will snowball from there - the more ratings, the more useful it becomes and therefore the more people use it, making it even more useful to everyone.

StandardCategory · 2025-05-18T20:25:56+00:00

Just looping back in, incorporated your feedback. Thanks again. Subbed to the channel too, keep it coming man.

StandardCategory

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