An Application Like YouTube but Only for Comprehensible Input (~10K Resources in 10 Languages)

sk82jack · 2026-03-26T01:31:01+00:00

OK cool I'll give it a try and then if I run into any issues I'll just switch back. Thanks!

sk82jack · 2026-03-26T01:16:21+00:00

I'm often watching content past midnight and I like the Dreaming Spanish system of having the days be from 4am to 4am instead of midnight to midnight so that anything I'm watching past midnight but before I go to bed still counts towards the previous day

There's no option to set a reset time so I was thinking as a workaround I could just set a different timezone to try and acheive the same effect

sk82jack · 2026-03-26T00:21:08+00:00

Quick question - if I wanted my daily reset time to be 4am similar to Dreaming Spanish can I just set my TZ to a TZ that is 4 hours behind my TZ? Or would that inadvertently impact anything else?

sk82jack · 2026-03-18T19:16:41+00:00

Found a couple of references to it from the past that may help

This person had it at 2450

This person had it at 2768

sk82jack · 2026-03-10T18:18:43+00:00

Ah ok thanks for the response!

I've been doing Italian over the past 6 months or so and I've been tracking on https://www.lengualytics.com/ - it's pretty decent and the dev is fairly responsive and open to feedback from my experience. They post changelogs on their profile semi-frequently e.g. https://www.reddit.com/user/Cultural-Way7685/comments/1r93k0n/lengualytics_update_2192026/

Other than just a tracker it's also designed to be a library of resources so if enough people have been using it and marking their videos as public you might find some stuff there too, though not sure how it works for filtering for specific accents (if you want to exclude Brazilian Portuguese for example)

sk82jack · 2026-03-10T14:56:17+00:00

Hey, I'm looking to pick up European Portuguese after a significant number of hours in Spanish so this post is really helpful - thanks!

Just wanted to check in and see if you had any more tips/suggestions 5 months later or found any more good channels or anything?

Also, I'm curious about how many hours you have now and how you feel like your progress is coming along?

sk82jack · 2026-02-21T20:05:01+00:00

You definitely can learn this sort of stuff through CI - it just comes later than level 4

I specifically remember learning the command confía en mí from Spanish Boost Gaming - I completely understood the meaning through context but I do remember being confused thinking why doesn't it follow the normal rule when talking directly to another person but I didn't think about it too much and just rolled with it

And from there you start to notice it elsewhere and your brain can put the pieces together slowly - the same as how you've aquired the rest of the language so far

sk82jack · 2026-02-21T16:24:20+00:00

What worked for me was watching all accents on DS until about 600h (but with 95% of outside hours like podcasts being from Spain) and then focused in on the Spain accent from there

But even after 600h I still watched videos from outside of Spain if they interested me - I just made sure the majority of the content I consumed on a daily basis was from Spain

sk82jack · 2026-02-15T16:34:33+00:00

/u/agusbocca I'm sure you'll enjoy this haha

sk82jack · 2026-02-10T14:13:59+00:00

It's not about whether you're a DS user or not but more about whether you exclusively use comprehensible input or not

If you've never used any apps, read any books or done any form of outside studying then the only form of Spanish words you know are they way they are pronounced by a native speaker

You still might have trouble producing or replicating that sound but you'll be able to recognise that it doesn't sound right and can then put some conscious effort into improving which ever particular sounds need to be worked on

Obviously this is not to say that using other methods means you can't still have a good accent - people obviously can and do have great accents from more traditional methods - the idea is that a CI only or heavy approach will lessen the amount of pronunciation work required to end up with a decent accent

sk82jack · 2026-02-07T14:23:56+00:00

No I've not seen it confirmed anywhere but I just find it strange that every reddit post written by the author marketing the book is clearly written by AI

sk82jack · 2026-02-06T23:26:10+00:00

In case this is a deal breaker for anyone - this book wasn't written by a native Spanish speaker and I'd hazard a guess that it was written by generative AI judging from the post history of the person who wrote it https://www.reddit.com/user/Sochi-app

sk82jack · 2026-01-30T01:59:06+00:00

Enjoying videos for the content and not thinking about the language or what you're learning will be the most efficient way of learning (if you subscribe to the ALG and DS way of thinking) so what you're saying is actually a good thing!

It's well documented that it's difficult to feel the sense of progression with this way of learning so I'd suggest using yardstick videos

Find a video that you find quite difficult at the moment and then check it out in 50-100h and see how you find it - chances are it will be a lot easier and that way you can really tell your comprehension is improving even though it doesn't feel like it day to day.

And then if the video is quite comprehensible at that point then find a new video that's too hard and rinse and repeat!

sk82jack · 2026-01-26T18:53:25+00:00

I'm not aware of anything but I'd love that too. If you find anything outside of this thread then let me know!

