#ds method

Whether you're just using CI Lessons as a supplemental practice, or as your main study material! Either way, I'd love to hear from you!

Whether you're a beginner building a foundation of understanding in the language, or you know some Mandarin and CI Lessons are helping you improve.

What’s the best way to learn if I already speak another Romance language?

If you are a native or proficient speaker of another Romance language, your journey will look very different.

An initial easy win will be getting used to the way the language sounds. Romance languages have many cognates, but at the beginning they will be hard to recognize. Once you get some familiarity with the pronunciation and with the patterns in which words change from one language to the other, your comprehension will skyrocket in a very short amount of time. Just by watching just a handful of hours of intermediate or advanced videos about topics that you are familiar with or that interest you, you will get used to the pronunciation enough and will have learned some of the most common connector words, and that will help you increase your comprehension a lot in a very short time. This phase may be slightly longer if instead of Spanish or Italian you are learning Portuguese, or especially French.

After this, you may find that some native media is already accessible. We recommend you start watching or listening to things about topics that you are already familiar with. Presentational content like podcasts, TED talks, or nonfiction audiobooks will be some of the easiest things for you to understand.

Once you can understand native media well, we recommend you continue watching our advanced videos only if you are genuinely interested in the topic that we are discussing and if you find them more engaging than the native content that you can understand well.

Pretty soon you’ll get to a point in which you can understand most native media outside of very specific things like very slang-heavy conversations in movies.

‍Crosstalk is also a great thing to do no matter your background.

Production is a whole different thing, though. Even though you’ll be able to understand most things thanks to the similarity of the vocabulary and grammar, you still need to specifically acquire the words, expressions, and the grammar of the new language. You'll still learn to speak the language faster than somebody who doesn't know another Romance language, but don't expect your speaking to improve nearly as fast as your understanding. Even if you can understand most things after a few dozen hours of input, you’ll still need to get a few hundred hours of input to be able to have conversations without too much trouble.

This is very applicable to me (I can read in French so not a proficient speaker but I have noticed this learning pattern in my own learning Spanish).

So if you already know a romance language, once you notice cognates you CAN use them to understand stuff. As far as Dreaming Spanish method is concerned, this way of understanding is fine (so instead of tons of images and gestures at the beginning). So ANY content you understand, from ANY prior experience (such as knowing cognates or - I wil extrapolate, from prior class study or anki study etc of a language, from being familiar with the topics the video is about, from seeing/hearing it before in a language you understood), will work fine for learning a language.

ANY content you understand the main idea of, no matter what is contributing to that understanding (in terms of past experience, visuals, cognates, topic familiarity), you can learn from.

I was curious what DS had to say about this, since for Beginners the lessons are typically visual heavy and made to be understood from visuals alone. But many people who switch to using extensive comprehensible input to learn are upper beginner or intermediate learners (with some vocabulary from prior learning, some media they can already understand) who are transitioning to simply doing more in ONLY the target language and less intensive study with textbooks/flashcards/lookups etc. So from my interpretation, it looks like DS is simply suggesting (for those types of learners): simply find stuff you understand, any stuff, and watch and read and listen. (Which is like a lot of advice for intermediate learners in general, no matter what they did to study the basics).

The other FAQ question I found interesting was the one on how to learn a language with very little CI. I think Peter Foley's paper on learning French with only audio visual materials is a good example of *the most extreme way* to try and do something like DS when there's no CI Lessons for beginners. However, the recommendations DS gives are much more similar to study methods like Refold (or, more broadly, like study plans MANY people end up doing - a mix of explicit explanations so they can UNDERSTAND some stuff, and then a mix of intensive and extensive listening/reading).

"What can I do to learn a language for which there are no easy videos like yours?"

The first thing that you should do is to try to find partners to do Crosstalk with. Crosstalk is the most efficient way to acquire a language, even more than our videos.

Other than that, you may have to use native content and use some of these techniques to make the input more comprehensible:

Watch content that you have already seen before in your language.

Look up words you’ve encountered several times.

