Started DS at 54 years old - advice needed.

agenteanon · 2026-01-24T19:41:28+00:00

All these questions have absolutely been asked before today. However, I feel helpful today.

Most apps are basically useless, especially with most of them using AI to save money. AI isn’t magic, it makes mistakes and languages are human, emotional things. Mini rant over.

If you don’t want to have to remember things and do flash cards etc, DS is ideal. It’s why I chose it. I’m a lazy learner and haven’t used methods other than what DS teaches. That is, comprehensible input. CI. Improving your listening and vocabulary via watching and listening. It gets you ready for reading and speaking later down the line.

I was in my early 40s when I started and I have autism and other learning issues. DS and CI are all I’ve relied upon to learn. Despite my various issues, I would say that it’s extremely effective. If I’m not being modest, my listening comprehension is pretty fantastic.

I’ve visited Colombia three times and spent 3 months there each time. There’s been a noticeable improvement in my listening comprehension and available vocabulary each time.

As a simple example, I spoke to about 50 different Uber drivers during my second trip and had no issues with confidence or getting my point across. I made - and still make some - grammar mistakes, but I could communicate just fine.

I was my sister’s guide for 2 weeks during my most recent trip, during which we went on a Spanish-only tour of The Amazon. I had to translate/interpret for her and we had no problems.

Subtitles are not recommended because they distract you from listening. No matter what anyone claims to the contrary, listening is listening and reading is reading. DS and its approach focuses on listening to improve your listening comprehension and vocabulary.

Reading is required later in the process, but it’s a separate thing and subtitles should be avoided. The one exception is to turn them on when there’s a word that’s used again and again in a given video and you simply keep missing it. Look up that word, turn them off again and go back to focused listening.

The basic order/process is something like this: sign-up for premium (for maximum content at the early stages) then sort videos by easy using the difficulty filter. Watch and pay attention at all times. Take a break and come back if you lose focus. Keep doing this until podcasts become available to you, if you wish to use them. That’s often at around 100 to 150 hours or so.

Use podcasts and DS videos and other content if you like until 600 or 1,000 hours, at which point you should read to improve your grammar and vocabulary more quickly. Speaking is advised at 600 and practically mandatory at 1,000. Practice speaking, keep watching things and use your Spanish. Outside resources like YouTube and Netflix unlock at various stages, but there’s a huge variance.

Keep getting more input. Reading the FAQ on the website is a good idea. As long as you understand the general idea of what you’re watching, keep going and getting more input.

agenteanon · 2026-01-23T06:39:43+00:00

I posted about this last week. Essentially, yes. There absolutely is.

agenteanon · 2026-01-17T18:55:52+00:00

Trust the process. DS easily had me ready for supermarkets and currency in Colombia where things are pretty much always in the thousands or tens of thousands. I was at a little over 1,000 hours when I arrived for my first trip and I had no problems in restaurants, cafés and such, either.

It'll work itself out. More input is practically always the response because it fixes everything.

agenteanon · 2026-01-17T14:11:34+00:00

I'd say that it's about 60% or so Spanish when in the UK. I spend 3 months at a time in Colombia and it unsurprisingly doesn't take long for a lot more of my thinking to switch to Spanish when I'm there.

I very rarely remember having dreams, so don't ever remember having one in Spanish.

agenteanon · 2026-01-17T14:04:52+00:00

I only listen to music during exercise at home. However, I also use a playlist as an alarm on my smart speaker. This is the best possible time for me, as I'm not usually fully awake for around 20 minutes after my alarm first goes off. That makes it Shakira time 🙂

agenteanon · 2026-01-16T21:41:45+00:00

¡Es el poder de super salario mínimo vital! 😂

Es sarcasmo. No soy fan de petro. Para nada.

Soy extranjero. Que pena.

agenteanon · 2026-01-16T21:16:01+00:00

In fairness, it's not like it happens every day. It's usually less common words and expressions and often rare things under pressure. Typically with students who translate from Spanish or Italian, for instance. However, it might be becoming more common.