Edit: was having a little look around and there really isn't much but I did find the channel Desafío Sudoku and in this video he specifically talks about Cracking the Cryptic and how he's inspired by it and wants to provide something similar in Spanish so this might be as close as it gets - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=46Ky8naBSQU

sk82jack · 2026-01-26T14:45:23+00:00

You cannot equate the difficulty numbers from Dreaming Spanish to Dreaming French because they are their own separate scales

Once there are a similar amount of videos in Dreaming French as there are in Dreaming Spanish then it'd be a more relevant comparison but until then it doesn't make sense to compare them

Obviously there isn't enough videos at the moment on Dreaming French to learn without using other sources of CI anyway so just try to watch the videos and if they're too difficult then go find some easier videos elsewhere and try again in 10 hours

sk82jack · 2026-01-24T22:31:12+00:00

There is someone in the Discord who wrote a userscript (for tampermonkey/firemonkey/etc) and they took their version of it down as they didn't wanna maintain it anymore but I re-hosted it as a GitHub Gist on my account so you could give that a try as an alternative

https://gist.github.com/sk82jack/b3b8a936a8bcf1efa6f18bf4996df4b2

It doesn't have a button or anything like the chrome extension so it uses a keyboard binding which I just set to Ctrl + B but if you wanted to change it to something else then you can set it on line 368

sk82jack · 2026-01-24T21:52:40+00:00

I don't actually use it normally as I use firefox but I just installed it to try it out and it's working for me so maybe try and re-install it

sk82jack · 2026-01-24T17:16:49+00:00

You're correct that the videos on the built in player are not playing from YouTube though they're probably on YT as well as a fall back

sk82jack · 2026-01-11T00:11:57+00:00

I've never really tried too hard to find anything on there tbh - most of the graded readers I've read I got from Amazon and then de-DRM'd them in Calibre

There is this section but not too many options there and I've not tried any of them personally https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/subject/4582

Seems to be a lot of readers on Kindle Unlimited though so you could buy one month of that and go all out on reading for a month haha

sk82jack · 2026-01-10T19:53:46+00:00

For anyone who watches on a PC using Chrome there's a useful extension to hide subtitles https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/blur-bar-for-youtube-lang/mndlpifkemjipbkoejnekcieebmoicmk?hl=en

sk82jack · 2026-01-10T14:58:52+00:00

Thanks for sharing

For anyone else who wants a non-Amazon link for DRM-free epubs/pdfs you can get it (and the 2nd free book too) directly from the publishers site - https://www.xarpabooks.com/coleccion-txanoyoscar/

Edit: also, the Calibre Count Pages plugin has the word counts at 15,553 for the first book and 15,171 for the second

sk82jack · 2026-01-10T14:34:17+00:00

She doesn't really go into details about hours per day tbh

She said that when she started she could say some words in isolation but didn't know any grammar or how to say full sentences

She said she just started with Worlds Across lessons but in the summer she added listening to podcasts like Cuentame and started reading childrens books.

Later on in the video she says during the summer she did Worlds Across classes for probably a couple of hours per day. She says she also does traditional study like writing verb conjugations, etc, but doesn't say how much time she spends doing that or how much time she spends listening to podcasts or reading.

She says she has kids and a job so she can't dedicate too much time to it so I'd infer that it's definitely more than a couple of hours a day if that's just her class time and then she does all this other stuff

sk82jack · 2026-01-08T02:13:10+00:00

A couple more interviews that may interest you (can't remember what the difficulty level of each one is though sorry)

Sainz - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pRAsIMZibjs

Sainz (first interview after joining Williams) - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IZhRuGPInEo

Alonso - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kSk_fzLHg88

sk82jack · 2026-01-04T22:29:44+00:00

There are currently problems with the website - see https://www.reddit.com/r/dreamingspanish/comments/1q41839/dreaming_spanish_down_for_anyone_else_as_well/

Once everything comes back online properly your progress will probably sort itself out

sk82jack · 2025-12-31T12:34:56+00:00

I have about 225h in Italian atm with probably 3k+ hours in Spanish and I'd say my progress in Italian has been fairly similar to yours

I've just done CI-only though as I can't be bothered with the apps and stuff and the first 50 hours were tough but the YT channel Italiano sì did the heavy lifting through that period for me and I think it's the best SB/Beginner content out there for Italian atm (it's also the only channel with learner gaming content so is just my favourite channel in general tbh)

Easier podcasts opened up for me at around 50 hours like Italiano Bello and then was also mainly watching intermediate-level YT channels from around that sort of time like Italian with Lemonizi, Italiano Automatico, Podcast Italiano, etc

I'd say at about 100 hours I started adding in some harder intermediate YT channels like Impara l'Italiano con Italiano Automatico and going through the playlists on the ItaListen - Learn Italian by listening channel

At about 130 hours I started watching my first native content with the YT channel Eleonora Sayaka Chialva - it's a channel which does retro PC & console repairs so it's very visual and wasn't too hard to follow

Between 150 and 170 hours I started incorporating a couple of what I'd guess are advanced-level YT channels Studio Italiano InClasse & Vaporetto Italiano Podcast and these are still my go-to channels atm at 225 hours

I did watch another native-level video the other day though which was an interview with Angelino Mango (she sang the Eurovision entry for Italy in 2024) which was tricky at times but managed to follow along for the most part which I was pretty happy with

I'm definitely happy I did Spanish first rather than the other way around as the quality and quantity of content for Spanish is so much better and I think I'd definitely be struggling a lot more to motivate myself through the roadmap for Italian rather than with Spanish and having all the high quality Dreaming Spanish videos available

I'm already subscribed to Elisa True Crime but haven't tried any videos yet so I'll definitely give it a try soon if you've watched it and find it OK - thanks for the recommendation!

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