Use translators to help you figure out the parts that you can’t understand.

Use parallel readers. Parallel readers are books that have been translated, and in each page one side is in one language, and the other side is in the other language.

Accept that since your level of comprehension of the input you are receiving is low, you’ll make slower progress.

My comments: you may notice all of these are recommendations Refold gives for making immersion more comprehensible. Refold would just add *study the most common words* (often with anki deck but any way) and possibly *study sentences/grammar* (often also with anki decks but not always, sometimes it's reading a grammar reference, sometimes its just looking things up while immersing like one of the points above says).

You may also notice a lot of these strategies are intensive reading (reading and looking things up, comparing the original with translation), and intensive listening (looking things up in shows and audio-only when you don't understand enough to grasp the main idea).

You are allowed:

1. To use ANY resource that includes translations to study a few hundred to a few thousand common words. Good resources include: free anki common word decks, free anki common words in sentences decks, free common word lists online, textbooks (and textbooks in libraries), Teach Yourself books, Berlitz Self Teacher books, Pimsleur, Glossika (I prefer the old cd versions - which you may find in a library), Innovative Language course (free in library apps like Hoopla, or the paid version LanguagePod101), Coursera courses (free options). Sky is the limit to be honest. You can find many resources that present the most common couple thousand words, and translations. You can study them in depth, or just cram study them (read quickly in a few weeks then reread/review a week later, then another week or month later, then move on even if stuff isn't memorized). Any vague familiarity you get with a bunch of words, after doing some study of words with translations, WILL make Comprehensible Input Lessons like Dreaming Spanish (and Lazy Chinese, French Comprehensible Input etc) feel much easier. Because you'll recognize a bunch of words vaguely, after studying translations, and then those CI Lessons are review instead of the first time you encounter many words.

2. You are also allowed to just study from translation resources instead! Some people prefer using textbooks, classes, or free anki decks and grammar references online. You will eventually need to practice reading and listening, and at that point one day you may find Graded Readers, CI lessons, and Learner Podcasts useful as "comprehensible" input to practice recognizing all the things you studied in those other resources. Then you'll eventually move into reading and listening to materials made for native speakers that you understand, over time. This is also a perfectly valid path to learn - and one many people take.

3. You are allowed to not know ANY individual words when you start using CI Lessons. If you do want to use CI lessons immediately, as a beginner, I'm begging you to get used to ambiguity. You are supposed to be able to learn from CI Lessons designed for beginners even if you know 0 words. Those lessons are designed to understand enough from ONLY visuals, so if the lesson was muted you'd still know what happens in it/what they're about. If you are learning from just CI Lessons, or CI Lessons first, you are going to take several hours to learn a few dozen words! It is going to be many hours before you can actually recognize every individual word being said. That is normal. It's not too hard to use because you don't know all or most of the individual words - if the CI Lesson is marked for Superbeginners, Absolute Beginners, or Beginners, and if you mute it you can follow (or guess) from visual context what it is about, then it is a lesson you can learn from. LATER, once you have learned a lot more words, then CI Lessons for Intermediate learners with less pictures will be understandable, with a combination of the words you know and the visuals to help provide context for the words you aren't expected to already know. Once you have learned a lot of words, Learner Podcasts and Graded Readers also become more understandable and can be used - the 95-98% comprehensible (every 95/100 words you know or more) statistic is more important when you've got no visuals for context, such as in reading only or listening only. When you have visuals, if the visuals explain enough, you CAN know 0 words heard. If there are enough visuals related to what's going on, you can understand the main idea of something, even if you know 0 individual words. You will still learn from a material, if you can follow what's going on. No matter how you follow what's going on - by words you know, or visuals you can interpret. So please don't be scared to use Beginner CI Lessons just because you don't know any words. (Or alternatively, if you hate figuring out whats going on from visuals, it is FINE to study words with translations first, then use CI lessons and other learner materials made to be understandable as practice materials instead).

