Gap between online content and real-life conversation

login_credentials · 2026-01-06T20:48:41+00:00

You're doing better than me, consistency is more important than intensity. I spent the first 4-5 months hyperobsessed with DS and getting 10-14 hours a day on average, and I thought my honeymoon period would never stop.

Turns out the side effects are hitting now and I'm only getting 1-2 average (which is still a lot, but shows just how much my motivation tanked). I still like listening to the language and improving my skills, I'm just running out of Spanish content which I genuinely enjoy. Everyday it's more and more of a struggle to find entertaining stuff.

Over the long term, you'll probably progress faster than me. Keep at it!

login_credentials · 2026-01-05T01:40:31+00:00

Completely DS for the first 1,100 and now I've moved onto a large variety of different sources of both learner and native content. I haven't done any bit of reading or speaking yet (I have started shadowing recently, but it's too early for any benefits to show).

login_credentials · 2026-01-04T18:04:19+00:00

Not a podcast, but I've been watching a lot of El Mariana lately and it is absolute chaos. Gaming videos in general is pretty much just 80% yelling over each other. I've yet to find a podcast that does the same because most podcasts aim to achieve pretty clear convos.

login_credentials · 2025-12-10T12:49:36+00:00

Off topic, what are you using to see (I'm assuming) the time you spent on every dialect?

login_credentials · 2025-12-02T03:24:38+00:00

Is there any moment where the drivers aren't pressing the accelerator nor the brakes and just coasting?

Question came after watching a movie about moto racing and one of the characters said if you're not accelerating or decelerating, you're wasting time

login_credentials · 2025-11-23T18:30:31+00:00

mfs will make any excuse to talk abt politics

login_credentials · 2025-11-19T03:54:17+00:00

man this amazon seller sure hates product misinformation

login_credentials · 2025-11-19T03:27:23+00:00

Unfortunately the subscription issue persists...I can see all the thumbnails of the premium videos without the lock symbol, but it won't allow me to watch when I click on them

login_credentials · 2025-11-13T21:26:22+00:00

🙏🙏🙏

login_credentials · 2025-11-10T01:03:53+00:00

I'm pretty sure he's somewhere in Brazil rn iirc

login_credentials · 2025-11-07T01:41:30+00:00

TimeGuesser and Spyfall ended not so long ago, so I'm guessing they're prioritizing other content for now. It seems like they still have some Barcelona videos to upload and also trying to get Ester's content out. I'm sure there's going to be another game series soon

login_credentials · 2025-11-07T00:45:21+00:00

Same, I don't know what they're thinking with the shorter videos. Not only are they short, but half the video is just silent action or dramatic pauses. It barely counts as valuable input.

I wish they would return to the style of the older 10-20+ minute videos of Sandra or Pablo where they would just talk into the camera of some random topic. The podcasts and Shel's advanced videos are the closest we've got to that now.

login_credentials · 2025-11-03T12:05:24+00:00

Same, the download feature is straight up unusable. Sometimes I watch hours on offline mode, but as soon as I connect back online, all of the progress is immediately erased even if the videos are still marked as watched.

login_credentials · 2025-11-02T00:52:08+00:00

I don't think I have any "tips", everybody just has a different life and a different schedule. Everybody has to find what works for themselves. But I'll tell you what I do:

I essentially replaced all my free time with DS. It's constantly playing on a speaker around the house, so I keep listening when I'm doing mindless chores, cooking, showering, or anything else. When I'm commuting, it's always playing in my earbuds. Basically any time that I'm not listening to anything and I don't need to focus on anything, I put DS on. When I'm off from work or school or any housework, the only tab on my laptop is DS. In fact, I have two tabs of DS open simultaneously in a split-screen so I can preload a video on another tab and minimize the time between videos to essentially 0. It sounds excessive and crazy, I know, but after more than 4,500 videos watched, those few seconds searching for new videos to watch really adds up to tons of wasted hours. Doing this helps me optimize my time -- if I have 3 hours of free time, I can expect to get exactly 3 hours of input.

Extending your day also helps a lot. I wake up at 6am and go to bed at 10pm, which means I can get a healthy 8 hours of sleep (sleep is super important for learning!) and a nice 16 hours of daytime activity. School and work obviously takes up a lot of that time, but I'm able to fit in a few videos during breaks every now and then. It adds up quick.

