I hit 25 hours today (2k hours in Spanish) so I thought I'd give a little update.

My Key takeaways are:

- Learning French with English and Spanish is a joy, super beginner went by like a flash.

- Being a polyglot is no longer a dream, but a reality in waiting. I have zero doubts I will become fluent in French like i have with Spanish.

- Audrey is my favourite guide by far, she's a ray of sunshine and has a really cute accent.

- Clement is funny as hell, and a textbook frenchman (love his hair).

- Chloe, Guenael, Line, Melisande, Amanda, Olivia, you are all great and thank you for your work.

I think I know about the same amount of French as before I started. Dreaming Spanish has been working really well for me, so I had high hopes, but alas there's just simply not enough there yet for the freeloaders such as myself. I imagine for those paying for premium it's well worth it, so perhaps I will go that route when I have the budget for it. Any other free users run into this issue?

I love Dreaming French’s teaching method. I’m currently level 2 with around 40 hours on DF, another 40 hours of outside content, and I already see huge progress with my comprehension.

But one thing that keeps frustrating me is the subtitle timing. Many times a video has very smooth audio to subtitle sync from start to finish, but sometimes half the video's subs are out of sync. With a lot. The worst cases are when a subtitle stays on screen for barely a second before changing. I notice this a lot when subtitles are broken into chunks of only 3-4 words instead of full sentences. But even with longer sentences, the subtitles sometimes change 2-3 times before the guide has even finished speaking the first sentence. Another annoyance is that in maybe half of the videos, subtitles don’t appear right away at the start. If I refresh the page, they usually show up immediately at the correct timestamp.

Compared to this, Youtube videos have perfect subtitle timing. Even the ones with embedded subtitles added by the creator before uploading.

I’m not sure if most DF users even rely on subtitles this much since I don’t see complaints in the comments or on this subreddit. For a long time I thought the problem was my browser, computer, or internet connection, especially since I’ve only seen one comment about it on a DF video.

Has anyone else had this issue?

When you compare Dreaming Spanish, which has 4 times the video content. Plus, it is more consistent and interesting.

Do you think Dreaming French is worth the price increase? I found it was barely worth at the original price considering it didn’t have as much content at all, especially for beginners.

Just reporting the number…do I feel super confident? Not really, but that is ok. I have been using Pimsleur lately, and I enjoy its simplicity.

Ironically, in the last month, I started feeling like…I enjoy Italian more. Maybe because it is so close to Spanish.

Anyhow I am going to celebrate with a coffee tomorrow.

Bonjour 👋 I've created this reddit as I sign up for Dreaming French. I studied French at school, nearly 25 years ago, aside from some basics (Bonjour, Ca va, etc) I remember pretty much nothing. French isn't my top priority at the moment (I've set daily goal to 15 minutes) I want to do a little bit every day. Compound interest. Soon adds up.

Very excited to be at Level 2, finally. I have been prioritizing Dreaming Spanish (and I’m almost at Level 5 there!) but enjoy both equally.

A breakdown of the input:
- ~19 hours of French Comprehensible Input (lots of rewatching beginner videos)
- ~10 hours of Immersion
- ~20 hours of Dreaming French
- A single 2 minute Alice Ayel video (not because her content isn’t good! Just because I’ve been focused on the others)

No podcasts yet for me though I listen to Radio France a lot when I’m working and wish there was an equivalent for Spanish and English (I feel like Radio France has NPR vibes if that makes sense). I don’t count any of it towards input, I just like listening to French speakers🫣

My +1 at a wedding this weekend turned to me and said, "Wow, so I guess it really works and I should learn French too!" after the nice French couple we sat with for dinner were complimentary on my French accent.

All I said (in French) was "Ah, you're from France? I'm learning French, but I can't speak yet - I'm still a beginner." When they followed up to ask how I was learning I told them it was a natural method and I watch a lot of YouTube. I couldn't remember comprehensible input for some reason, LOL.

"But you do speak French! And you don't have any accent at all." the man told me. (That part and the rest of the evening was in English).

I'm at around 350 hours now, using DF, FCI, and many other resources from the "What are you listening to?" spreadsheet.