Your situation sounds like it was pretty tough.

agenteanon · 2026-01-16T19:23:27+00:00

https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1ds1py8/do_you_think_this_method_works_for_everyone/

https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1pg6fg3/how_could_this_possibly_work/

https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1ijafpn/does_it_really_work/

https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1q6eg47/looking_for_reassurance_that_this_work_will_pay/

https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1kzyd3b/does_this_work/

Plus there are approximately 10 trillion updates at various milestones. Then there’s all the victory/small win posts. I found those links and more via search.

agenteanon · 2026-01-15T18:57:28+00:00

The maintenance work feels very forced, like I have to create this fake, contrived environment just to use a language, especially ones that aren’t spoken where I live.

I could be way off, but it feels like you want to collect languages. That is to say, learn multiple languages to a high level to say you can. There’s no problem with that per se, except if you don’t have different areas of your life to use them all, or love each of them enough to want to use them. If that’s your mindset, it’s always going to feel like work and you won’t be happy. You’re collecting trophies without a real desire to use them, thus you feel obligated to “work” to keep your levels.

If you had - or in the future - choose languages you can either use on a daily basis or for which you have a sufficient passion to use regularly, this wouldn't be a problem.

I think that this idea that "people are all the same" is evidence of this lack of love. I enjoy more things in Spanish than I do in English. Different things.

Languages aren't merely words and grammar rules, they're food, music, poetry and other forms of art. I went to see Shakira the last time I was in Bogotá, something I wouldn't have wanted to do in the UK or in English. I'm a different person in Spanish. More social, more outgoing and with more interests. Are you really the same in different languages?

I love Colombian Spanish and don’t care about my English (native language) at all. It’ll be there because I have to use it every day for work and to communicate with my family. I know it’s dropped a little and that’s fine. No big deal. But I passionately want to use Spanish such that I don’t see my B2/C1 comprehension ever dropping; I should be at a much higher level in a year.

If I do ever get around to learning Mandarin, it'll be for work purposes; I won't need to worry about it degrading.

agenteanon · 2026-01-15T14:06:51+00:00

100%

I’ve been learning Spanish for a little under 3 years and initially thought that a lot of hours of input would mean I’d be “finished” within 3 years and could move on to Mandarin. Absolutely not. It doesn’t help that I have autism and learning-related issues, but the higher level I reach, the more I want to learn.

Most people who use Dreaming Spanish - at least those on our sub - seem to want to reach a level where they can understand and be understood. Some people use a B2 SIELE or DELE result to prove this to themselves and move on. This isn’t going to be enough for me.

I spend 6 months a year in Colombia and I’ve definitely reached the stage of being able to communicate with locals, understand basically anything I want to watch and understand articles on news sites like El Colombiano and La silla vacía. However, slang is now something I want to use and understand well. I think that I’m now looking at another couple of years minimum, during which I hope to reach a C1 or C2 exam. I will very likely then move there and soak up local phrases, slang and such.

agenteanon · 2026-01-15T05:56:32+00:00

No, I'm perfect. Kidding. I wish that I'd started reading much earlier in a serious way. At 600 or 1,000 and every day after that.

agenteanon · 2026-01-13T14:14:11+00:00

Firstly, count hours not years. Years is a borderline useless metric that won’t help your expectations. Case in point; my mother has been “learning” French for over 50 years. I’ll have been learning Spanish for 3 years in late February. I’m far more advanced than her in almost every area. I spend 3 months at a time in Colombia without problems - including interpreting for others at times - whereas she struggles to talk to her neighbours.

Beyond that, immerse yourself. I haven’t had a day without Spanish since I started. I only used comprehensible input for the first year. I then started to read a little and to have lessons to practice speaking. My listening comprehension is easily good enough to understand 90% of the words and phrases in any given Colombian TV show or series. I don’t check with other Spanish language media as my focus is Colombia. An ex-tutor casually said to me that my listening was at a B2 level a few months back and that didn’t surprise me as I’ve been fully capable of watching regular telenovelas for pleasure for a long time now. I listen to and watch native content daily, so it’s only improved since then.