4. Peter Foley (i am a broken record about his self-experiment) proves to me that you really COULD just learn the basics of a language from Cartoons for Toddlers. Cartoons for Toddlers tend to have 5000 words and be MUCH HARDER than CI Lessons made for beginners. Since CI Lessons are made for people who don't know the language yet, whereas Cartoons for Toddlers assume the toddlers know some words already and are comfortable with guessing from everyday situational contexts. But you could use cartoons for toddlers. It's been done successfully for an English speaker learning French. It would presumably work just as well as it did for Peter Foley, for anyone learning a language with some similarities with a language they already know. It's HARD. It's not ideal. CI Lessons for Beginners and Crosstalk is way easier, as language teachers can put a lot of effort into ensuring they provide you enough visuals to understand them. But it can be done. What I take from his self-experiment is that if you really want to learn a language from audio-visual resources, you can. Whether you start with cartoons for toddlers where the visuals are related to what's being talked about, or you start with even more visually understandable stuff like CI Lessons. Cartoons for toddlers are the bar for what is useful, at minimum and most incomprehensible as a beginner, to my mind. So if you understand something at least AS MUCH as a cartoon for toddlers, you'll be able to learn from it. If you understand something MORE than a cartoon for toddlers, you will likely learn faster and easier. (And learning from translations is the easiest and least mentally taxing, if you dislike or struggle to figure things out from context, so feel free to use translation resources like textbooks or pimsleur! You can always use media you understand as practice to reinforce what you're learning from other resources!)

If my understanding of what Pablo explains about how to use the lessons is correct, the idea is to understand the main idea of what's being conveyed... not to directly translate each individual word. So it's fine if you understand 0 of the individual words at first, as long as you can understand from the visuals what is going on. Here's the video I am referencing (along with the roadmap, and an interview where Pablo mentioned designing beginner videos to be understandable on mute with only visuals).

Because English and Spanish have a lot of cognates (words which are nearly the same or ARE the same), some Intermediate videos may SEEM easier if you're judging by individual words you know. Because you may 'know' a lot of geography words in Spanish, since they're cognates to English. So the words will sound more like English, and easier to guess, and then the unknown words - if you can guess them from the visuals and words you do recognize - may also be easier. So I suspect that for some people, especially people who can guess easily from context (visuals and surrounding words-they-recognize) then the Intermediate videos may 'feel' easier than the Beginner and Super Beginner videos sometimes. So feel free to use the Intermediate videos that feel useful to you, if you feel you can follow them.

The Super Beginner and Beginner videos are the easiest in terms of visuals on screen to help you - so don't skip them! Especially don't skip them if you recognize very few or 0 of the individual words - those are words you can learn from those videos! And words you don't know yet! I find these videos a bit harder sometimes, because hey I don't know the words for ANY common physical objects in spanish! I don't know cake, sugar, salt, person, dog, cat, animal, tree, grass, sun, apple, meat, steak, chair, table, door, light, computer, ice cream (I know casa because 'mi casa es su casa' is said in the US sometimes). I don't know a ton of basic words! But the Super Beginner and Beginner videos DO give me the visuals to understand what they're trying to convey, so these are excellent videos to pick up those basic words from.

My point is... get comfortable with knowing 0 words, or only 50% of words, or whatever very low amount you know, and relying entirely on visuals to understand. Yes, you might feel like a little kid (like I did back when I was 5 and didn't know what 'senator' or 'democracy' meant when my parents talked, or what 'lawyer' and 'testimony' and 'judge' meant when my parents watched shows on TV, or what 'giraffe' or 'predator' or 'herbivore' or 'sahara' meant until I saw a nature documentary and guessed from the visuals/heard the words explained more). Using CI Lessons, especially in the beginning, is like being a little kid again. You know as few words as a toddler! You eventually know as few words as a 5 year old (around 5000). That's the whole point! You are learning from visuals, and once you have learned enough from visuals, you can start also relying on words you already know to understand explanations of new words (which is how the Intermediate and above lessons are designed - less visuals, more relying on words you already know). As Spanish has some words in common with English, you may recognize more scientific words than an actual child (an actual child would not recognize Animal, Liberal, Artificial, Central, Cerebral, Experimental, Festival, Funeral until they learned the meaning sometimes needing visuals to understand, whereas English speakers may recognize those words once they get used to the pronunciation). Just, you are not doing anything wrong, if at first you're relying entirely (or mostly) on visuals to figure out what's going on or what words mean. That's entirely normal.