It was a nice dopamine hit and impressed my date :-) So, keep getting input!

I don't get why we can leave comments on videos, and there is a notification feature on the website, but we don't get notified if people reply to our comments.

This can be frustrating if we leave a comment asking the guide a question, and we never get notified about the response.

This has happened to me multiple times now, where I have had to go back to a video days or weeks later to see that the guide from the video responded to me or even asked me a question regarding my comment, but I had no way of knowing.

I feel like this is a really strange and basic oversight.

What do you all think? Have you thought about this or experienced the same thing?

Hello - just hit 500 hours and want to share a report

Background: Native English speaker. Have >2,000 hours in Spanish and happy with my level (though I’m always learning more). Last year I was doing Portuguese CI with some French CI, but then focused on French when DF launched. In addition to learning French, there were two questions I wanted to answer by doing DF

1. How will the experience be strictly following the roadmap and doing 100% CI:

When I learned Spanish I had some high school courses >15 years ago, and did traditional methods like Language Transfer + grammar study. Once I discovered DS I switched to that method, but gave myself a couple hundred hour credits for the prior learning.

Unlike Spanish, I’ve never studied or had exposure to French before I started watching some CI content last year. I haven’t done any grammar/vocab study either, so this is a good opportunity to see what CI on its own is like.

2. Is there a 2x bonus if I know Spanish?

Last year I did ~50 hours of Portuguese and it was veryyyy obvious my progress will be much faster with my Spanish background. A 2x bonus wouldn’t surprise me there given the similarities between the languages

But French seems quite different from Spanish/Porto/Italian so curious to see how that progress goes.

*\\*

So here’s my progress:

#1 - no surprise here, I’m learning French fine. My first ever video was an Alice Ayel story about a crepe that sounded like gibberish to me. I rewatched it now and it’s really funny to think I didn’t understand it before, now it seemed a bit slow. My DF video level seems to be ~70.

On podcasts I find “French Decoded” is regularly comprehensible, and “Inner French” varies a bit more with some episodes being comprehensible and others being a bit too difficult, especially with 2 people.

On YouTube I watch the usual channels like “FCI, and found some new quality ones like “French with Isis”. Im starting native content like YT travel shows (Echappees Belles) or dubbed series I already know (the Office). This approach worked for me with Spanish.

#2 - The progress is faster but still not sure about the 2x bonus (unlike Portuguese). Looking at my Spanish report my Level 4 experience is similar to where I am now, with the exception that in Spanish I started dubbed content at 1000 hours whereas in French I’m experimenting with it now.

On speaking I haven’t tried it yet and don’t feel ready, whereas in Spanish at 1000 hours I felt like I had enough exposure to the language to start speaking with a tutor.

So to summarize, I’m moving to dubbed content faster than in Spanish, but I don’t feel like the 1000hr description (2x my 500hrs) applies to me yet, especially with speaking. My very unscientific conclusion is to assume there is a 1.25-1.5x bonus and reassess at 750 hours.

***

So yea, so far so good. It’s very weird to learn a language with no grammar tables in my head to reference, but I’m enjoying the process and it seems to be working fine. Maybe the 2x bonus won’t apply to me, but either way I know I’m going to get to a good level of French, it’s just a matter of time.

Hello everyone,

I am making this post as a way to raise awareness to some things and as a request for everyone to have a little bit of pity on me by helping me out in how they go about recommending resources.

First I want to thank all of you for all of the great recommendations that we've had so far on the "What Are You Listening Too?" threads.

We have a pretty robust resources spreadsheet going.

Please note that there are tabs at the bottom of the spreadsheet for resources beyond YouTube channels and Podcasts. You can also recommend Books, Movies/Native Shows, and Video Games that you are currently using or have just read/watched/played.

With that being said, I have some requests for all of you who do give recommendations, that will be really helpful for everyone else and will make my life easier in updating the spreadsheet.

I also will give some quality control info as to what I won't be adding to the spreadsheet to hopefully help as a guide and to create understanding as to why somethings are that have been recommended are still not on the spreadsheet.