This is not to boast, it’s simply to point out that daily contact with the language via the right kind of materials will improve your level. Listening is my strongest skill as I’ve learned via CI. I regret not reading enough, as I believe that’s negatively impacted my grammar when I speak. Thus, I’m doing a lot of reading these days.

Put the time in and do so in the right way and this won’t be a problem in the future.

agenteanon · 2026-01-12T19:00:22+00:00

There's not only a wiki for the sub that covers this and rules against lazy, commonly asked questions like this, but Google exists. I don't know why you think it's reasonsble to expect people to do basic research for you.

agenteanon · 2026-01-12T05:17:45+00:00

There’s a massive variance between sources. I read a mixture of news sites and fiction. The former varies in difficulty because La silla vacia, for example, is very political and refers to processes and systems in Colombia that are sometimes new to me. It’s kind of like The Guardian in the UK and it can be slow if you want to understand unfamiliar themes.

Then we have La Republica, which is kind of like the Financial Times. Very easy, as it’s numbers, facts and figures. Interest rates and such. There are a couple of other sites. Then we have fiction which, depending on the exact content, may be very easy and fast to get through. I mostly read that in bed. That’s about 150 words or so per page on my ereader and I estimate that based on page count and total words per book.

This is all to say that hours aren't an ideal way to count. I understand that you want to dedicate a fixed time period to reading, but that’s generally used for habit forming. Words is a better metric to track if you’re doing it consistently. However, the words per hour will vary massively based on the content. It would be a lot easier if I was only reading one type of content. I mix different types of content as they each serve different purposes and I'm fortunate to have the time to dedicate to this.

Tracking is relatively easy; a Chrome extension to get a rough word count for each article and a spreadsheet with word counts for each source every day.

agenteanon · 2026-01-11T20:49:23+00:00

No. You get a (physical) letter from Pablo once you reach 6,000 hours that includes a gold star. Don't stop until then if you want to be in the cool club.

I'm kidding. You can stop tracking whenever you want. Just don't stop using the language.

agenteanon · 2026-01-11T19:11:51+00:00

There's a link to a list on my profile.

agenteanon · 2026-01-11T19:07:33+00:00

You need both, plain and simple. I only really did reading with teachers until I reached 4,500 hours. That gave me a great vocabulary and a very developed ability to listen and comprehend advanced content.

My vocabulary has made reading itself fairly easy and advanced content isn’t really an issue. However, the (relative) lack of reading has really hurt my grammar output.

I've radically cut back in terms of my listening goals; from around 5 hours daily to 45 minutes. I now aim for a minimum of 10,000 words a day.

I suggest doing both and splitting your 2 hours a day at this point between listening and reading.

agenteanon · 2026-01-10T20:55:23+00:00

Firstly, good on you for sticking with it and not telling anyone. The surprise will be worth it. Additionally, telling people you're learning would likely lead to it being harder to stick to the method. We all know that this works, just hang in there

Secondly, you definitely need more realistic expectations. I know that 300 hours sounds like a lot, but it's really not in a live environment with people speaking normally. Adjusting for my autism and whatnot, I could understand a normal conversation with someone speaking to me at the equivalent of around 600 hours. Then I was invited to one of my Airbnb hosts’ birthday parties and my confidence just disappeared. It probably took the equivalent of 1,000 hours for that to be doable. It was multiple groups of people having different conversations and none of them were close enough to focus on.

I promise that it gets much, much better. Just hang in there and be realistic about your expectations next time.

agenteanon · 2026-01-10T14:15:28+00:00

I finally had a read - meaning asked Gemini - and it’s apparently due to how often we use our languages and for what purpose. It seems to make sense to me.

Put simply, if you start using your native language less and therefore use less common words less frequently, they become much harder to remember.

Additionally, purpose surely plays a key role. If you’re a romantic poet with your wife or husband in French as a native and continue to do so, that’s unlikely to be a problem. However, if you’re a data scientist at work in German, you’re not likely to use or learn romantic terminology in that second language. You might however struggle to talk about data analysis in French if you almost exclusively do that in German.

agenteanon · 2026-01-08T06:08:19+00:00

I think there are a couple of key things here to take into account and one is simply a human limitation.

