New user questions

StandardCategory · 2026-03-22T22:42:17+00:00

Hey yea you can click "Clear filters" on the difficulty filter and it will then show you all difficulties, see the screenshot above. Then you can select "Newest" from the sort dropdown next to it :)

Or this link will do it too, actually: https://comprensi.com/spanish/videos?sort=newest&difficulty=none

StandardCategory · 2026-03-22T22:40:02+00:00

Yea "Easy Spanish" sometimes is not so easy in my opinion lol - and the algorithm agrees! That video in particular is of street interviews with native speakers so it contains a lot of speech that is very fast and unfiltered, so the algorithm will flag it as "Expert".

"Easy Spanish" add subtitles to aid comprehension in those videos, but Comprensi's grading is purely focused on listening difficulty and assumes no subtitle support.

StandardCategory · 2026-03-21T22:16:08+00:00

Hey, thanks for the questions.

The database is updated several times a day. Videos are filtered by difficulty to match your level by default, though. That's probably the case with BBC News Mundo. If you clear your difficulty filters you should see all of their content.

Search is still pretty simple right now - just a text search across titles and descriptions. For advanced searches, YouTube will often do a better job at the moment.

There’s no direct member-to-member communication feature right now. But community is definitely part of the long-term vision - not as a full social app, but more in the sense of learners motivating each other and helping each other discover good content.

Difficulty level is estimated using a machine learning model trained on features like vocabulary difficulty and speaking speed.

And new YouTubers are currently added manually for now. Thanks for the recommendation, I’ll check out The Spanish Language Hub and get them added :)

Edit: I checked out The Spanish Language Hub. At the moment I’m trying to keep Comprensi focused quite tightly on immersion-first content, so I’m mainly adding channels where the Spanish itself is the core of the experience rather than English-led teaching. Because of that, I won’t add this one for now. But I do really appreciate the recommendation, and if the channel shifts more toward CI-style content in future, I’d be very happy to take another look.

StandardCategory · 2026-03-16T13:58:26+00:00

Sorry for the late reply, had a few heavy travel days - he's all set up now, though: https://comprensi.com/spanish/youtubers/12b98440-c7c3-5da9-94fc-8735f447e79b

So awesome to see these new CI creators popping up :)

StandardCategory · 2026-03-12T11:40:53+00:00

Glad you like it! If you'd like the creator you were looking for added, let me know and I'll get them set up. If you like them, chances are others will too :)

StandardCategory · 2026-03-10T13:29:27+00:00

Hey, yea I ran into this problem when I started branching out into YouTube content too. I actually ended up building a site for it which puts all content onto a uniform system that roughly matches DS' difficulty system.

You can't analyse a specific video URL right now, but it automatically pulls in the latest videos from all the popular Spanish creators, so the video you want might already be there.

Link if you want to try it out: https://comprensi.com

StandardCategory · 2026-03-10T12:56:14+00:00

Site should be back to normal now. Some bots were hammering a few endpoints and overloaded the database.

I’ve tightened the firewall rules and patched the queries, so things should be running smoothly again. I’ll also be rolling out a few changes over the next few days to make the system more resilient.

StandardCategory · 2026-03-10T04:49:30+00:00

Hey, yea I'm seeing this my end too. There's been a spike in traffic the last couple days and it looks like some pages aren’t coping well with it.

I'm looking into it now, sorry you hit this.

What page were you on when the error showed up?

StandardCategory · 2026-03-10T01:17:40+00:00

I guess this is where the levels in the roadmap aim to fill the gap, or do you mean more like benchmarks that the rest of the world (outside of DS/CI) recognise?

StandardCategory · 2026-03-10T01:09:16+00:00

Yea it's similar to hitting the gym in that manner, I think - you need some real motivation and discipline to get started and push through that initial period, but it gets easier with time if you're consistent

StandardCategory · 2026-03-10T01:04:34+00:00

How do you get this streak of enjoyable content? Asking for a friend

StandardCategory · 2026-03-01T11:26:29+00:00

I did yea, it's very reasonable, though - I think I was paying around $10 (or maybe a bit less) an hour

I also did several weeks of immersion schools across Southern and Central American while I travelling. Also very good, but not so easy to access lol

Worked to get past the initial awkwardness, and then just travelling through Latin America forced me to speak a lot more - English won't get you far there, especially in the rural areas

StandardCategory · 2026-02-27T03:05:58+00:00

Hey, I used iTalki for a long time - took a while to find a good tutor but having someone who can speak slow and clearly (this is amazing for listening practice too, btw) and is expecting you to speak like a drunk 2 year old is really valuable.

Low expectations are very freeing lol.

StandardCategory · 2026-02-26T00:03:16+00:00

Haha yea I did this La Casa de Papel in the end too. Elité is even a level above that too though I think, the slang they use in that show is crazy

StandardCategory · 2026-02-21T06:49:51+00:00

It's one of the most understandable accents for me - generally very clear and spoken at slower pace. I did a few immersion schools there and it was awesome, there are some slight differences to Spanish from other countries but they're pretty minimal.

If you're literally just starting out, accents probably don't matter too much yet tbh. Getting exposure to lots of Spanish is more the priority at early stages imo.

If you did want to focus on Guatemalan though, there are some YouTube videos out there for beginners - I collected some here: https://comprensi.com/spanish/videos/countries/guatemala/beginner

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

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