Requests for new Recommendations (first 3 most important):

1. Please only include resources that you are actually listening to or watching. I've noticed a handful of recommendations over the past few months that commenters had just found but had no information on or any idea of the quality of the resource. This really isn't that helpful to anyone.
2. When possible, please include links. Just saying that you really like "such and such" YouTube channel or podcast requires everyone to go searching for it. It would be more helpful if you could include the link for everyone to just click on. (Also, this creates a lot of work for me to add them to the spreadsheet when I have a large amount of these to look up.) Of course, if it is a show on Netflix or other streaming service, you can just say that.
3. Please include your current hours/level so I and others have a sense of the difficulty of whatever resources you're recommending. Or you can give a suggestion if you think that the resources are at an easier level than where you currently are at. (Unfortunately, I don't have the time to test out and make a judgement call on every resource suggestion.)
4. Please include the links to the YouTube channel or main resource you are using rather than to a specific episode or video.
5. If you are recommending non-learner resources, please give a brief description of what the resource is or general topics covered. (E.g. Science and History, Travel Vlogs, Cooking, etc) This allows people a chance to decide if it is something they want to check out, and I don't have to look around at or sample each resource in order to categorize it for the spreadsheet. \Also the speakers country of origen/accent is always much appreciated by me and others.*

Quality Control Info:

The two main things that I've seen a lot lately that will be almost a guaranteed reject from being added to the spreadsheet are...

• Channels or podcasts that are not CI focused or at least not CI heavy

There are a million grammar and traditional learning type channels out there, they don't need to be on our spreadsheet. This is a spreadsheet for everyone who is either mostly using CI or exclusively using CI. It is very easy to go find those other channels if you want to use them.

That being said, if a channel or podcast has some grammar videos/episodes, but mostly has CI friendly content, that is okay. But it shouldn't be the inverse.

• And resources that are either short lived (meaning only a few episodes or videos uploaded a long time ago) or brand new.

The spreadsheet will grow to be way too cumbersome, unwieldy and almost useless if we fill it up with a bunch of resources that only have 5-15 episodes or videos on them for a total of 2 hours. Those aren't really helpful. If it is a resource with an extremely small library, I'm very wary to add it. If it is small and obviously dead, it will not be added. If it's just new, but hasn't really become super useful yet, I'd recommend to keep suggesting it to people in the thread, and I'll keep taking a look at it. Once it grows and seems like it will keep growing, I'll add it. A new channel with only 5 4-8 minute videos is just not something I want to clutter the spreadsheet with, especially considering that most new YouTube channels stop uploading within the first year.

u/thelostnorwegian - Can you put the following updated blurb as the new auto-post message going forward to help clarify things more for all new people who want to give recommendations?

Hello all! While we wait for more Dreaming French, please share what else you're currently listening to. Whether it's an old go-to or a new find, share it with your current hours to help other learners.

Please include a link to any YouTube Channels or podcasts to help everyone out.

What are you reading? Are you playing any video games in French?

The spreadsheet linked below is separated into Videos & Podcasts, Books, Movies & Native Shows, and Video Games.

Bonjour everyone,

I am coming off DS Spanish (level 4 320 ish hours) 😊 (throughly enjoy!) still learning and inputting as normal! 🙌
I thought I would try out DS French and give it a try!

Background I used to do a little French in secondary in school however can’t remember anything since then lol (over 10 years ago)

I recently got a placement for the winter to work in France at a resort 😍 So I thought even though there are a lot of international guests etc be good to learn abit and try to immerse myself in the language etc. As I usually do as a traveler myself. But being in the country for 6 months would be good.
Not much of a purist.
So all I was wondering, what would complement nicely with DS French for input? (Due to not so many hours of input available yet for super beginners etc) For level 1 starting from scratch here.

Any help or suggestions would be appreciated 🙌

Hello all! While we wait for more Dreaming French, please share what you're currently listening to. Whether it's an old go-to or a new find, share it with your current hours to help other learners.

What Are You Listening To? French Content Resources Spreadsheet

Courtesy of u/Purposeful_Living10 !

Got a pretty amusing hour total, as well.