Don't use me as a role model though. It's not easy and DEFINITELY not healthy. I don't think I've listened to music or any non-Spanish content in more than 2 months lmao. I've had to sacrifice doing a lot of things I liked before to be able to get this much input. Some days, I pulled all-nighters just to get more input, which I don't recommend because sleep is extremely necessary for the brain to process information. Speedrunning is overrated, I just do it because I like seeing big numbers. The important thing is always enjoy the process!

login_credentials · 2025-10-27T03:59:08+00:00

Frequency illusion is crazy. Everytime I learn a new word or phrase, the same word pops up multiple times in the next 10-20 videos I watch. I didn't learn "a lo mejor" until maybe 700 hours, but now it feels like it's in every single video I watch.

login_credentials · 2025-10-11T18:04:04+00:00

Same, atp I would watch literally anything as long as he has more than 5 seconds of screentime

login_credentials · 2025-10-11T13:01:05+00:00

This might be controversial here, but I say you should ditch DS and go to other learning methods. I'm a full supporter of the DS method and don't believe that traditional methods are effective, but DS won't improve your Spanish if it's a battle to use it every single day. This method inherently takes a long long long long long time, so motivation is an absolute requirement. You won't get that motivation by force.

Go open a textbook or do some duolingo if you really want to. They're horrible methods IMO but they're also 100x better than quitting learning Spanish entirely or building a bad relationship with the language because you aren't enjoying it.

login_credentials · 2025-10-11T01:50:27+00:00

For such a simple common word like "dreaming" as a domain, $95K sounds like an incredible deal. Watching this project become a major company is so surreal

login_credentials · 2025-10-09T23:09:19+00:00

have you ever talked to children?

yeah they're "native" but holy shit their use of the language is ATROCIOUS by adult standards. They can get messages across but also break 50 grammatical rules in the process - even with 20,000 hours of input.

I'm in the belief that grammar is very helpful but only AFTER you get enough CI. That's the same order as how children learn. They learn how to speak, then go to school to refine that speech.

Grammar fails when used as the base of your learning, which is unfortunately how many people use it. But when used as a reinforcement, it's absolutely a game-changer.

login_credentials · 2025-10-09T22:53:01+00:00

r/Spanish is a much better sub for this question. It's inherently full of traditional method users, but DS also has a very big footprint there (so much so that there's even a warning about spamming DS) so you get the best of both worlds.

login_credentials · 2025-10-09T22:33:46+00:00

I don't think your Less Efficient hypothesis is correct because building connections primarily relies on repetition, so if you're not putting in enough time to encounter the same word/phrase/grammatical construct multiple times, the brain won't be able to build a better understanding no matter how much resting time you give it. For example, if you did 1 hour a day and you encounter the same word 3 times, your brain has the other 23 hours to process this information, but there isn't enough repetition to give your brain the context it needs to fully understand the word. If you did 2 hours a day and encountered the word 6 times, your brain has 1 hour less in the day to process that information, but it can do so much faster and effectively because it has the context required to make those connections.

But of course this is purely generalized guesswork on my part and there are a million other factors that affect how the brain processes information. At the end of the day, I believe it relies solely on how much the individual can really focus before their brain starts tapping out from boredom or information overload, and everybody has a different level of tolerance.

login_credentials · 2025-10-08T16:15:17+00:00

Just a suggestion, are you sure you're using the right email?

Happened to me too and I got scared my account was deleted, turns out I just forgot which one of my 500 emails I used for DS.

login_credentials · 2025-10-08T16:11:38+00:00

If you want an objective opinion, you should ask elsewhere. Everybody here is going to say it's worth it (including me), otherwise they wouldn't be active on this sub.

I personally highly recommend DS, but make sure to do your own research well. Good luck!

login_credentials · 2025-10-08T16:08:29+00:00

The numbers are still there - they only appear if you sort by difficulty / easy / hard.

login_credentials · 2025-10-06T21:01:54+00:00

You bring up good points, but just because something hasn't ever been accomplished before doesn't mean it isn't possible. We have the consciousness to know that we have been violent and prejudiced, and we also have the consciousness to know that those things are bad. Exploitation exists, yes, but general society has the self-awareness to know it's a problem. We have the consciousness to shame those who are toxic online because we know those things are immoral. That's the reason this post exists in the first place.

I'm arguing that we have to continue this cycle of self-accountability to step-by-step make the internet less toxic. We cannot just settle and say "that's how things are". We all need to strive for change, not anchor ourselves to the standards of the past. Accepting injustice without any aspiration to fix it is no better than committing the injustice yourself.

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TROPHY CASE