Yes it's just an estimate, yes the roadmap descriptions are a bit exagerated (in that in reality 1500 hours tends to make most people around B2 or u0per intermediate, enough language skills to work in the language, have conversations, and engage with media for native speakers) as they tend to imply C1 level skills. So the DS R9admap estimate has some flaws.

Still, I think B2 level skills are enough to get by in a language in many life situations, talk on a general level about most things, and enjoy media without tools. Many language learners will be very happy to achieve B2. (And if DS Roadmap did add a category of C1 it would be like 2500 hours based on what DS users say).

1500 hours is a good number of hours to recommend people study/engage with a language, and most people can achieve B1-B2 skills in a language similar to ones they know in around 1500 hours. I think it's a decent number of hours to aim for.

As anyone learning languages will say, the time it takes to get to A2 or B1? Pretty doable in a year. In 100-600 hours (so 1 hour to multiple hours a day). People often then get stuck in a plateau trying to reach B2. Having a rough idea of how many more hours to engage with the language to reach B2? Useful.

Many people tend to be frustrated if they get to A2 or B1, and still need to rely on tools to understand media for native speakers (and tools to speak on various topics). So being able to reflect and say "ah yes I only engaged with the language to A2 - so idk 300 hours - of course I still need to learn more to achieve what I want to eventually do."

Some people see DS saying "do 1500 hours" and go "oh god thats so much, this will take 8 years! (At 30 minutes a day)" well yeah. It was always going to take this long. Many people take 2-4 years of a language class in high school, them 2-4 more years of a language in college, and then sometimes even more years AFTER college to learn a language enough to speak and understand whatever they want! It DOES take 1000+ hours to do that much stuff! Even if you take classes and its say "600 class hours" those classes are expecting you to study at least the same amount of time outside of class, so ~1200 hours. You'd be aiming for 1000+ hours of study time... no matter what.

Dreaming Spanish has some things in common with ALG, such as recommending students WAIT to speak and wait to read until they have a solid mental understanding of the pronunciation and sounds of the language, and teaching entirely with Comprehensible Input Lessons with only visuals to communicate meaning (no translations, no explanations), and recommending students to do extensive watching/listening of CI Lessons and Learner Podcasts, and then transition to extensive watching/listening/reading to materials for native speakers that they can understand, as their understanding improves. Dreaming Spanish also recommends not analyzing the language and translating in your head, which is in ALG. But Dreaming Spanish is much less strict with it's recommendations, saying it's fine to look up a word if you're confused and it would help you understand the material, and to speak and read earlier if you need to for life situation reasons, or just really want to.

I think in the long run, more lax study approaches like Dreaming Spanish are going to catch on. ALG is not done strictly in the Thai schools that teach in that manner - while they recommend students don't speak early, and don't read explanations of how Thai works or use translations, many of their students do speak (since they often live in Thailand) and have studied Thai with explanations and translations before finding the ALG Thai classes. Some students go through ALG Thai classes and attempt to do ALG strictly, like Pablo Romano and David Long.

I think there's use in trying to stick with ALG theory if you're doing an ALG lessons program - it's how the school recommends you will have the Most Likely chance of success and best outcome with the lessons they teach. Just like there's use in trying to stick to any study program's advice - their advice is what they are most confident will result in the outcome you came to them for and are hoping they'll deliver. That said, if you take out all the theory... if you aren't a nerd like me who's into reading about language learning research and different teaching methods...

ALG has some suggestions on how to think/approach the material you're engaging with - which you can take or leave. The actual teaching method though? That is simply Comprehensible Input Lessons (that use visuals and no explicit translations), and extensive watching/listening to material made for learners, then later materials you understand that are made for native speakers. That's all the ALG lessons are. And you can find CI Lessons free for many languages on youtube, or on Comprehensible Input Wiki. So you are free to try out the recommendations ALG gives and make your own study plan and decide for yourself what's useful to you.