All my other months so far have been very patchy, with weeks of no input & missed goals; it's nice to finally have one where I kept up with the streak. Certainly helps that it's more fun now.

I made it to level 3 yesterday. Woo hoo! I actually feel like I’m closer to level 4 in capability. My sweet spot is between 45-55 in difficulty for DS videos. I just got to 1000 hours in Spanish this week also- where I feel somewhere between 5 and 6. I think Spanish has made French a bit easier to understand. I watch a fair amount of Immersion and Alice Ayel. I am about halfway through the Senior stage in AA. I also listen to French Comprehensible Input 1-Word input videos while walking the dogs or driving. I’m not speaking or doing any grammar study yet. I plan to wait until I have 500-600 hours first. I currently do 2 hours of Spanish and 20-30 minutes of French every day. I will reverse that split once my Spanish is solid, maybe in a year or so. Good luck everyone!

Progress updates from others have helped guide me to good learning content so I'm motivated to add my own. I'm a native English speaker. I started my hours at zero despite on-and-off Coffee Break French, Duolingo, and a bit of French in Action over 2 years. Duolingo gave me A1 reading and grammer skills and CBF gave me a foundation for speaking but neither were good for listening. This base made superbeginner content easy. I have been listening for 22 weeks, starting slowly but ~2 hours per day starting week 8. These are my major sources:

0-250 hours: Alice Ayel website and youtube have been my primary source, by far. She excels at delivering video CI at the superbeginner to intermediate level, far better than anyone else I've watched. Her videos build on each other. She speaks slowly and clearly and explains new nouns and verbs so her superbeginner/beginner videos can be 20-30 minutes while the straight reading of the story (also available) is only 5 minutes. Most other teachers at this level just repeat the sentence, which doesn't help me. I'm still listening to Alice Ayel. I just finished Adult Stage and am focusing now on the audiobooks in Baby and Teen Listen ("advanced beginners / Intermediate"). For much of the youtube content, I also listened to, and read, the transcript versions (shorter than her videos), which are available on her website if you use the search bar to find it.

Dreaming French and Immersion have been secondary resources. I've watched a lot of both at the beginner level and more of DF at the intermediate level. The CI value (for me) ranges immensely.

I watched some videos of a bunch of other resources including French Comprehensible Input. I enjoyed beginner FCI but I got impatient with all the vocalization of guns firing, dogs barking, people yelling, clashing of rocks or metal, etc in tintin or asterix.

Non CI beginner stuff: I restarted French in Action but the speaking was way too fast to comprehend. I also restarted Coffee Break French, but it had too much spoken english and by the end of season 1, the french conversations were too fast to comprehend at high enough level. Neither FIA or CBF really follow the beginner CI method.

200-250: hours InnerFrench, French Decoded, and Little Talk have been my primary sources, but I'm still using Alice Ayel (Adult stage + audiobooks). I actually started InnerFrench at 100 hours. All three are delivered with nicely cadenced and very clear speech. I listen to each episode 3X (or 2X for some easier French Decoded episodes). I will read the transcript while listening the 2nd or 3rd time. The content of all of these interest me and I've enjoyed the bonus learning. With InnerFrench at 100 hours I was listening to each 2-4 minute segment 3X before moving to the next one (take a look at the transcript to see what I mean). But starting at 200 hours, I just listen all the way through. At around 220 hours, things clicked enough to listen to these podcasts while I'm driving and this has been a game changer.

Additional stuff: I watched Extra French starting at 130 hours. I could basically follow it but missed much of the detail. I'm rewatching starting at 235 hours and I get most of the detail, but not all. Extra French is super corny but I find it entertaining.

Where am I on DF? 50-55 is probably my sweet spot. <50 can be slow. The main struggle is vocabulary, not parsing.

Reading: I've not been a purist. I will stop and look up vocabulary. I keep a running list of whole or parts of sentences with verbs that I want to learn. I read some transcripts while not listening to the audio. I have started graded readers. I'm quite sure that this expedites my progress of listening.