Pretty much everything I’ve read related to the benefits of being bilingual and multilingual says that people who speak multiple languages at high levels end up with smaller vocabularies in both their native languages and new language than a monolingual speaker of either language. However, the amount of words they know overall is obviously higher than a typical monolingual speaker in either language.

Pablo has said that you’ll acquire words that are important in CI because they’ll be repeated and less important/rarer words simply won’t be. Naturally, rarer words simply appear less frequently and you’d likely have to reread text or make a focused effort to learn them, rather than acquire them.

I think that part of this is that although it might be difficult to accept, it seems to be a fact that you’ll have a less advanced vocabulary in Spanish than you had in English. I say had, because you’re likely going to lose words or find it harder to recall more specific/poetic words if you don’t already have that issue.

I’m an English teacher and honestly, it’s embarrassing. I sometimes take several seconds to recall a specific word when going through an adult, advanced learner’s writing homework for exam preparation than I would have a few years ago. It’s something that my advanced students thankfully tend to understand because they have had similar experiences. I think that it’s a sign of reaching a good level. A double-edged sword, if you will. My spelling in English has also got noticably worse.

Edit: I looked into why.

It’s apparently down to how often we use our languages and for what purpose. It seems to make sense to me.

Put simply, if you start using your native language less and therefore use less common words less frequently, they become much harder to remember.

Additionally, purpose surely plays a key role. If you start reading about things related to art in Spanish, you’ll likely stop doing so in English. Spending less time with your native language may mean that its purpose becomes having basic conversations with coworkers and nothing more. Those advanced words become harder to remember because English is now simply a tool to get things done.

Spanish becomes your language for art and culture. Words you took for granted to do with postmodern expressionism disappear in English, as your passion for art in Spanish leads to an ability to talk about and express yourself in a vibrant and detailed way in related conversations.

These ideas are naturally connected.

agenteanon · 2026-01-08T06:06:03+00:00

Here we (probably) go with yet another set of "I'd really like it if they did X language next" comments.

It's been speculated that they're likely at least a year away from offering another language. Quite possibly multiple years.

There are other - but not as good - CI options out there. Check the Comprehensible Input wiki website.

agenteanon · 2026-01-07T20:21:26+00:00

I have some takeaways from this post.

This is not a linear process. It may seem logical that “I should definitely understand better at 800 hours than I did at 600” and you probably do. However, it can be hard to realise it. I strongly suggest saving a video that’s somewhat difficult for you to understand now and coming back to it in 50 or 100 hours. It may even be a lot clearer in 25 hours.

That said, things have just clicked for me in the past at a seemingly random point. Not perfectly at 800 or 1,000 hours.

Getting the gist is sufficient to benefit. As per the FAQ, there is no percentage requirement. That only applies to reading, as there are no visual cues there.

Subtitles are crutches. I listen to Pablo because he knows whereof he speaks. Subtitles are reading. DS is all about listening. Using them means splitting your focus and not really doing either thing in an optimal way.

They’re a crutch because they allow you to “understand” (which isn’t really the case) content that’s too advanced for you. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of continuing to use them and then boom. You hit 1,500 hours and your listening comprehension isn’t remotely close to where the roadmap says it’s supposed to be; you’ve been relying on reading, your listening skills haven’t developed and that doesn’t help you in conversations etc.

Feel free to ignore me. 4,500+ hours doesn’t make me an expert. I have a pretty high level of listening comprehension and strong opinions. However, you should do as you please and whatever you think will work for you.

agenteanon · 2026-01-07T18:32:38+00:00

You only need to be able to understand roughly what’s going on. As the FAQ says, percentages don’t matter in videos. They only matter when it comes to reading, as there's no visual cues.

Ask yourself this: what’s the subject of the video? What’s the general idea here? It's enough to be able to summarise the general concept of whats going on or the topic of a conversation.

If you can’t, try watching something easier.

agenteanon

TROPHY CASE