As far as I can tell, ALG's teaching method would work. CI Lessons work - they're used in ESL programs in my country and work great, and they work for classes made up of students with various native languages so they're extremely useful if translations aren't a useful option to teach students who speak 70+ native languages (that's the situation in my city). Extensive Listening works great - Learner Podcasts are PLENTIFUL, and help build up listening skills and review things you've learned, if you pick podcasts you can understand the main idea of (aka are comprehensible input to you). So it makes sense a teaching program entirely made up of those things, would work. It would teach vocabulary, grammar, and since all lessons are audio-visual or audio, then their strongest skill would b listening skills. So the student would still need to go practice speaking, practice writing, and practice reading outside of those lessons, if they want competency in all 4 language skills.

Things like:

A. Many Americans who often have a background in Spanish from school, finally engaging with Spanish and "practicing" all the skills they were able to study but not adequately practice in school (similar to the people in European schools who take English classes but felt they "didn't learn anything" from them until they just watched/read/engaged with English media a lot).

B. Many language learners in general needing MORE STUDY TIME to reach their goals, and Dreaming Spanish's goal of "1500 hours" for ~B2 level skills is measurable. People do well with measurable clear goals, and the hours goal makes it CLEAR how much people need to work on this goal. Classes in school and college have hours of class time, but the outside hours students are expected to put in are not really suggested in any clear way (and I think often mean the difference between the students who felt they "succeeded at learning" a language, and the ones who felt they failed to learn a language, despite the students all putting in the class hours and getting passing grades).

C. Dreaming Spanish is to a degree, a Structured Resource. I have raved before about how Structured Resources tend to be easier for people who aren't good at making study plans or have difficulty finding study materials. Dreaming Spanish provides nearly 1500 hours of Comprehensible Input Lessons, meaning you could JUST do Dreaming Spanish lessons, then turn on captions for their videos and read those captions for your separate 'reading time' (DS recommends 1-3 million words read), and you'd have all the materials you need to become B2 (Upper Intermediate) in Listening and Reading skills. Dreaming Spanish Roadmap page (and the downloadable file which is more in depth) recommends more like: when to start practicing speaking, when to start reading, and popular places online like the r/dreamingspanish subreddit recommend to speak 100-300 hours, read 1-3 million words, and provide a LOT of outside supplemental resources one can use to study Spanish. To be honest, even if you NEVER paid for Dreaming Spanish's website lessons, you could learn Spanish entirely from a combination of their free youtube videos and ALL the free resources r/dreamingspanish links on their What Are You Listening To spreadsheet. I have a very basic Spanish background from 1 semester in middle school, and 1 summer of listening to Language Transfer Spanish podcast and reading Madrigal's Magical Guide to Spanish, and at this point I could JUST use the resources linked on that spreadsheet to keep learning Spanish for free to get to B2 at this point.

D. The NEW point I'd like to bring up in this post, on why I think Dreaming Spanish is so effective for so many people. At least for those on the r/dreamingspanish subreddit, it turns reaching 1500 hours into a friendly competition and into motivating each other. In regular Spanish classes in school, you don't see students competing about how much they studied Spanish that day - 1 hour or 5 hours. Dreaming Spanish learners often want to get 'more hours in.' I think part of this is they simply were already told HOW MANY HOURS of Spanish they need to engage with (so classes could do well to tell students something like FSI Estimates or even just Dreaming Spanish Roadmap estimates to give students a goal to aim for). So people realize this is a thousand plus hour endeavor. It's not ridiculous to spend 4 years in college learning Spanish to B2, and yet you see many Dreaming Spanish learners feeling they REALLY WANT to finish the Dreaming Spanish Roadmap in 1-2 years or else they're 'going slow.' They'd be going at a normal school pace if they just did 0.5-1 hours a day, as 8 years or 4 years is how long it takes most people in school (4 years of high school optional, then 4 years of college where they dig in and focus).