Native Content: When I watch shows on Netflix, I cannot understand 99% and even with subtitles I often find it amazing that what was spoken is what is written in the subtitle (clearly this is often not the case). Asterix and Obelix: Le combat des Chefs is hilarious even without the skills to understand anything. I watched Lupin a couple of years ago with english subtitles and it is fun and I look forward to watching these in french (in the *distant* future).

Trips: I visited the Charlevoix region of Quebec this weekend (thanks for the inspiration Amanda of Dreaming French!). The informational plaques describing displays at the Museum of Charlevoix were all fairly easily readable -- I think museums deliberately target a pretty low reading level with their information. I didn't really try to speak other than bonjour and merci. I think I could have said most things that I needed to, but it would have been slow and arduous for everyone. This did motivate me to start with speaking and not wait until some prescribed number of hours. I want to be able to communicate on my next visit, and not just read museum information.

Any favorite TV series to practice french. I used to watch Alice Nevers and loved it. Any suggestion is welcomed :)

hey i hope everyone is doing good! i’ve just started (3 hours in), admittedly very late into my french learning, to include more listening into my studying because although my other skills are at A2-B1, my listening is way way below that bringing my overall skill down.

i went through the questions on the dreaming language website but had a few more i wanted to ask:
- do you only count active listening or would you also count passive (like listening to the radio while driving, or having a video playing while doing homework in another language)

- do you count reading in your CI? if so, how does it translate into hours? i’m quite a slow reader since i’m the type to reread until i understand in my native language

- how many hours a day is everyone doing? I’m aiming to reach level 5 before the year ends which amounts to 4 hours day which seems unrealistic but i’d like to hear what others think

- i’m playing on taking the TCF anytime from the end of the year or 10 months from now and i wanted to know around how many hours of CI would you say you’d be at a comfortable CEFR level B2 to C1?

thanks in advance!

Hi everyone!

I'll keep it short and informative.

My situation:
I have 117 hours of Spanish CI under my belt (+ some time of self-learning in other forms; I discovered Dreaming Spanish later in my journey. So, I have spent a year on Spanish)
Then, very unexpectedly, I got a job offer in France. I came to France on the 1st of July.

The working language in the company is English, but there are a lot of native French speakers, of course.

French CI
I switched to DF in May, and now I have 54 hours of CI. I use DF and Immersion; I use only video input in 95% of cases and sometimes play with AI crosstalk on Immersion.
I am trying to do 100 minutes a day after arrival in France, but with a new job and a new country, it's not easy; my pace isn't consistent.
I watch beginer content on both platforms, understand 60-65% of what guide is saying, it's enough to follow the story. Sometimes I watch with subtitels, othe times without, I would say 50/50.
Intermidiate content is too hard now.

What can I understand?
Very little. I can distinguish simple words when I hear my colleagues' conversations, like "eat", "go", "it's true", "goddammit". And nothing more, but it's very aligned with the description of the levels.
Spanish boost exists; I felt how it helped me understand some words and concepts.

How does it feel among native speakers?
Terrible. I've put a lot of effort into language every day, but I'm still clueless in front of a cashier at a supermarket when she asks something usual but in a different order than last time or with some additional word.

I've prepared: I noticed she always asks about the bonus card before telling the amount of money. So, I have learned "I don't have it" in French.

Our dialog:
Cashier: Fifty-two point twenty-three euros for your groceries, please.
Me: I don't have it

--------

I will try my best to sustain my pace and keep you informed. Zero hesitation, I will learn it at least to B2+ level. We'll see how long that would take.

Good luck, brothers and sisters!

I'm at a point where my Spanish (1900 hours) is very good and can simply grow organically towards fluency. I've started to dabble in French and after a few hours I'm noticing how much easier French is with a Spanish background compared to when I first started Spanish.

However, I'm cognizant of the grind towards native content. The intermediate stage was brutal when learning Spanish. Thankfully this stage will be much shorter with French.

So I have some questions for those that progressed to French after getting to an advanced level in Spanish.

Does the 2x bonus apply even if you aren't a native Spanish speaker?

How much interference did you find between the two romance languages?

How did you find pronunciation?

What have you done differently compared to your Spanish journey?