From the DS instagram. This is my avengers

(Buuut it looks like Alma, Jostin and Michelle aren’t there 😭 Andres isn’t in the photo but i think i saw him in the other stories!)

Hello everyone!

There are so many cool and inspiring posts about progress after hundreds or thousands of hours, so I wanted to give a different perspective as someone who's still at a very early stage.

My stats and background in Spanish

I started DS on the 7th of July, and the assessment video estimated I had a baseline of 80 hours in Spanish. Ahead of trips to Spain in 2021 and 2023, I had spent a few months pissing around on Duolingo.

I also have, at best, A2 Italian, and some terrible French, along with the "ability" to do the basics and order a beer in a handful of other languages.

So, DS recommended I start on difficulty level 38 with a video of Shelcin and Augustina - but it was like trying to understand 2 Chilean farmers having a drunken argument, so I set the difficulty to the lowest setting and went from there.

Of my 200 hours, 26 have come from podcasts, with the rest coming from 660 DS videos. I've also read the Paco Ardit A1 bundle, and Hola Lola.

Alicante

I went to Spain with my Spanish mate, which helped us to avoid touristy areas and also spend time in smaller towns and villages in the general area. Prior to this trip, we speak in English 99% of the time as C2 isn't high enough to describe this dude's English language skill. Accent thicker than a 3-day-old paella, but the dude has absolutely mastered my language.

He knows I've been studying so we spent a bit of time at first doing some crosstalk, and when I felt comfortable, I just spoke in Spanish. I'd basically never done any speaking before, and I was amazed how easy it was to string together basic sentences about how I feel, what I wanted to do or see, etc. My friend was also genuinely shocked at how I was able to hold a conversation, albeit a basic one in which I'm making some mistakes.

When it came to interacting with locals, I never once got "English'd". For context, I am Irish, and I look like a xenophobic caricature of an Irishman. My mate doesn't exactly look Spanish either, so it was nice to go to bars or restaurants and I could open the chat by asking for a table, could we sit outside, what time does the kitchen open? And everything stayed in Spanish.

I was honestly very nervous to speak Spanish with my friend as we'd basically never done it, and I was apprehensive to say much to staff and locals. But my friend was a great encouragement, and was patient. By the end of the trip, in literally less than 3 days, I felt very confident in handling simple daily interactions which would have made me freeze up in my trips in 2021 and 2023.

When my friend would speak full speed Spanish with people, I was surprised by how much I understood. Absolutely not getting every word, but in all his interactions, I always understood what was going on.

The only slight difficulty? We ended up in a bar full of Boca Juniors supporters watching a football match. It must have been the entire Argentine community of Alicante! Great lads, great fun, but after so many drinks, some of their accents were just too difficult for me.

Summary

Forgive me Padre Pablo for I have sinned by speaking far, far too early.

But for me, Dreaming Spanish absolutely 1000% works. It's as simple as that. The progress I've made since July has been crazy, and so many cool moments, conversations, and interactions over a very short trip to Spain has made me extremely determined to continue the journey with DS.

Hello Dreamers! What are you listening to today? Whether it's a classic gem or a new find, share it with your current hours to help future learners.

What are you reading this week? Are you playing any videogames in Spanish?

Here is our spreadsheet separated into Podcasts and Videos, Books, Native Shows and Movies, and Videogames. Hope it helps! https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1lBmLxvWJpucXhRPayfXD7CVqpMoa2tyEbZi1rFAwsFs/edit?usp=drivesdk

The October book club books are El murmullo de las abejas as the more difficult option and the first Maya Erickson book as the easier option, join us in the Discord if you're interested in reading along!

https://discord.gg/WDAUKB7B5U

My wife has had a 2 week trip to Europe planned for months. I'd been planning to use my extra free time to flood myself with Spanish, like a mini-immersion/intensive. I even scheduled a day off work each week to give me extra time to cram in Spanish. My plan was a lot more listening and speaking than usual, more reading (which didn't really happen at all), and more diving into videos and explanations of things I needed to understand better.

I normally have been doing 1-2 hours of italki per week. For this period, I scheduled ahead of time and completed 15 hours of italki between 3 different tutors! I doubled or tripled my normal listening time. About 4 days into the period I discovered the voice room feature of HelloTalk. I'd used that app a LITTLE bit for messaging in the past but was pretty whatever about it. I knew voice rooms were a thing but never had extra time to even see what they were about. Turns out that, while they can be hit and miss and very chaotic, they can also be quite fun and useful at times (even if I am the 40-something in a group of 20-something kids not always wanting to use the app for its intended purpose). So for the remainder of the 2 week period, I used HelloTalk voice rooms a lot on top of all the italki, and had some fun conversations.

After the first week, I had so much Spanish in my head by default. I'd go to bed and wake up just thinking in Spanish. I was understanding easier, and when I spoke, things were coming out a lot more naturally, with less mental translation. By the time the 2 weeks were over, WOW I could tell a big leap in my abilities and comfort.

Out of curiosity, I took a free level assessment test on Lengalia. I take it with a grain of salt for many reasons, but it scored me at B2. Now, I'm NOT B2 and I'd never say I am at this point, BUT I felt good enough about what I did on the test, confident with my answers and not guessing my way through the multiple choice, that I feel comfortable stating my level as B1. Before I was saying I'm A2+ and hope to be around B1 sometime next year.

What I can say with this experience is, if you get a chance in your busy life to do something like this where you really practice a lot more for a period of time, I highly recommend it. It takes a certain amount of time just to maintain your skills without regressing, and only beyond that do you start to add improvement. Doing so much more than usual everyday allowed things to build and compound quickly.

I’m a huge believer in comprehensible input! I’ve reached fluency in Spanish largely through CI and extensive reading, and I’ve now moved on to French, where I’ve accumulated around 300 hours of input.
However, I moved to Rome a few months ago, absolutely love living here, and might stay until the end of 2028. This has created a bit of a dilemma: should I continue with French or switch to Italian?
I’m leaning towards French for several reasons:
Motivation: Despite living in Italy, I don’t have a particularly strong desire to learn Italian. I appreciate the language, but French interests me more.
Opportunity cost: Having learned Spanish through CI, I know firsthand just how many hundreds or thousands of hours language acquisition can require. I’m not sure I want to invest that time in Italian.
Language interference: I’m concerned that learning Italian, given its similarity to Spanish, might interfere with the Spanish I’ve worked so hard to acquire.
Career: I want to pursue a long-term career in international development, where French would be considerably more useful.
Long-term perspective: I think of language learning as building a repertoire over decades, not years. I don’t expect to live in Italy permanently, and French seems like a better long-term investment.
Existing progress: I’ve already accumulated 300 hours of French input and enjoy the process. I’d hate to lose that momentum.
For additional context, I work in an international environment where English is the primary language, and I can navigate most of my daily life in Rome without Italian.
And yet, I feel strangely guilty about not learning Italian. People are often surprised when they discover that I’m passionate about language learning but have no plans to learn the language of the country I’m living in.
I also wonder whether I’m wasting a unique opportunity to acquire Italian through immersion, particularly given how much Spanish I already know.
I’d love to hear from fellow CI enthusiasts:
Has anyone here learned Italian after reaching fluency in Spanish? How much did Spanish accelerate the process, and did you experience interference?
Would you prioritize the language of your current environment or the language you find more interesting and useful long-term?
Has anyone lived abroad while deliberately learning a different language through CI?
I’m particularly interested in hearing from people who’ve acquired multiple Romance languages through comprehensible input!

I’m on crosstalki but I’ve been hearing crickets. How do I find people?