E. The other NEW point I'd like to bring up today, is I think Dreaming Spanish succeeds at showing that engaging with a language can be FUN. The initial Dreaming Spanish lessons are just as boring, I'd argue, as any classroom lesson for Beginners. But it engages the learners and demand they focus on trying to understand Spanish IMMEDIATELY, showing them an immediate use for understanding Spanish - they'll find these lessons easier! The Comprehensible Input Lessons rely on visuals to communicate meaning, forcing the learners to think deeply enough to connect what's heard to the visuals they see, and that engages some people by necessity in a way that a lecture may not (some people just will tune out if hearing a lecture/explanation). So at the initial beginner stage, I think Dreaming Spanish's success shows how other learning programs could benefit from more 1. Difficulty at the initial stage (forcing learners to NEED and USE what they're learning quickly), 2. Visuals at the initial stage (either instead of or in addition to translations) - and many successful beginner classes do utilize these things, my French class in College utilized visual movements to teach us verbs, and French In Action is a whole video learning series designed to teach visually and demand from learners that they apply what they've been learning to understand the videos (which many classes in many languages do).

F. Following the last point. At the LATER INTERMEDIATE stage, Dreaming Spanish encourages learners to engage with Spanish material that does not provide much visuals, has no translations, and expects learners to rely on their own knowledge and the explanations given IN Spanish. This, like the initial lessons, increases the difficulty and forces learners to rely on the Spanish they've been learning. It also shows learners how to FIND content in Spanish at their level of understanding, making it easier for learners to brave engaging with content not made for learners as they can gauge if they understand something or not. So maybe they start with Dreaming Spanish intermediate lessons, then find Spanish Boost Gaming recommended as at the same level made for learners, then find they can figure out which youtube gamers they can start understanding (and by how much) by venturing out a bit more. This allows learners, like children growing up, to gradually expand the materials they can understand and engage with, and to have the ability to judge if they can understand a material themselves. In classes, a big problem is that a lot of people do A1-A2 classes, then feel material for native speakers is too hard (and it often is), and so they just keep NOT practicing engaging with a language outside of class. At this point, teachers/programs could encourage students to seek Learner materials like Intermediate CI Lessons, Learner Podcasts, to practice understanding the things they've learned in the class/program. Then at B1-B2 level classes, the issue tends to be some students don't ever try to engage with materials for native speakers, and if/when they do they STILL find it too hard and have not practiced gauging what they understand and what they don't so they struggle to pick materials they can understand and enjoy. What's more, they may have very few hours of actual practice engaging with the language and trying to apply all the things they've learned. Anyone who's started reading/listening to a language you're studying: you KNOW the first time you read something it felt draining, the first time you listened to something it felt draining, no matter HOW MUCH you already knew about the language. It doesn't matter when you started practicing listening and reading, whether a beginner or intermediate learner, the first times you practice feel HARD. Dreaming Spanish's structure helps learners by immediately making them practice listening skills, daily. Then by making learners practice understanding things with no translations and less and less visuals over time, again making learners practice understanding what they've learned. By the time a learner is several hundred hours into Dreaming Spanish, they may have the self confidence to check out things in Spanish made by other teachers, and eventually things in Spanish made for native speakers, and gauge what they can understand and enjoy and continue practicing and improving with.

I really think Dreaming Spanish's best quality is it frames engaging with the language and actively practicing understanding what you have learned as an enjoyable activity. You can do this with your own study plan. Many classes can put more emphasis on this - and some already do (by having some class time to directly engage with the language, or homework directly engaging the language by watching learner content then shows, or reading Graded Readers then regular novels). The learners who get to the point where they see time spent engaging with the language as fun and pursue it regularly, are the learners most likely to reach their goals. Every self-studying intermediate learner has reached that conclusion, unless they were only studying to pass a test - and even then, if they use the language afterward in real life then they usually find a way to frame continuous engaging with the language as worthwhile to be in their regular schedule.